bicycle.net -- cycling news, product reviews, original essays, podcasts & video :: tour de france 2008

Spain’s Pereiro Receives Yellow Jersey From the 2006 Tour de France

Tuesday, October 16, 2007; Washington Post

Oscar Pereiro finally got his hands on the winner’s yellow jersey from the 2006 Tour de France yesterday.

“Finally, we have a winner and it’s Oscar,” Tour director Christian Prudhomme said at the handover ceremony in Madrid. “Oscar, you have won the Tour out on the road.”

Pereiro Now Wearing The Yellow Jersey For The 2006 TDF

The Spaniard moved from second to first after Floyd Landis’s disqualification for doping.

“I have the feeling of arriving at the end of a thriller, after having spent 14 months thinking about it and not being able to concentrate as I should have on my job,” Pereiro said. “It is essentially a kind of release.”

The International Cycling Union formally declared Pereiro the winner on Sept. 21, one day after a U.S. arbitration panel voted 2 to 1 to remove the title from Landis for using synthetic testosterone during the Tour.

It’s the first time in the 105-year history of the race that a winner has been stripped of the title.

“The moment I received the profit of my work, I had mixed feelings, something between satisfaction and regret for what we were deprived of,” Pereiro said.

Pereiro stood on the top step of a podium with his winner’s jersey, not along the Champs-Elysees as a normal champion would but in offices of Spain’s Sport Ministry.

Landis has appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which is expected to issue a final and binding ruling by mid-February.