The Festina team have threatened legal action against the Tour de France organisers after their expulsion in the most serious drugs scandal in the race's history, Judging by the placards along the route of yesterday's stage from Brive-la-Gaillarde to Montauban - "Why Festina and not the others?" was one example - the French public view Richard Virenque and his team-mates as victims of injustice. Virenque's tearful exit certainly added weight to this interpretation. "Everyone knows that drug-taking goes on in the peloton," said his manager, Michel Gros. "We are just the sacrificial lambs."
Their expulsion raises more questions than it answers. Yesterday, for instance, most of the race's team doctors issued a statement to the effect that their job here is solely to look after the riders' health. The affair, moreover, may be the subject of an official inquiry by the French government. The riders' testimony to the Lille magistrates is eagerly awaited, as is their return to racing, planned for next weekend.
Festina learned their fate at a meeting with the Tour organisers towards the end of Saturday's time trial stage. "The guilty parties are behind bars, we are only witnesses, but we can't go on any more," said Virenque before collapsing, in tears, into the arms of one of his team-mates. The Tour de France will never be quite the same again.
The consensus among the riders at the start of yesterday's stage was that this would be an unusually chaotic. Jan Ullrich may have been wearing the yellow jersey after his victory in Saturday's 58kilometre (36-mile) time-trial stage but, with almost two weeks until the finish in Paris, no one expected his team-mates at Deutsche Telekom to control the stage.
Telekom do not look quite the force they were last year, and the man who served as a foil for the young German during last year's Tour, the 1996 winner Bjarne Riis of Denmark, looks unlikely to take that role after an abysmal performance on Saturday.
Ullrich did not win on Saturday by the huge margin which might have been expected after his domination in the equivalent stage last year, so there were plenty of riders within reach of the maillot jaune yesterday. All of them were no doubt aware that, with the race entering the Pyrenees tomorrow, this opportunity would not be repeated.
Those posters along the 190.5km (119-mile) route which did not demand the release of the Festina nine all proclaimed the virtues of the local boy Laurent Roux, but it was another "Lolo" from the other end of the country, the Nordiste Laurent Desbiens, who took what can only be a temporary hold on the race lead.
Desbiens, a diminutive character with schoolboy looks, is the sort of cyclist the French call solide: good enough to win several races a year and play his part in the team, but without star quality. Schoolboy looks or not, he does have a black mark against his name: both he and Gaumont, his close friend, tested positive for the steroid nandrolone in 1996 and were banned for six months. Their team doctor was the man who took the rap.
Yesterday's stage winner Jacky Durand is another solide: twice French national champion, a stage winner in the 1994 Tour and maillot jaune after the 1995 prologue time-trial when he escaped the rain which laid low Chris Boardman.
His sprint victory yesterday ahead of the Italian national champion Andrea Tafi was merited. He was the first rider to attack when the Tour left Dublin, and he has been in every breakaway of note since then. Not surprisingly he is wearing the red race number which denotes the race's most aggressive rider.
Like Gaumont and Desbiens, he was found to have taken steroids in 1996, although he escaped on a technicality. His nickname, inevitably, is "Dudu", and that is pretty much the state of the Tour at present.
