Bob Stapleton is investing more than $10 million of his own money to sponsor a cycling team that was kicked out of the Tour de France last summer.
He has named it Team High Road. "We want to be transparently drug-free," Stapleton said. "I still believe in this sport even when it's not easy."
Team High Road is one of four teams racing in this year's Amgen Tour of California that have committed nearly $500,000 each for doping programs that go beyond those of the International Cycling Union (UCI). The others are Slipstream Chipotle, CSC and Astana.
They have made public their intensive drug-testing schedules, embraced a new "biological passport" that is supposed to record every tiny variation in a cyclist's blood and urine profiles, and committed to keeping track of where their cyclists are at almost all times.
This continues the fight against doping that has tarnished the last two Tour de France races.
In 2006, champion Floyd Landis was accused of failing a doping test and eventually had his title taken away. Last year, with less than a week left in the race, overall leader Michael Rasmussen of Denmark was told to leave after his Rabobank team said it could not verify Rasmussen's whereabouts when he missed prerace doping tests.
T-Mobile, a German powerhouse for nearly two decades that produced Tour de France winners Bjarne Riis and Jan Ullrich, was tainted by Riis' admission he was doping during his Tour de France win in 1996, and by doping allegations against Ullrich, who as a result hasn't raced in two years.
T-Mobile withdrew its financial sponsorship last season, and it became Team High Road.
"What, are all the rest of us the low road?" said Michael Ball, owner of Rock Racing, a new team that has signed several doping-tarnished riders.
Stapleton, a native of Riverside who made his fortune in wireless telecommunications, said he chose the name only to make a statement about his own team. "We will not have a rider who fails a drug test," Stapleton said. "It just can't happen."
But making a new commitment to anti-doping hasn't helped Astana, whose entire team was ejected from last summer's Tour de France when lead rider Alexandre Vinokourov failed a doping test after the team time trial.
The Kazakhstan-owned Astana was re-formed last fall with several riders and key management personnel from the Discovery Channel team after the cable network chose not to renew its sponsorship. The new riders include Alberto Contador of Spain, last year's Tour de France winner, and Levi Leipheimer, the third-place finisher in Paris and defending Tour of California champion.
