MySports Today

Spain’s Alberto Cantador won the 2009 Tour de France on Sunday for his 2nd career Tour de France victory.  Cantador also won the 2007 Tour de France.  Fellow Astana team member – 7-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong – finished in 3rd place.  Cantador and Armstrong battled throughout the Tour as tensions grew over who would be the team leader.  Cantador had this to say about the win – “It has been an especially difficult Tour for me, but I savor it and it is more special because of it… We are totally incompatible.  In the end, Armstrong will go his way and I’ll go mine.”

Cantador is probably the best cycler in the sport today.  He has already won all 3 Grand Tours of France, Italy and Spain, and at the young age of 26 still has plenty of good years ahead of him.

As for Armstrong, he intends to return to the Tour de France with a different team in 2010.

Cycling has been sounding like baseball the last few years with all of the steroid talk. Friday we find out that American cyclist Tyler Hamilton announced his retirement after testing positive for the steroid DHEA. He said he knowingly ingested it in an over the counter herbal antidepressant. This was his second doping offense who tested positive for homologous blood transfusion in 2004 and served a two-year suspension, even as he disputed the test results. It was likely that he faced a eight year to life suspension for this second offense.

Hamilton, said he decided to admit to the violation in order to deal with an ongoing battle with clinical depression that was first diagnosed in 2003. When he bought the supplement called Mitamins Advanced Formula for Depression, he was in a “desperate” state triggered when he went off his other medication cold turkey, he said.