The Tour de France starts in Copenhagen on Friday with a cloud hanging over it after the Bahrain Victorious team, winners of three stages in last year’s race, was subjected to a second police raid in a week.
The team’s hotel in Brøndby was searched at dawn on Thursday morning by Danish police officers as part of an investigation by French prosecutors. It was the second search of the team’s riders and staff in a week and follows an initial search and investigation that began during the latter stages of last year’s race.
The team’s official pre-race press conference on Thursday lunchtime lasted only eight minutes after riders and staff refused to answer questions about the police investigation.
However, in a statement issued on Thursday the team said: “Following the police search into some staff and riders’ homes on Monday, the Team Bahrain Victorious hotel was searched by Danish police at the request of the French prosecutors this morning (Thursday) at 5:30 am.
“The officers searched all team vehicles, staff and riders’ rooms. The team fully cooperated with all the officers’ requests, and the search was completed within two hours. No items were seized from the team.”
Since the first police raids in Pau during the 2021 Tour, the team have maintained their innocence. Raids on team hotels in the modern Tour are not unprecedented and there has been intermittent police involvement over the past two decades or so, the most renowned being the tsunami of searches and detentions during the 1998 Tour’s infamous Festina affair.
The latest dawn raid was at the same hotel as the Groupama-FDJ team and their rider Stefan Küng responded angrily to the police presence. “It gives an image that we are all cheaters, and that’s not very nice,” Küng told Cyclingnews.com.
“I just hope that if there is something, that they are prosecuted. But I also hope that if there is nothing there is a public apology,” he added. “It’s good that there are prosecutions because I’m the first one to support any measure that helps to give our sport credibility and make sure that we, as clean riders, are not penalized. But in the same way I always ask for fair play, from everyone, from the authorities.
“If they make their prosecutions, good. If they don’t find anything, there should also be a statement about that.”
The police searches last Monday, prior to teams gathering in Copenhagen, were led by Europol, who searched properties of riders and team staff in three different countries. The team described this as part of a campaign to “damage the reputation of individuals” and added that “the timing of this investigation is aimed at intentionally damaging the team’s reputation”.
After the raids earlier this week, Vladimir Miholjevic, the Bahrain Victorious performance manager, said that his team was “sleeping like babies and working like horses”. “We’d like to know why they are doing this,” Miholjevic told VeloNews of the space of police searches.
“Someone who is interested to see how we are working can join our team for a period of time and maybe these people will understand the effort that staff and riders are putting in their jobs to achieve their results.”
Meanwhile, the Grand Départ Danish organizers have focused on accentuating the positives of cycling’s younger generation, and both Bjarne Riis, disgraced winner of the 1996 Tour, and Michael Rasmussen, expelled from the 2007 Tour while leading the race, are persona non grata during the opening weekend’s celebrations.
But as the race gets under way on Friday, another cloud is looming after a spate of withdrawals of riders due to positive tests for Covid-19. The French rider Bryan Coquard (Cofidis) and the South African Daryl Impey (Israel – Premier Tech) were pulled on the eve of the race start.
Yet there was a twist when Bob Jungels, the Luxembourg rider for the AG2R team, tested positive, but was declared “not contagious” by the International Cycling Union’s (UCI) medical team and was allowed to start the race.
According to the UCI rules, at the discretion of the UCI medical director, riders who are positive may be allowed to start if the Covid doctor at the event is satisfied that the rider is “not contagious and not likely to infect third persons”.
www.theguardian.com
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism