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Tour de France champion Chris Froome has expressed 'disappointment' for the fact that he was not being drug tested at a training camp ahead of the three-week race that which starts on 5 July.
The 29-year-old Team Sky rider remarked he has not been subject to out-of-competition testing for the last two weeks. He said three major TDF contenders staying on Mount Teide and no out-of-competition tests for the past two weeks, which is very disappointing. Cycling's governing body, the UCI, is responsible for anti-doping tests.
Froome, the Kenyan-born British professional road racing cyclist and winner of the 2013 Tour de France, is training with teammates from Team Sky in the Mount Teide area of Tenerife ahead of the Criterium du Dauphine in June and the Tour de France that which starts in Yorkshire. He went on to remark that he is one of the three major TDF contenders and he thinks it is in all our best interests to be able to prove we are clean no matter where we train. The rider added he it would be good to have more testing done here, especially this close to the Tour de France and he would have expected to see more testing and it's disappointing. Froome, who rides for UCI ProTeam Team Sky, has never failed a doping test but had to face questions about doping when he won the Tour de France for the first time last summer.
Froome claims he has only been tested once during his visits to Tenerife despite Sky and other professional teams making regular use of the area for high-altitude training. The rider added he had been tested once and he has been up here maybe four or five times. He concluded by saying that in his opinion they're not helping by not doing controls at this part in the season and he thinks that if we are trying to show that the sport has changed it's difficult to do so if we're not being tested up here.
He also revealed that potential Tour rivals and leading riders Vincenzo Nibali (Astana) and Alberto Contador (Tinkoff Saxo) had also not been tested while on the island. In 2012, Contador was given a ban of two years that was backdated to January 2011 and stripped of his 2010 Tour de France win after he tested positive for Clenbuterol. Alberto Contador vehemently denied that he had knowingly ingested the substance and blamed the failed drug test on eating contaminated meat.
Froome also remarked he had asked around with other teams just out of interest, because we've been up here before and not been tested. Chris Froome also remarked he wanted to see if it was the same case for everyone, but none of them, from what he could gather, had been tested either. He added Alberto, Vincenzo, we're all up here with our respective teams and, at the end of the day, we are the ones that have to stand in front of the television cameras in July and justify performances. The Team Sky rider said all three of us are GC (General Classification) contenders and the probability is that whoever is in the yellow jersey in July is going to have to answer questions and added that if we're not getting tested, that doesn't look good on any of us.