Contador, Alberto

Alberto Contador, (born December 6, 1982, Madrid, Spain), Spanish cyclist who twice won the Tour de France (2007, 2009) and had a third Tour victory (2010) stripped from him after he was found guilty of doping.

Contador competed as an amateur from his mid-teens and made his professional debut in 2003. He showed early promise, winning a time trial that year at the Tour of Poland, but in 2004 his future was left in doubt after he suffered a fall during a race and subsequently underwent brain surgery to remove a blood clot. He made a remarkable recovery, however, and resumed racing in 2005, winning a stage of the Tour Down Under in Australia and earning his first overall victory as a professional rider at the Catalan Cycling Week.

Contador’s emergence as one of the elite figures of road cycling came in 2007, when he won his first Tour de France, beating Cadel Evans by 23 seconds. At the close of that season, however, his Discovery Channel team disbanded. Contador was unable to participate in the 2008 Tour because his new team, Astana, was excluded from the race for prior doping offenses. Despite the setback, he won both the Tour of Italy (Giro d’Italia) and the Tour of Spain (Vuelta a España) that year. He returned to the Tour de France in 2009, but reports soon surfaced of a rift between Contador and his teammate Lance Armstrong over the leadership of Astana. Any doubt as to who was the stronger rider vanished on stage 15, however, when the Spaniard produced one of the fastest climbs in Tour history, making the final ascent to the Alpine village of Verbier, Switzerland, at an estimated rate of more than 6,070 feet (1,850 metres) per hour. Contador seized the leader’s yellow jersey on that stage and never relinquished it. He finished 4 minutes 11 seconds ahead of runner-up Andy Schleck and 5 minutes 24 seconds ahead of Armstrong, who finished third. Followers of cycling marveled at the Spaniard’s versatility, regarding him as a “complete rider”—a peerless climber who was also a formidable competitor in individual time trials. In 2010 Contador defended his Tour title as he bested Schleck by 39 seconds.

In September 2010 it was revealed that Contador had tested positive for a banned substance during the final rest day of the previous July’s Tour, which he claimed was the result of having ingested contaminated meat. He had initially received a one-year ban when the positive test was announced, but he was cleared on appeal by the Spanish cycling federation and returned to racing in February 2011 while his case remained under review by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). In February 2012 the CAS rejected Contador’s appeal, and he was stripped of his 2010 Tour title and retroactively banned from the sport for two years. He returned to competition in August.

Contador subsequently won the Vuelta a España (2012, 2014) and the Giro d’Italia (2015). However, he struggled in the Tour de France, achieving his best post-suspension finish in 2013, when he placed fourth. In 2017 Contador retired from competitive racing.