The sports court CAS has finally refused world champion Peter Sagan to return to the Tour de France. The German team Bora-hansgrohe failed with an urgent application to the International Court of Arbitration for Sport to lift the Slovak's exclusion from the Tour of France.
Reason for application: The team accused the race stewards of a rule error by failing to hear Sagan after the Stage 4 finale. However, the CAS did not follow the arguments of the team and rejected the appeal.
The attempt to sue Sagan back into the race seemed unlikely. Nevertheless, team spokesman Ralph Scherzer said after the CAS decision: "When we have the reason, we will check whether we can intervene further." Bora-hansgrohe had requested the suspension of Sagan's exclusion. After that, the 27-year-old should "immediately get back into running racing and fight with the Bora-hansgrohe team for a successful design of the Tour de France 2017," it said in a team statement.
His team, represented by lawyers Rainer Cherkeh from Hanover and Maurice Courvoisier from Basel, argued that the jury had denied Sagan "every opportunity to present his point of view". And this despite the fact that the regulations of the world association UCI "clearly stipulate that the athlete concerned must be heard before a disciplinary decision is made".
“We are aware that if Sagan comes back into the race after the fact it would get pretty messy. But we had no other way to protect our driver and make it clear that he was not to blame for the incident," said team spokesman Scherzer. The team hoped that the CAS would decide before the 5th stage on Wednesday.