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 Alberto Contador Velasco (born 6 December 1982 in Madrid, Spain) is a professional road bicycle racer for UCI ProTeam Team Astana and winner of the 2007 Tour de France with team Discovery Channel. While he competes for the overall titles, he is considered a climbing specialist.
An early career highlight is his Stage 5 victory in the 2005 Tour Down Under, his first win after overcoming a massive blood clot in his brain, for which he underwent a risky surgery and a long, painful road to recovery to get back on his bike. The blood clot was discovered after he crashed and went into convulsions during the first stage of the 2004 Vuelta a Asturias. He had suffered headaches for several days beforehand. Following the demise of the Manolo Saiz–run Liberty Seguros-Würth team, Contador was without a professional contract until mid-January 2007, when he signed with Discovery Channel under a cloud of suspicion due to the Operación Puerto doping case.
 Contador's first major pro victory came with the 2007 Paris-Nice, which he won in dramatic fashion on the race's final stage. Discovery effectively wore down the remnants of the race leader, Davide Rebellin's, Gerolsteiner team, allowing Contador to launch an authoritative attack on the final climb. With Rebellin leading the chase, Contador held off his competitors in the final kilometers, winning him this prestigious race.
In the 2007 Tour de France, he won the 14th stage at the mountaintop finish of Plateau-de-Beille, and was second in the general classification to Michael Rasmussen. Upon Rasmussen's removal from the race after stage 17, Contador assumed the overall lead and the yellow jersey. In stage 19, a time trial, he managed to keep hold of the yellow jersey by a margin of only twenty-three seconds over challenger Cadel Evans and went on to win his first Tour de France, the first win for the Discovery Channel team since Lance Armstrong's victory in 2005. After the announcement of the future termination of team Discovery Channel, Contador announced on October 23, 2007 that he would move to Astana for 2008. Source: wikipedia.org . This article is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. |
