Despite isolated doping allegations, which hit even race leader Michael Rasmussen, the Tour de France was buoyed by signs that riders might be cleaning up their acts

	Young Contador (white jersey) caught Rasmussen and a feathered fan en route to his stage 14 win. Christophe Ena/AP

The leaders of the Tour de France were playing chicken in the final climb of stage 14 on Sunday when they were briefly overtaken by ... a chicken. To the Borat impersonator in a lime singlet who ran alongside the cyclists during stage 8, waving the flag of Kazakhstan, and the guy who adorned his bike with gigantic racks of deer antlers in stage 10, add the fellow in the yellow-feathered costume to the list of amusing spectators at this, the most unpredictable Tour in memory.

In the last kilometer of a cruel Pyrenean beast called the Plateau-de-Beille, front-runners Michael Rasmussen of Rabobank and Alberto Contador of Discovery Channel had a brief conversation. Neither, it seemed, wanted to ride in front. Contador gestured toward Rasmussen, as if to say, It's your turn to take a pull.

Rasmussen, 33, the skin-headed, stick-thin Dane and overall leader of the Tour, relented, throwing down a punishing acceleration that failed to shake Contador. Fifty meters from the finish Contador, a dashing, 24-year-old Spaniard, dropped into a big gear, pulled around the man in the yellow jersey and dropped him, too. Before crossing the line, Contador had enough of a cushion to sit up, zip his white jersey and begin his celebration -- a dash of insouciance that evoked the panache of a certain Texan who preceded him at Discovery.

Indeed, the tactics employed in stage 14 by team director Johan Bruyneel sprang from the same playbook that worked so well for Lance Armstrong, who won the last of his seven straight Tours for Discovery. There was the aging warhorse, 34-year-old American George Hincapie, turning the screws on the peloton in the valley preceding the last climb. There was Ukraine's Yaroslav Popovych, setting a savage pace at the front for almost the entire first half of the Plateau-de-Beille, his Herculean effort shedding all of Rasmussen's Rabobank teammates. With the yellow jersey isolated, Discovery's Levi Leipheimer set up Contador's attack with a decoy surge of his own. The instant Leipheimer was reeled in by the remaining elite group, Contador shot from the pack as if from a pneumatic tube. His was Discovery's first stage win of the Tour.

It delighted the thousands of Spaniards who'd made their way up the mountain. They painted his name all over the road to the summit and roared when he appeared from behind the giant, inflatable clamshell to receive the winner's bouquet and busses from the podium girls. In two days Contador had leaped from fifth place to second overall and become a serious threat to relieve Rasmussen of le maillot jaune . (Sitting fourth at week's end, a serious podium threat in his own right, was Leipheimer, the top American rider and the man who, until Sunday, had been known as his team's leader.)