Four-time Tour de France King of the Mountains winner Richard Virenque has been charged with breaking France's 1989 anti-doping laws by the magistrate investigating last year's Tour de France doping scandal.
Patrick Keil, in charge of the inquiry launched after Festina team masseur Willy Voet was found with a boot-load of drugs en route to the 1998 Tour de France, informed Virenque by letter that he was being charged.
Virenque (28), who led the disgraced Festina team last season, is accused of knowingly using and administering doping products and of complicity to import, hold, transfer, supply and acquire poisonous and prohibited substances.
Virenque, now with for the Italian Polti team, has persistently denied taking banned substances, and dismisses official tests which appeared to contradict him.
Voet had claimed Virenque took up to 100 injections of the banned drug EPO (erythropoietin) every year.
He accused Virenque and teammate Pascal Herve, who has also denied any drug taking, of lying and of and being the biggest consumers of doping products. EPO boosts the oxygen content in the blood and thus can boost endurance.
The president of the French Cycling Federation (FFC), Daniel Baal, and the Tour de France race director, Jean-Marie Leblanc, who also functions as vice-president delegate of the French Cycling League, are to appear before investigating police in Lille today.
They will be questioned as witnesses, and could suffer the same fate as Roger Legeay, the FFC vice-president who was charged on Monday following police questioning.
Judge Keil believes Legeay did not do enough in his position as a senior cycling administrator to deal with the doping crisis. Similar accusations could be levelled at Baal and Leblanc.
Keil said as early as last summer he wanted to have Baal and Leblanc interviewed, but procedural delays have so far prevented him from doing so, judicial sources said.
"Thursday will consist of a typical procedure. We will see what they say before deciding whether I need to interview them also," said Keil.
Spanish cycling teams have made their peace with the Tour de France, Leblanc said in an interview published in Spain yesterday. The four teams from Spain who staged a walkout during last year's drugs-blighted Tour - Banesto, ONCE, Vitalicio and Kelme - returned to France this week for the Criterium International race.
It was the first time ONCE and Banesto had raced in France since the Tour de France last year.
Police raided team hotels and an ONCE doctor was placed under investigation on doping charges. The raids sparked a war of words between ONCE team director Manolo Saiz and the French authorities.
There had been speculation that ONCE, whose riders include Laurent Jalabert and Abraham Olano, might not race in this year's Tour.
But Leblanc sent out a message of peace in an interview with Spanish sports daily Marca yesterday, saying he believed the "little war" between France and Spain was now at an end.
"Relations between the Tour and the Spanish teams are now back to normal,' Leblanc told Marca.
