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2017 Tour de France Extra: CAS rejects Peter Sagan’s appeal for disqualification

  • Ron 

The Court of Abritration for Sport released their decision regarding Peter Sagan’s dismissal from the 2017 Tour de France today.

If you’ve been living in a hole, Sagan was ejected from the race after race commissionaires decided that Sagan threw an elbow in the Stage 4 finish line sprint on Tuesday, ending the race for Mark Cavendish and causing a massive crash that took down a number of other riders.

The peanut gallery has come out strongly against Sagan’s disqualification, saying that Cavendish tried to fit into a space that wasn’t there, and even claiming that commissioners wanted Sagan out to allow Frenchman Arnaud Demare pull on the green sprinter’s jersey.

Rejecting the Cavendish and nationalism theories, our man Scott Kingsley puts the blame on the actions of others earlier in the sprint and maintains that if Sagan and Cavendish hadn’t touched, commissioners might have been taking a closer look at the actions of Alexandre Kristoff and Arnaud Dumare a few hundred meters before the Sagan/Cavendish dust-up.

Be that as it may, Sagan’s BORA-hansgrohe team appealed to the CAS for reinstatement to the race. CAS has rejected the request and Sagan is still out of the race:

The Court of Arbitration of Sport (CAS) issued a decision rejecting an urgent request for provisional measures filed by the Slovak cyclist Peter Sagan and the Denk Pro Cycling team in the afternoon of 5 July 2017.

The rider and team appealed the exclusion of the rider by the UCI Commissaires Panel on 4 July 2017 following an incident during the sprint phase at the end of the 4th stage of the 2017 Tour de France (Mondorf-les-Bains to Vittel).

Accordingly, Peter Sagan remains disqualified from the 2017 Tour de France.

The decision is unfortunate, but with Sagan having already missed a day of the race, the logistics of him re-entering the competition would have been difficult. At bare minimum, other riders would be complaining that he had fresher legs from missing a day. Also, how would the TdF organization count points and time for a rider that missed a stage?

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