Cadel Evans's Tour de France teammate has been dumped over drugs

AUSTRALIAN cycling star Cadel Evans has been caught up in a drugs scandal before the Tour de France has even started.

His Belgian team, Silence-Lotto, dumped Dutch rider Thomas Dekker after an old sample, re-tested for the banned blood-booster EPO, came up positive.

Dekker was recruited to be one of Evans' key support riders in the mountains, where the Tour is usually won and lost.

Evans, who arrived in Monaco on Wednesday, was not immediately available for comment but team boss Marc Sergeant expressed deep disappointment.

Meanwhile, another top Australian rider, Allan Davis, waits to see whether the French arm of the international sports arbitration court allows Quickstep star Tom Boonen - who has twice tested positive to cocaine - to start the race tomorrow.

If so, Davis will miss out.

Because Boonen's positives, in April last year and May this year, were out of competition he cannot be banned as a drugs cheat, but the Tour organisers want him out because a rider immersed in a drugs culture is clearly bad for the image of the race and the sport.

Dekker's positive relates to a test done in December 2007, and re-examined recently because officials were suspected that he might have been involved in blood manipulation since then.

He was riding for Rabobank then, but the affair has landed in Silence-Lotto's lap now _ and Evans's.

Cycling'scontrolling body, the UCI, has said the Tour, which starts in Monaco on Saturday, will be the most rigorously policed sporting event ever, with 520 tests to be carried out over the three weeks _ or about 26 for each of the 20 stages.

UCI president Pat McQuaid says he is "neither an optimist or a pessismist" that this might finally be the year there are no scandals.

So far, with Dekker out, Spanish star Alejandro Valverde also dropped by his team, Caisse d'Arpargne, because he is uner a ban in Italy, where the Tour visits, and the Boonen case, the event is already on uneasy ground.