July 9, 2007 — Milram manager, Gianluigi Stanga, has now joined the list of big names that will be absent from the 2007 Tour de France according to AP. Like CSC team owner and manager, Bjarne Riis, Stanga was among those recently named by Joerg Jaksche (Tinkoff) in his doping confession. As previously reported, Riis will not be directing the CSC team in this year’s tour.

Meanwhile, the Berliner Zeitung, a daily paper based in Berlin, announced to its readers that it will not cover the 2007 TdF. The newspaper owners explained that the Tour is beset with doping problems. “Even if there have been some recently positive developments concerning the struggle against doping, they still lie, still cheat, hide the truth, cover it up, and bend it,” concluded an editorial. German television channels ARD and ZDF are also threatening to drop TdF coverage as announced yesterday on Cyclingpost.

Professional cycling and the UCI were targeted by World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) president, Dick Pound at a meeting of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on Friday in Guatemala. Blaming the UCI for professional cycling’s woes, Pound offered no remedy to fix the problems but declared that, “their credibility is undermined. The audiovisual media is no longer interested and sponsors are leaving.”

The sport’s scandals have endangered the World Road Race Championships in Stuttgart Germany scheduled for September. In a worst case scenario the event could be cancelled because of the series of doping scandals that have plagued cycling announced German sports minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble. The German government is considering withholding some 150,000 euros ($214,500 CDN) of financial support earmarked for the Sept. 26-30 event.

One remedy for all this was proposed by the 2006 TdF winner, Floyd Landis in an interview on Vermont Public Radio on Saturday. Landis proposed that cycling should leave the Olympics and thus escape the clutches of the IOC and WADA that, “justify their existence by attacking cycling.”