Team Sky’s the limit

There was a remarkable picture in the Independent’s sports section the other morning showing a lone cyclist tearing up a mountain road in the Italian Alps. The high pastures were thronged with people — thousands of them — and most are cheering like crazy. The eye is caught by a green, white and red tricolore, held resplendently aloft. The race was the Giro d’Italia, second only to the Tour de France in the ranks of great stage races, and the cyclist was the 32-year-old Italian Ivan Basso. He was surging back into contention for the maglia rosa — yellow jerseys in the Tour but pink in the Giro — by climbing the fearsomely steep Monte Zoncolan some four minutes ahead of his nearest rivals. 

Basso was banned from the sport for a couple of years because he was caught up in the so-called Operacion Puerto drugs scandal in Spain in 2006 — admitting later that although he hadn’t blood-doped, he certainly planned to.