Tour route appears tailor-made for Contador

PARIS (Reuters) - Tour de France organizers have designed a route for the 96th edition that should suit 2007 winner Alberto Contador, with the grueling ascent to Mont Ventoux on the penultimate day likely to decide the outcome.

Starting in Monaco on July 4, the 2009 Tour will run over 3,445km from the glamorous principality to Paris and will feature a team time trial for the first time since 2005.

The race against the clock in Montpellier appears tailor-made for Spaniard Contador's Astana team, who could take a stranglehold of the race as early as the fourth stage.

Astana, who were not invited to last year's Tour because of their past doping record, will be welcomed back to the sport's greatest race with or without seven-times winner Lance Armstrong.

The American, coming out of retirement after a three-year break, said he would take part in the Giro d'Italia but was still unsure over his commitment to the Tour de France.

"It is up to him to decide whether he wants to come or not," Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme told reporters.

"His return (on the Tour) would neither be a bad, nor a good thing. Of course he is a special character, but for the Tour he is a rider like others."

WAITING GAME

The intimidating climb up the Mont Ventoux, with a 7.6 gradient over 21.2km should provide Contador a perfect opportunity to break his rivals a day before the race arrives on the Champs-Elysees in the French capital.

Armstrong tried his luck five times up Mont Ventoux in the Dauphine Libere and the Tour but never won at the summit.

"No one will be able to say 'alright, I won the Tour because I have a 2:30-advantage before the penultimate stage'," Prudhomme said. "But I will not say that Contador is going to say that he does not like the route."

However, Astana will have to be cautious in the Pyrenees, where some of the minor contenders could take advantage of a possible game of brinkmanship between the Tour favorites expecting a final battle on the penultimate stage.

"If the big teams tell themselves 'let's wait' in the Pyrenees, you could have other riders building impressive gaps with attacks a long way from the finish," competition director Jean-Francois Pescheux said.

The Tour will snub western and northern France but will pass through Spain and Switzerland, with a brief run through Italy.

It will also be returning to Barcelona for the first time since 1965 with a 17-km ride inside the Catalan city.

"The Tour de France is the greatest race in the world, it is its duty to go abroad," Prudhomme added.

Images of top climber Bernhard Kohl, third overall this year, German Stefan Schumacher who won the two time trials, and stage winners Riccardo Ricco and Leonardo Piepoli were cut from the traditional ceremony-opening film that looks back at the last race.

All four riders tested positive for CERA, the latest generation of erythropoietin (EPO), when their blood samples from the Tour were retroactively analyzed earlier this month.

"It is not an omission, it is not a mistake," said Prudhomme.

"They have nothing to do in the great book of the Tour de France."

(Editing by John O'Brien and Alan Baldwin)