Tour champion travels to sponsors’ homeland
Although his racing season has ended, and he has signed for a new team for 2011, Alberto Contador continues with his commitments to Astana; the three-time Tour de France winner is visiting Kazakhstan’s former capital Almaty along with Alexandre Vinokourov and cycling legend Eddy Merckx to take part in a race through the city on Saturday.
Contador, Vinokourov and Merckx were all present at a press conference at the headquarters of Samruk Kazyna, one of the principle sponsors of the Astana team. Keirat Kelimbetov, the company president thanked both Contador and Vinokourov “for this exceptional year, in which they proudly flew the flag for Kazakhstan.”
Contador has ridden for Astana, which was built around Vinokourov after the collapse of the Liberty Serguros team, since 2008. The team was excluded from the Tour de France that year, thanks to Vinokourov’s positive for blood doping in 2007, but he won both the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España.
In 2009 Astana was welcomed back to the Tour and Contador won it, despite internal conflicts with teammate Lance Armstrong, who’d come out of retirement to try to win an eighth Tour himself. Contador repeated his win again this year, alongside Vinokourov who’d returned from his suspension; the Kazakh also took a stage win for himself.
As well as the Tour de France, Contador also won the Volta ao Algarve, Paris-Nice, the Vuelta a Castilla y León and finished second in the Critérium du Dauphiné. In August it was announced that he would be leaving the Astana team, despite a reportedly lucrative offer to stay, to join Saxo Bank-Sungard in 2011.