Editor’s Note: After team leader Alexander Vinokourov tested positive for homologous blood doping during last year’s Tour de France, the entire Astana team left the race under a cloud. Vinokourov’s top lieutenant Andrey Kashechkin tried to relax by spending time with his family in Turkey. His time out of the limelight, however, was short-lived as anti-doping testers knocked on his hotel room door and asked for a sample. That knock began a year-long struggle for the Kazakh rider, which has yet to be resolved.

Kashechkin recently spoke with VeloNews editorial director John Wilcockson about that night in Turkey and the scandal that followed. This is part one of Wilcockson's special report. The second half of this report will appears on VeloNews.com on Friday, July 4.

A year ago, everything in the world of Andrey Kashechkin looked brilliant. The blond Kazakh, then 27, and Nadja, his picture-perfect wife, were expecting their first child at their home overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in Monaco. He was racing at a high level and pulling in a high salary with one of the best cycling teams in the world, the Kazakh-sponsored Astana squad. And he was about to help his team leader Alexander Vinokourov win the 94th Tour de France. At least, that was the plan.

It didn’t seem like a crazy expectation because in September 2006 Kashechkin had raced impressively at the Vuelta a España, winning a stage and finishing third overall, while helping Vinokourov take the overall title. Kashechkin’s great form continued in the spring of 2007, when he finished third in both the Tour de Romandie and Tour of Switzerland. It looked like he and his Kazakh colleagues were going to have a memorable Tour.

However, the optimistic atmosphere began to sour for the Astana boys a week before the Tour’s start in London. The French media accused them of being the “men in black” — top riders said by the UCI to be avoiding out-of-competition doping controls. The situation worsened when Vinokourov told L’Équipe that he was using the notorious Italian sports doctor Michele Ferrari as his trainer.

At a confrontational pre-race press conference in London, Vinokourov said in his normal, soft monotone, “Ferrari has not done anything illegal. He is my trainer, not my doctor. Why do you think ‘trainer’ means doping? I have … nothing to reproach myself for.”

The Astana general manager Marc Biver, the former Tour of Switzerland race organizer, tried to defend his men.

“We’ve suffered through a media persecution of the team,” he said. “There’s been no respect for our team, no respect for our riders.”

The acrimony slid below the surface in the first week of the Tour, and then Vinokourov was transformed into the reluctant hero after he suffered bad cuts and bruising in a high-speed crash near the end of stage 5. Vino passively soldiered on, while Kashechkin did his best to help his suffering leader when he couldn’t stay with the other pre-race favorites on the big climbs in the Alps. In riding toward defeat with bandaged knees and elbows, Vinokourov was cheered by the sympathetic fans.

Kashechkin was having a great Tour until the Vinokourov result pulled the plug.

Photo: AFP (file photo)

Vino looked to be on the comeback when he was fastest at the stage 13 time trial in Albi. But he blew up the very next day in the Pyrenees, dropping completely out of the GC picture, before gaining a consolation stage win the day after. Then, on the rest day at Pau, Vino’s world exploded with the announcement that a blood test taken after the Albi TT showed up positive for homologous blood doping.

Biver pulled the Astana team from the Tour, and Kashechkin was left wondering whether he could have improved on the eighth place he held in the overall standings. A week later, Kashechkin, his wife and their new baby — born on the day of the London prologue — were on vacation at a hotel in the Mediterranean resort of Belek, Turkey.

Their life was about to change.

At the end of a baking hot day on August 1, with temperatures in the triple digits, Kashechkin was relaxing in his Turkish resort hotel room. “I was having a party with my friends because my son had been born while I was riding the Tour de France. I took all the family to meet my friends in Turkey to celebrate,” Kashechkin told VeloNews in a recent phone interview from Kazakhstan. “Well, just before 10:45 that night, the hotel’s concierge called to say. ‘There are two people coming up to your room.’

“I said okay, but I wasn’t paying much attention; I thought they were just more friends…. There were already six of us, and the children, in the room. But these two people were in fact people I knew very well from the [anti-doping] controls at some races in Belgium. So they came in and asked, ‘Can you do a control?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s okay, but can you put it off until, say, tomorrow? Right now, we’re here to have a party.’

“They said, ‘No, no, because we have to leave tomorrow morning.’ So I said, ‘Good, but what’s going on? It’s late, and it’s normal that we’re having a party.’ The friends who were next to me were all surprised, And it’s a fact that when people arrive like that it’s not good for your image, right?

“So, I stopped talking. It’s the same for every athlete. And I gave them my arm and they pricked me to take the blood. But what upset me the most was when I asked, ‘Do you have a thermal bag? A frigo?’ Because right then it was very, very hot, maybe 45 degrees [113 degrees F]. Even though it was nighttime it was still very hot. So I asked them if they had a bag, and they said, ‘It’s not necessary, that’s not your problem. We’ll take care of that later.’

“So I said, ‘Okay.’ If that’s how it is, what can you do? If I’d said no, I can’t do it today, I’ll do it tomorrow, right away they would have said I was positive, like they did with [Michael] Rasmussen. In fact, you don’t have a choice. So I did the test, but I didn’t ask them how they were going to transport [the blood]; because they left my room without the blood refrigerated — so we can’t know the [chain of custody] — and so it’s difficult to know what happened to it before the analysis.”

Besides Kashechkin’s concern that the blood samples were not transported correctly (which the UCI denies), he later alleged that when his blood was collected shortly before 11 p.m. that night the inspectors contravened the permitted sample-collection time limit of between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.