In the rarefied atmosphere inhabited by defending Tour de France champions, the effect of any stray words so often seems to be amplified. When Astana's Vincenzo Nibali rhetorically enquired of Nairo Quintana’s whereabouts during an exchange with journalists last month, he hardly anticipated that his words would become headline news 48 hours before the Grand Départ. Such is the hyper-reality of life after the maillot jaune.
As in 2013, Quintana took a lengthy break from racing ahead of the Tour, preferring to spend almost two months training at altitude at home in Colombia between the Tour de Romandie and the Route du Sud. Concerns have been raised in the past about the frequency of out-of-competition blood tests in Colombia, but speaking on Friday afternoon, Quintana said that he had been tested on at least five occasions in his home country in the past year.
During his final pre-Tour press conference just beforehand, Nibali had been at pains to douse the flames of any potential controversy, looking to avoid any diplomatic incident with one of the other heads of state at this race when he responded on two occasions to questions from Colombian reporters on the matter.
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“I’m sorry if Quintana was angry or offended. My intention was not to speak badly of Colombia, which is a wonderful country with a lot of great riders who are riding very strongly,” Nibali said. “It’s just that there was no news of Quintana and we were all asking ourselves about where he was, but not in a malicious way. We knew that Alberto was training in Livigno and where all the other contenders were and so on, I just meant ‘let’s see where Quintana is',"
Nibali was later asked if he felt that all of principal Tour contenders had faced testing of the same rigour in the months leading up to the race. “I don’t know if we’re all controlled as much as one another. I can only speak for myself. I’m tested a lot by WADA and the UCI and I can only say that they do great work,” he said.
Even before this nascent controversy, Nibali’s year had not been bereft of incident due to the apparent sword of Damocles that hung over his Astana team’s WorldTour licence for much of the spring. The positive doping controls of Maxim and Valentin Iglinskiy last year, as well as a trio of cases on the Astana Continental team, triggered an audit from the University of Lausanne and eventually prompted the UCI to request its Licence Commission to revoke Astana’s top flight status. They finally found in Astana’s favour in April.
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