On July 25th, an article in the Lufbra Echo alleged that Alberto Contador had "not failed a single drugs test" during this year's Tour de France. Some readers believed that we were inferring that Mr Contador was in no way a drug cheat. Given the recent developments, we would like to retract the article in full and point out that Mr Contador did in fact fail a drugs test during the Tour and thus any inference of innocence was entirely false. Whilst we deny that we were deliberately setting out to portray Mr Contador as an honest sportsman, we understand how some readers may have incorrectly thought this to be the case.
We would like to apologise to Mr Contador for the upset and embarrassment that our article caused and are more than happy to set the record straight.