Astana and Contador committed to clean cycling at Tour de France.

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Astana and Contador committed to clean cycling at Tour de France.

Astana for clean cycling. Dry cycling, too.

There are teams like Garmin-Transitions and HTC-Columbia that believe strongly in clean cycling. It’s nice to know that Astana and two-time Tour de France winner Alberto Contador feel the same way.

The on-board washing machine and dryer go a long way to toward cleaning up the sport starting with the bid shorts and jerseys and socks.

A robust internal anti-doping program costs quite a lot of money — just ask Jonathan Vaughters or Bob Stapleton — and you can add the price of detergent and fabric softener.

Doping is a dirty business and the first line of defense is team wear that smells good and looks great and has that special ProTour sparkle.

Bravo for Astana. Now even former doper Alexander Vinokourov will find it’s easy to maintain his new squeaky clean image.

By |2019-02-03T16:29:06-08:00July 9th, 2010|Alberto Contador, Astana, Tour de France|2 Comments

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  1. joepappillon July 9, 2010 at 12:30 pm - Reply

    Matt – a suggestion!

    Would you try to document as much “behind-the-scenes” non-bike tech stuff as you can, and write-up a feature about it? Perhaps you compose a couple of short pieces whilst you’re at the Tour, and then a more comprehensive one back home…

    But what I really think people should see more of is the shot like the one you include of the bus w/ the washing machine. There is so much of that “stuff” – that wacky improvisation and examples of “things you don’t necessarily think of when imagining what’s required to keep a ProTour team going”…

    So…pics of the underside of the bus – pics of the inside of the team box truck where the bikes are hung – CLOSE UPS OF THE CUSTOM-MADE ROOF RACKS (!!!) this could be its own feature! people need to know how amazing a process it is to obtain those racks, w/ the few builders who still make them having waiting lists of up to two years! – THE INSIDE OF A RIDER’s RAIN BAG – the mechanics and soigneurs getting shit-faced at the bar at about 2AM on the night of the 7th stage – etc…

    Think about it, please!

    Cheers!

    JP

  2. Ron July 13, 2010 at 11:58 am - Reply

    Matt, there may be more truth to your story than you think. Or at least there is a laundry detergent connection with doping…

    I dont know how true it is but a few years ago I heard that riders were carrying a small bag of a certain European washing detergent in their back pocket in case they got the call to pee in the cup. They would put some of the detergent on their fingers and pee over it….the proteins in the detergent masked the EPO. I wonder if any of your readers can verify this.

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