Tyler Hamilton has signed a one-year deal with the Italian/Russian Tinkoff cycling team it was announced in Rome on Friday.

The year-old continental team is bankrolled by Russian brewery magnate Oleg Tinkov and has recently been working to sign German Tour de France winner Jan Ullrich.

Hamilton, once one of the sport’s top stars, completed a two-year ban for blood doping in September. Hamilton had hoped to sign with a ProTour team and return to the top level of the sport, but settled for a contract with the Continental squad as that option appeared unrealistic. In recent months UCI officials made it clear that they would strictly interpret the ProTour code of ethics, which requires that riders be banned from the top level of the sport for a period twice as long as their original doping suspensions.

Tinkoff gained its UCI continental license this season and is actively recruiting for next year. Under the direction of team managers Orlando Maini and Dimitri Konishev, the team has also signed Italian Salvatore Commesso and German Danilo Hondo.

The team doesn’t seem to mind potential controversy as it seeks to sign other top riders who have faced doping allegations. Hondo finished a one-year doping ban last year. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) had ordered the sprinter to serve a two-year suspension, but the second year of that ban was overturned by a Swiss civil court. CAS has not appealed the decision.

Ullrich was fired by his T-Mobile after he was barred from competing in this year’s Tour de France, when Spanish investigators named the 1997 Tour winner as a suspect in the Operación Puerto doping case. Thirteen riders, including Italian Ivan Basso, Ullrich and Spain's Francisco Mancebo suspended by their teams days before the start of the Tour.

Since then, however, the investigation has stalled and several riders – including Basso, who recently signed with the Discovery team – have tentatively resumed their careers. Hamilton, too, was named as a suspect in the Puerto case, a revelation that prompted UCI president Pat McQuaid to threaten the 35-year-old American with a life-time ban.

Hamilton, formerly of the CSC and U.S. Postal teams, was found positive for blood doping after winning an individual time trial at the 2004 Vuelta a España. Hamilton mounted a long and expensive legal challenge against his suspension, arguing that the test used to isolate foreign blood populations was unproven.

A three-member CAS panel, however, ruled that results from several blood tests in the months before and after the Vuelta showed a declining population of another person’s red blood cells. Hamilton argued that there could be other reasons for the existence of that secondary population, including a rare phenomenon known as “chimeraism,” in which the cells of a twin that died before birth are absorbed by a fetus. U.S. Anti-doping Agency officials successfully argued that the secondary population of cells would not have disappeared as they did in follow-up tests had Hamilton been a chimera.

Hamilton maintained his position as he signed the Tinkoff deal.

"There have been mistakes and the price that I had to pay was very high," he said. "Now I am ready to put myself back into competition. I passed excruciating long months and have come out on top thanks to the help of my family and my close friends. Now I am ready to for a new challenge and I want to thank Tinkoff Credit Systems for offering me this new opportunity."

Hamilton recently competed as a team member in Las Vegas’s SilverMan triathlon and has raced for the last two years in New Hampshire’s Mount Washington Hill Climb, an event not sanction by USA Cycling and thus not subject to UCI racing bans.

Race organizers mount challenge to ProTour
Organizers of some of the world's biggest bicycle races plan to challenge the UCI’s handling of the ProTour calendar to the European Commission.

The Pro Tour was introduced two years ago by former UCI president Hein Verbruggen, but the elite-level racing series has met considerable resistance from race organizers, some of whom say their events have since been marginalized.

The biggest current gripe of race organizers is that the current format of the Pro Tour - which consists of having the 20 biggest teams in cycling contesting events on a specific calendar - is too restrictive.

In a statement issued in Paris on Friday, the AIOCC, the international association of cycling race organizers, voted 81 percent in favor to mount an anti-trust challenge of the system to the European Commission.

"We have decided to consult the European Commission to show our opposition to what we believe is a closed system of competition in the ProTour," said the statement.

Eighty-seven race organizers from 12 countries participated in the meeting in Paris.

Current UCI president, Irishman Pat McQuaid, said he would accept any decision coming from the European body but added that he was confident the sport's world ruling body would be allowed to continue with the Pro Tour.

"The UCI would be among the first to submit this issue to an arbitration tribunal," McQuaid told AFP.

"We are 100-percent confident in our vision of the ProTour, and we are ready to be scrutinised by such a professional body as the European Commission, McQuaid said. "We will submit all the necessary documents."

"Obviously, it means we will have to assume whatever decision is taken, but we are calmly awaiting that decision," he added.

Among its many roles the European Commission regulates competition in the European Union. It vets all mergers with Community-wide effects and initiates proceedings against companies which violate EU competition and anti-trust regulations.
Agence France PressePuerto blood shows signs of EPO use
An analysis of blood seized during police raids conducted as part of the Operación Puerto doping investigation in Spain shows that many of the samples contain "high levels” of erythropoietin according to a report released Madrid on Friday.

The Spanish newspaper El Pais claimed that an anti-doping laboratory in Barcelona which analyzed 99 bags of blood plasma seized from the premises of doctor Eufemiano Fuentes contained the banned blood booster.

The newspaper said that should be seen as proof that some or all of the 58 riders implicated in the affair were doping, requiring constant monitoring of blood levels.

The laboratory, responsible for analyzing the evidence by the investigation's ruling judge, has not identified any riders from the bags of blood plasma seized from Fuentes' premises.

Fuentes was suspected of masterminding a drug and blood-doping network that involved athletes from several sports, but especially cycling.

The investigation which rocked the sport this summer has all but fizzled out and none of those implicated are set to face sanctions because of a lack of concrete evidence.

Italian Ivan Basso, Germany's Jan Ullrich and Spaniard Francisco Mancebo were among the biggest names implicated in the affair. The three were among a group of riders suspended by their respective teams prior to the Tour de France.

Since then Basso has been cleared by the Italian sports authorities and recently signed with the Discovery Channel team.

Ullrich, who was sacked by T-Mobile, could be given the green light to his continue his career if and when the Swiss cycling authorities, with whom he has a license, clear him from any wrongdoing.

After studying the Barcelona lab's report El Pais said that athletes would go to extreme measures to boost their blood before competition.

The newspaper said that a few weeks before major races athletes would remove blood which would then be put into a machine to separate the plasma from the oxygen-rich red blood cells before being frozen.

Prior to competing, the athletes would then re-inject the red blood cells to boost its oxygen-carrying capacities and its resistance to fatigue.

If and when the athletes' hematocrit levels reached dangerously high levels, they would then re-inject the plasma to dilute the volume of red blood cells and thus avoid detection.