Tour de France director will not award Lance Armstrong’s titles

Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme said Friday that the Tour de France will have no official winner for races between 1999 and 2005 if Lance Armstrong is stripped of his titles.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Prudhomme said that the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s investigation of Armstrong raises doubts about “a system and an era.”

"We cannot be indifferent to what USADA has unmasked this week, it's a damning picture that's been drawn," Prudhomme said, according to The Telegraph. "What we want is that there is no winner."

This is a different approach to how tour officials dealt with Tour de France titles in the past. After Alberto Contador was stripped of his 2010 title for doping, the award was given to Andy Schleck. The 2006 title was given to Oscar Pereiro after it was discovered that winner Floyd Landis doped.

According to the AP, tour officials are still waiting on the International Cycling Union’s decision on whether to go along with the USADA’s decision to ban Armstrong from cycling and strip him of his racing titles.

If they do, the time period will indeed be what Prudhomme called a “lost decade.”