Millar and Team in Pull-out

There was, inevitably, a hint of the feast in Macbeth about the cavernous velodrome here. The absent headline act, David Millar, was in the role of Banquo's ghost after his withdrawal late on Friday night, following the unprecedented decision by his professional team, Cofidis, to stop racing temporarily pending results of a police inquiry into the team.

Millar, three times a stage winner in the Tour and the reigning world time trial champion, was due to make his international track debut in the team pursuit at the World Cup meeting here yesterday with the Great Britain team. Olympic medallist Paul Manning took his place alongside Rob Hayles, Chris Newton and Bryan Steel, and the quartet still qualified fastest.

Millar said, through his sister Frances, that he was 'incredibly disappointed' but was '100 per cent behind the decision'.

'In the meantime, my objectives and motivations remain the same for this season,' he added. So far, his goal of two Olympic gold medals, in the time trial and individual pursuit, remain intact.

Cofidis's 'auto-suspension', as the French press term it, is the first time a professional team has withdrawn its riders from races due to the weight of evidence in a police drugs case. The black sheep of the cycling peloton, Festina, were thrown off the Tour de France in 1998 after drugs revelations, but even they kept going throughout the lengthy police investigation.

Pressure had been mounting on Cofidis since a young Polish cyclist, Marek Rutkewicz, was stopped at Charles de Gaulle airport on 12 January and drugs seized. Rutkewicz was the first of eight people - including five past and present Cofidis cyclists and one masseur - placed under formal examination to date in a three-month drip of revelations, interrogations and detentions.

The turning point came on Friday, with the publication in the French newspaper L'Equipe of extracts from police interviews with the cyclists, and in particular 1992 French Olympic medallist Philippe Gaumont, who was sacked on17 March. Alongside revelations of small-time dealing in banned drugs involving Gaumont, masseur Bogdan Madejak and Rutkewicz, it was also alleged that team doctor Jean-Jacques Menuet knew team members were taking drugs but did not act. Menuet denies the charge.

An editorial in L'Equipe alongside the 'interviews from hell', as they were headlined, called on the team to stop racing until they had worked out how to change their ways and set an example. Having failed in an initial attempt on Friday to have the newspaper removed from sale, the team ironically appear to be trying to follow its edict to the letter.

Representatives of the sponsor, who have a turnover of about a billion euros a year selling high-interest loans over the telephone, and the team met yesterday in northern France to discuss the next step. It appears the brief was to come up with a plan to restore the team's image within 24 hours.

'The boss said that we had to present a new way of acting, which seems normal to me,' said rider Jimmy Casper. 'He told us we would start again on a new footing. We will try to be a cleaner team than the others.'

However, it remains unclear when the team will be in action again, if they do return. That depends on whether the gendarmes extend their inquiries, and perhaps, given the newspaper's driving role, what else makes its way into the pages of L'Equipe . There's also a question mark over their participation in the Tour de France, which starts on 3 July.

The squad's eight-year existence has been troubled: its first leader, Lance Armstrong, nearly died of cancer a few weeks after signing his contract and its first manager, Cyrille Guimard, was charged with embezzlement.

Subsequent stars have been equally ill-fated. Armstrong's replacement, Tony Rominger of Switzerland, broke his arm after three days of the 1997 Tour, his replacement, Italian Francesco Casagrande, tested positive twice, and the man who followed Casagrande, Belgian Frank Vandenbroucke, brought with him a further drug scandal, also involving Gaumont, in 1999. Last year the Kazakh Andrei Kivilev was killed in a crash in the Paris-Nice race.