Tour De France officials managed to make a highlight film of this summer’s race while barely showing the winner, American Lance Armstrong.

The Los Angeles Times’ Diane Pucin reports that at a press event where the 2006 route was revealed …

a 10-minute highlight video of the 2005 race was shown. Barely shown was 34-year-old Armstrong, who has been fighting allegations reported in August by L’Equipe, a French sports newspaper, that there is proof Armstrong was using illegal blood-doping products when he won his first Tour in 1999.

Tour officials made it clear they want nothing to do with Armstrong. This despite the fact that he has never failed a drug test.

Armstrong responded today:

“Once again Jean-Marie LeBlanc has taken an unsolicited shot at me and continues to ignore the truth… And while he may want to erase the last seven years I have nothing but great memories of participating in the greatest sports event in the world. Jean-Marie claims the Tour deserves a better fate. I believe it deserves a better leader.”

Meanwhile, the Tour’s 2006 course — which Armstrong may yet race — has no team time trial, a particular strength of the U.S. - based Discovery and CSC teams.

One would think they didn’t like Americans.

Technorati Tags: France, lance armstrong, Tour de France

This entry was posted on Friday, October 28th, 2005 at 2:54 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Cycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.