Tour Welcome Their Top 20 As Contador's Astana Miss Out

The Tour de France yesterday announced that it had invited the 20 "best teams in the world" to this year's race, but as expected the organizers pointedly left out Astana, the squad that includes the 2007 winner Alberto Contador, and the third finisher, Levi Leipheimer of the US.

Confirmation that the Kazakh-sponsored team will not make the cut raises the prospect of the Tour organizers, ASO, reaching their own agreement across all their races with the major teams who they want to ride their events. Astana are one of the 18 teams signed up to the increasingly threadbare elite ProTour circuit, all of whom are supposed to race the Tour according to the guidelines of the world governing body, the UCI.

ASO, on the other hand, has always been opposed to the ProTour, which it feels limits its room for manoeuvre in whom it invites to its events.

Among the 18 ProTour teams invited is Team High Road, which includes the Britons Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish. The three non-ProTour "wild cards" are Barloworld of South Africa, which includes a potential British Olympian in Geraint Thomas, the French squad Agritubel which is headed by the national champion Francis Moreau, and the American Slipstream outfit led by David Millar of Scotland.

The Tour organizer Christian Prudhomme said all 20 teams were invited on the condition that they met ethical guidelines between now and the race start. In essence, that means no positive drug tests and no sordid revelations. However, he added that any decision to exclude a team will not be taken independently by ASO, but in concert with the other squads.

This raises the prospect of the major teams and the company that organizes many of the world's biggest events working together independently, with the governing body on the sidelines unable to control the sport as it wishes. ASO and the teams' association led by the Frenchman Eric Boyer are likely to meet soon to finalize an agreement for the teams to race in all the company's events, which include the Paris-Roubaix "Hell of the North" cobbled one-day Classic.

"We will sign participation contracts for the whole season," said Boyer, adding that he had already discussed this with ASO after last week's Paris-Nice race. That event was held outside the rules of the UCI, with both the riders and their teams under the threat of being banned and fined. "We don't want to experience again what we had prior to this Paris-Nice, so this meeting was necessary, and it went well."

In essence, at Paris-Nice the UCI asked the teams which was more important to the sport, the governing body or the Tour de France, the only event in the world that justifies a sponsor investing in a major squad. The teams went with the Tour, and the ramifications of that are only now beginning to be felt.