Ullrich's positive test casts cloud over Tour

If the Tour de France organisers were hoping that the race would avoid scandal, their hopes were dashed yesterday. Just four days before the start of the Tour in Luxembourg, cycling was thrown into a new drugs crisis by the announcement that the Olympic road race champion Jan Ullrich of Germany tested positive for amphetamines in an out of competition test carried out on behalf of his Deutsche Telekom team.

"I was notified on Wednesday afternoon," Telekom team manager Rudy Pevenage told Belgian radio yesterday. "It is a very bad blow. If the news is right he is on a very bad road." Ullrich is awaiting the results of a control sample to confirm the initial finding.

Ullrich, who won the Tour de France in 1997 and has finished second four times, was tested during his rehabilitation from the knee injury which prevented him from competing in the Tour de France. "The team asked for the check," said Pevenage. "We have a system where the team test riders five times a year out of competition."

As he was neither competing nor training at the time of the test, there will be speculation as to why the drug was found in his system.

The Olympic champion is also banned from driving at present, after a late night escapade in early June in the town of Friburg in which he collided with a number of stationary bicycles after drinking several glasses of wine.

The revelation comes shortly after the sport's biggest team, Mapei, announced their withdrawal at the end of year due to what they term the governing body's failure to combat the doping problem, and follows a Tour of Italy which was plagued by scandal.

Ullrich's is the third positive test announced in the run-up to the Tour de France, following the withdrawal yesterday of French cyclist Laurent Paumier after a positive test for corticosteroids and fellow Frenchman Laurent Roux's positive amphetamines test. Like Ullrich, Roux is awaiting the verdict of the B-sample.

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