The Vuelta 2008, the Tour of Spain, will take place from 30 August until 21 September ... without Team High Road!

Other news: Ivan Basso will make his comeback at Liquigas ...

The Vuelta without Team High Road

The organisor of the Tour of Spain, Unipublic would normally only announce the team selection for this 63rd edition early May, but apparently it's already known that Team High Road will not be part of it.

Bob Stapleton's team which has been built on what remained of the German T-Mobile team, would have been excluded from the Vuelta 2008 because of the different doping cases in and around that team: Ullrich, Honchar, Sinkewitz, Kessler, Riis and Zabel are thus the reason for this exclusion.

Team High Road had been excluded from participation to the Giro d'Italia already. The riders from this nowadays American team will however (not like Astana) start in the Tour de France 2008 on July 5th.

Ivan Basso will join Liquigas from 2009

In the Puerto doping case the Italian rider Ivan Basso has been suspended officially on 15 June 2007 after he had recognised he wanted to work with the doctor Eufemanio Fuentes in order to use EPO but that he had never really used it. Based on the 243 days of suspension he already had before, the judges suspended him until October 24th, 2008.

Ivan Basso can thus make his comeback in the next season, early 2009, and will do that wearing the green jersey of the Liquigas team.
Before he had already signed a contract with the no longer existing Discovery Channel team but he decided to end that himself.

Liquigas has always been a member of the AIGCP (the Association Internationale des Groupes Cyclistes Professionnelles) but this organisation's ethical code does not allow any of its members to hire a rider in the four years following a suspension for doping. The Italian team has thus announced it will leave the AIGCP by saying: "The AIGCP no longer correctly represents the different teams. The programme we agreed upon at its creation no longer corresponds to the current situation. There are new needs now."

door Thomas Vergouwen
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this publication is published in: Vuelta a España | Cycling general (except Tour de France) | Doping

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