One team that looks like it is on course for a wild card entry in next year's Tour de France is the US based Team Slipstream. Led by the stridently anti-doping Jonathan Vaughters, a man who's only tangle with the doping laws is when he had to pull out of a Tour because he couldn't take a cortisone shot for a wasp sting.
Team Slipstream have teamed up with the Agency for Sporting Ethics and will test their riders 20 times as often as the UCI, and they have offered WADA complete oversight of the results.
Although T-Mobile's testing set-up didn't stop one of their riders failing a test in training, it would rather be hoped that this team's setup pretty much ensures they will be clean.
So far announced for the team are American time-triallist David Zabriskie, Scottish time-triallist and poacher-turned-gamekeeper on drugs David Millar, and climber Christian Vandevelde. A few good names, a chance of a stage win, and a clear anti-doping policy probably put them near the front of the wild-card queue. If the TdF organisers get their way, I suspect they'd rather pick stringently clean teams than fast ones...
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