BREST (France), July 5: The three-week Tour de France started on Saturday with organisers hoping to win cycling’s most prestigious race by reaching the finish line without any doping scandals.

Drug use and cheating in recent years have depleted the race of many of cycling’s biggest names, giving a new crop of would-be stars a chance to make their names.

Cadel Evans, Alejandro Valverde, Carlos Sastre, Denis Menchov and Damiano Cunego are seen among the most likely contenders to win the three-week race that takes riders over more than 3,500 kilometers (2,175 miles).

“I’d rate myself as a pretty good chance to win,” said Evans, who has progressively improved from an 8th-place finish in 2005, to fourth the next year and runner-up in 2007. He now has the same bodyguard that Lance Armstrong once had. The race begans with a 197.5-kilometer (122.7-mile) flat ride through Brittany. For the first time since 1967, the Tour began without an opening-day prologue.

It also started without a defending champion for the second straight year. The team of 2007 winner Alberto Contador — Astana — wasn’t invited because of doping scandals it faced in the last two years. American Floyd Landis was stripped of his 2006 title after testing positive for synthetic testosterone.

Among the other big names out this year are Kazakhstan’s Alexandre Vinokourov — who was removed from the Tour last year for a positive test for a blood transfusion which led to the ouster of his entire Astana team — and Astana rider American Levi Leipheimer.

The 2006 Giro d’Italia winner and two-time Tour podium finisher Ivan Basso is also absent. The Italian is serving out the last few months of a two-year ban that he received after acknowledging involvement in the Spanish blood-doping probe known as Operation Puerto.

“People are talking about the ones who are absent, but once the race starts, people will stop talking about them and start talking about those who are here,” said Patrice Leclerc, head of Tour organiser ASO.

Valverde, a 28-year-old Spaniard, is looking strong after winning the Spanish championship and the Dauphine Libere race last month. He was backed by a solid Caisse d’Epargne squad.

Race organisers hope fans will be able to focus on the sporting drama instead of doping scandals that overshadowed the 2007 race, which ended in the closest-ever finish: Contador beat Evans by 23 seconds and Leipheimer by 31.—AP