What Lies Ahead

Alberto Contador of Spain won the 94th Tour de France on Sunday by one of the smallest margins of victory in the history of the race. The 24-year-old rider for the Discovery Channel team beat Australian Cadel Evans by 23 seconds, with his American teammate Levi Leipheimer in third place, only 31 seconds behind.

The Spaniard inherited the race lead -- and, as it turned out, the championship -- when former race leader Michael Rasmussen was booted out of the Tour for having lied to avoid two out-of-competition drug tests.

In the aftermath of a race plagued by reports of doping, many newspapers wondered about what would happen to professional cycling in the near future.

"Since fans and sponsors appraise the topic of doping in much less dramatic terms than the media, the Tour is at least economically still healthy," wrote the Berlin daily Der Tagespiegel.

"The situation will become truly critical when the existing contracts start getting renegotiated," it said. "At that point, we'll know if those involved are planning to use doping as a basis for introducing a price reduction in the field with the goal of distributing their brand names even more widely at a bargain price. As far as the sport itself is concerned, this situation will bring with itself both opportunities and risks."

Munich's Süddeutsche Zeitung predicted that "power struggles [which] lie ahead between the International Cycling Union (UCI) and the Tour organizer ASO can in the end lead to only one conclusion: that both organizations can no longer control themselves and each other. Here, it would be a necessary step to bring in the World Anti-Doping Agency WADA."

A commentator for the Westdeutsche Zeitung from Düsseldorf also stressed the need for outside control. "With tricks of unscrupulous medics and pharmacists becoming more and more refined, officials like the affable head of the German cycling federation, Rudolf Scharping, are becoming increasingly helpless vis-à-vis the sport mafia." The added that there was a solution: "A state anti-doping law and allowing big events to take place only in those countries that can investigate and prosecute matters of professional misconduct."

By general consensus, cycling is seen nowadays as a sport in deep crisis, which is why the Berliner Morgenpost described the Tour de France as "the seriously ill patient [who] shlepped itself to Paris," adding that: "Three weeks and 20 gruesome rounds of the Tour de France gravely damaged the sport, raising questions about whether the whole thing makes sense any more."

"If the organizers of the Tour de France prevail and organize their spectacle next year in a similarly autarchic manner -- the event has a turnover of 130 million euros ($178 million) after all -- they will surely make money, but without contributing to the patient's recovery. Egoism is the last thing that can help the staggering sport."

For some newspapers, however, the mere attention given by the media to the issue of doping in cycling was seen as a potentially positive development.

"The 2007 Tour was a scandal race that produced only losers," wrote the Rostock-based Ostsee-Zeitung. "Cycling got a lot of bashing, but this can serve as an example for other corruption-laden sports."