And so, two weeks after being unexpectedly overwhelmed with hope and optimism as four million people in England embraced the Tour de France, it has come to this.

The stink of defeat hangs heavy in the evening air in Pau tonight. Alexandre Vinokourov, winner of two of the last three Tour stages, has tested positive for a blood transfusion on the same day that the doubts over the credibility of Michael Rasmussen appeared to reach critical mass.

The French police have closed off the hotel housing Vinokourov's Astana team and are conducting room to room searches while the media gathers outside. And all of this because of a bicycle race...

Does this latest scandal indicate that cycling's war on doping has been definitively lost, or are the flurry of positive tests, and the furore over Michael Rasmussen's attitude to doping, signs of real concrete change?

“This is a war, a war on doping and in a war there are always casualties,” Tour president Patrice Clerc said tonight. “I am convinced that we will win the battle but we need an ethical revolution.”

There has not been a Tour as mournful and dark as this since 1998, when police raids and rider protests revealed the depth of European cycling's ethical depravity. Ten Tours later, it seems that despite all the brave words, the disappointments, the confessions and yes, the hand-wringing, that little has changed.

This afternoon I watched David Millar, repentant former doper, break down in tears, not for Vinokourov's folly, but for the waste of hope, of all our hopes, that this Tour has become. I listened to the bosses of the Tour de France, Clerc and Christian Prudhomme, talk tough, as they spoke of war and casualties and evoked the history of the century old race.

I listened to Michael Rasmussen, his team manager Theo de Rooy and his lawyer, Harro Kniijf, put their arguments explaining why we shouldn't be concerned over the Dane's attitude to doping controls and that this was all a simple 'administrative error' on the rider's part.

Their words are merely white noise however against an increasingly dark horizon. This Tour is terminally ill and with only five days of racing remaining, will limp, meaninglessly, to Paris. That is because Clerc and Prudhomme said today that the Tour, a pillar of French life for 104 years, must continue.

They are wrong to be so complacent: in its current unsustainable format this race has run out of time. It is an anachronism, a fast-fading snapshot of a disappearing France that is out of step with the expectations of the modern world.

Change or die they say, and it seems that the Tour de France is still not listening.