Cycling: Petacchi Out of Tour After Tests Show Excess of Asthma Drug

Alessandro Petacchi will miss the Tour de France after the head of Italy's anti-doping committee yesterday requested that he serve a one-year ban for possible abuse of the asthma medicine salbutamol during this year's Giro d'Italia, in which the Italian sprinter won five stages.

"Alejet", also known as the Gentleman Sprinter, has a doctor's certificate permitting him to use the medicine for therapeutic purposes so long as it is taken by inhalation but the quantity found in his urine sample after he won the 11th stage was over the threshold set by the World Anti-Doping Agency. Beyond a level of 1,000 nanograms per milliliter the substance is considered to have an anabolic effect.

Petacchi, who won four stages of the 2003 Tour, said on Monday when he attended the hearing in Rome that he had taken the medicine "in good faith". His team, Milram, said yesterday that he would not start the Tour and would be replaced by the Ukrainian Andriy Grivko.

It is estimated that 60 to 80 of this year's Tour field have doctors' certificates and many of them will be for Ventolin, the asthma drug that contains salbutamol. The substance was found in the urine of the five-times Tour winner Miguel Induráin, who was ruled "positive in France", where the authorities are less tolerant of its use, and Oscar Pereiro, last year's runner-up, was involved in an embarrassing episode before Christmas when he was late posting his certificate to the French anti-doping authorities.

Milram's other star rider, the German sprinter Erik Zabel, confessed to using drugs in the 1996 Tour and the team manager, Gianluigi Stanga, is currently defending himself against allegations from Jörg Jaksche, one of his former charges at Polti in the 1990s.