Ricco EPO positive

Ricco's Saunier Duval team immediately announced their withdrawal from this year's race and their riders, who had gathered at the stage 12 start line at Lavelanet, left the peloton in a surreal display.

"This is a decision of the team and is not dictated by (Tour organisers) ASO," Saunier Duval sports director Matxin Fernandez said.

"We suspend the activities of the team until we understand what has happened," Fernandez added.

The brash Italian climber, who won stages six and nine in summit finishes, tested positive for the illegal drug during the fourth stage individual time trial in Cholet, the French anti-doping agency announced.

Ricco, who was ninth in the general classification at two minutes and 29 seconds behind yellow jersey Cadel Evans, was arrested by French police before the start of Thursday's stage.

"It shows that the controls are really efficient and that it is harder to get away with it," Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme said.

The 24-year-old Ricco is the third rider to test positive for EPO (erythropoietin) at this year's event after Spaniards Manuel Beltran and Moises Duenas Nevado.

"It's for the same product as the other two," AFLD president Pierre Bordry told Reuters.

But Ricco is by far the biggest name of the three, having finished second in this year's Tour of Italy and dominated the mountain stages through the first week of the Grande Boucle.

The rider, nicknamed the Cobra, had already cockily predicted he would claim victory on the stage six uphill finish at Super-Besse, a promise he delivered upon, as well as guaranteeing a stage victory in next week's fabled L'Alpe-D'Huez stage.

Ricco was leading both the mountains classification and the young rider's standings.

"It's completely shocking," International Cycling Union president Pat McQuaid said.

"It would strike me now that someone would have advised those guys to take some form of EPO thought to be undetectable because we haven't caught guys in this fashion for a long time."

The latest doping scandal is a new black eye for the biggest race in the sport, which had hoped to recover from two successive years of outrages involving performance enhancing drugs.

In 2006 Tour winner Floyd Landis was stripped of his yellow jersey after testing positive for heightened levels of testosterone.

Last year's race was also marred by a drugs scandal when then overall leader Michael Rasmussen was kicked out of the Tour for failing to inform his Rabobank team of his whereabouts for out-of-competition tests and overall favourite Alexandre Vinokourov tested positive for blood doping.

Barloworld team manager Claudio Corti said that the squad was going to sack Duenas Nevado, whose positive test was announced one day prior to Ricco's as bags of blood and syringes were discovered in the Spaniard's suitcases.