Alberto Contador - "A year of transition in Astana"  
The Kazakh team accepts the conditions of Contador, ready to fulfill his contract

“It looks very easy to people,” said Alberto Contador. “The news goes out saying that I’m free to leave Astana and everybody believes it, but then questions to the UCI and you’re hit with reality.”

Carlos Arribas
El País/October 30, 2009
 He was hit with reality by telephone, since his brother and manager, Fran Contador, cancelled a trip to Switzerland at the last moment, where, accompanied by his lawyers of the firm Bardají and Honrado, he had planned to meet directly with the leaders of the UCI in order to receive clarification on the actual possibilities of legally breaking, without cost or complications, the contract that binds him to Astana until December of 2010.

Alberto Contador in the maglia rosa of the 2008 Giro d'Italia.
Photo © 2008 Fotoreporter Sirotti

The reality is that Philippe Verbiest, legal advisor to the UCI, has told Contador’s lawyers by telephone that despite Astana not having received a license on October 20, the application of the article introduced last July to the rules of the UCI which frees riders to change teams in the event that they don’t have licenses is not automatically applicable, therefore there are doubts about whether it is retroactive. In summary, they informed them, the matter could take some months and could likely end up in the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

“And so we could wind up in the middle of December without knowing what team I’ll ride for in 2010, and I don’t want that,” said Contador, who counts offers from three teams - Caisse d’Eparge, Garmin and Quick Step - ready to pay him up to four million euros per year in the event he breaks with Astana.

“I want to settle it all as soon as possible, I don’t want to get worked up any more, so I’ll probably take next year as a year of transition in Astana, and after that we’ll see.”

Contador still holds on to the idea of creating his own team, to his own specifications, as of 2011, as Lance Armstrong did at Discovery Channel in 2005, although he’s also happy to listen to the possibility of a Spanish team getting a big Spanish sponsor in order to rescue completely the best cyclist in the world for Spanish cycling.

If he stays at Astana, Contador will renegotiate the conditions of his contract with the Kazakh directors, led by the new strongman Nikolai Proskurin. In previous conversations, anyway, he has already given them his conditions and has obtained their commitment. All of them, apart from the obvious necessity of major sport-related reinforcements to comprise a team guaranteed capable of the Tour, refer to matters related to the fight against doping.

Contador does not want what happened in 2006 to happen again, when the Tour threw out his team, Liberty, due to Operacion Puerto, or in 2008, when Vinokourov’s positive from 2007 caused Contador’s team, Astana, to be banned from participating.

Indeed, 2010 brings with it the return of Vinokourov, who has finished his period of sanction, and brings the fear to Contador, who wants the team to organize an internal anti-doping system—promise received—and who wishes to add to his contract a series of clauses by which he will be freed in the event a positive is produced in his team or in case of a scandal or some other circumstance, like administrative problems, that would deprive them of an invitation to the Tour.

If there’s one thing Contador wants to have sewn up, it’s that he will be in Rotterdam, wearing bib number 1, on July 3, 2010. It might be on the team that he’s on.
Thanks to: http://albertocontadornotebook.info/

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