Cavendish wins 5th stage

AL KHOR, Qatar: British rider Mark Cavendish won the fifth stage of the Tour of Qatar on Thursday while Tom Boonen closed in on the overall victory by protecting his lead on the penultimate day.

Cavendish secured his second stage win in three days by taking a mass sprint at the end of a 160-kilometer ride from a camel race track in the east of the country to Al Khor in the north. The Team Sky rider arrived in Doha with a bout of flu but still beat Liquigas-cannondale duo Daniel Oss and Peter Sagan to the finish line.

Boonen retained a 31-second lead over Tyler Farrar going into Friday’s final stage. Spanish rider Juan Antonio Flecha is third, while Cavendish moved up to seventh.

Ullrich guilty

In Berlin, retired former Tour de France winner Jan Ullrich has been found guilty of doping in relation to a blood-doping scandal that engulfed his sport six years ago and has been banned for two years, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) said on Thursday.

The ruling comes three days after CAS banned another former Tour winner, Spaniard Alberto Contador, for doping.

The Operation Puerto scandal broke in 2006, when Spanish police launched raids that uncovered more than 200 code-named blood bags, some of which were linked to cyclists.

Ullrich, who retired in 2007 after also winning an Olympic gold and silver medal at the Sydney 2000 Games, became the first German to win the Tour de France in 1997.

The rider, a huge sports name in his home country during his prime, also finished second in the world’s greatest race on five occasions, three times behind seventimes champion Lance Armstrong.

With his name linked to Operation Puerto, Ullrich was barred from starting the Tour de France in 2006 and was then fired by his T-mobile team although he repeatedly denied he had links with Eufemiano Fuentes, the doctor at the heart of the investigation.