Tops Storm Rider

Alberto Contador: Riding in a storm

On Saturday morning, Alberto Contador will begin his quest for a fourth Tour de France victory. The 28-year-old will line up at the Passage de Gois for the opening stage wearing No 1, as defending champion, and having previously won the race in 2007, 2009 and 2010.

Contador has become the world's most prolific stage race rider, also winning two Giros d'Italia, one Vuelta Espana and numerous week-long stage races such as Paris -Nice and the Tour of Catalonia.

Although he has played down his chances of winning this year's Tour, saying that he may not be fully recovered from winning one of the hardest Giros ever in May, it's difficult to see anyone coming close to challenging the Spaniard.

As far back as 2006, Contador's biggest challenges have come not from any of his rivals on the bike.

Instead, the men that have come closest to stealing the collection of pink and yellow jerseys he has accumulated -- certainly over the past 12 months -- wear white coats instead of lycra and work in laboratories rather than the colourful mobile office that is the professional peloton. They are the anti-doping testers.

In July '06, a young Contador was about to line up for the Tour with his newly-named Astana-Wurth team. Newly-named because the team had just received backing from a group of Kazakh businesses -- under the moniker of the Kazakh capital city Astana, after previous sponsor Liberty Seguros withdrew their support due to the team's involvement in a doping scandal just weeks earlier.

The revelation by former Kelme rider Jesus Manzano in March '06 that he almost died due to a botched blood transfusion shortly after the previous year's Tour led to an investigation by Spanish police into controversial doctor Eufemiano Fuentes. That in turn led to a bigger investigation -- called Operacion Puerto -- which included other teams and riders.

Just 36 hours before the start of the '06 Tour de France , race organisers were frantically scouring a list sent to them by Spanish police. The list contained names and information pertaining to one of Europe 's biggest blood doping scandals, linking cyclists, football teams Real Madrid and Barcelona, tennis players and athletes to Fuentes' clinic in Madrid .

Having hurriedly reviewed and translated the information from Spanish, the French race organisers ejected nine riders from four teams, including pre-race favourites Jan Ullrich , Ivan Basso , Francesco Mancebo, Oscar Sevilla and Alexandre Vinokourov.

Rhyme and Reason: Riders on the Storm

Storm at home were more of a rarity. When I grew up they were a form of entertainment. We'd huddle by the window and watch them turn the sky purple and count the seconds between the flash and the rumble. Although there were tales of lightening strikes just as there were craggy old trees in the forest, bereft of all life, that bore testimony to the ferocity of the storm, it was all so distant from our window. Here it's not so predictable. Two years ago a twister touched down near the house ripping down trees and power lines across the street and wiping out the village choked with antique shops a mile down the road. And I have a recurring dream that I toil across a landscape of beaten down cornfields, unremittingly flat and terrible where a black sky is painted over the drifting blue air. This sense of foreboding is unfortunate because there's something exhilarating about storms, about the way they make the trees dance and suck the heaviness from the lead infused air. One night back in Wales when we were younger and more foolish we went out on a night of high winds when the sky was a screaming symphony full of razor edged clouds. Richard, Mark, Brian and myself walked along the banks of the Taff as the waters rose and trees snapped around us and the moon slipped in and out of the clouds like a reveller at a jig. The howling wind and the falling trees infused us with a sense of delirium and and excitement. If we could duck and dive and dodge fast falling death and the fleet flowing river there was surely nothing we couldn't do. We were alone in the chaotic wilderness but we mastered the stormy night and walked into the early hours until we saw the shuttered tower of Llandaff Cathedral wrapped in the pale strands of dawn.

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