The Tour de France is dead. Vive le Tour. Such was the mood in France yesterday after police arrested the latest star in the world's premier bicycle race to test positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

Call it denial, cynicism or naivety, but for its home nation the latest disgrace in a scandal-plagued pastime does little to dim the magic of a Gallic rite that goes beyond sport. For die-hards things are not much different from the heroic days when riders stoked up openly on cigarettes and alcohol before hill climbs.

“The tour changes but it remains a great popular festival with fervour and fraternity which always moves me,” said Michel Debré, a veteran, vélophile Gaullist who heads the Constitutional Council, the highest state body in France.

The disgrace this week of Riccardo “the Cobra” Ricco as the tour wound along the Mediterranean coast was the third elimination for suspected dopage this year in a race that has been sapped for a decade by drug revelations. Two Spanish riders were ejected in the past week after failing tests.

France toughened the penalties this year, meaning that Ricco, 24, who had been deemed a possible winner, faces up to two years in jail if convicted of using EPO, or erythropoietin. Traces of a supposedly undetectable new EPO variant were said to have been found in his urine.

For some fans the fall of the Italian, who scored two explosive hill-climb wins, was the final straw. The 2008 tour has failed to keep its promise to kick the habit, they say, and it is now time to write off the once-glorious rite of endurance and suffering that began in 1903. “As a sport, cycling is dead,” Libération newspaper said yesterday. “As a spectacle, it is still running - like a chicken with its head cut off.”

Yet for all the disappointment, the lure of le Tour burns on. The stain of suspicion, disqualification of the 2006 winner and the withdrawal of whole teams has turned off foreign audiences. But in its home country the Tour is attracting bigger crowds and higher television audiences than ever.

Millions line the route to watch their heroes zip by, followed by the caravan of 200 garish, horn-honking vehicles. Up to five million people a day are watching the live coverage on France 2 television, through to the politically incorrect podium ceremony in which the day's winner is kissed by pretty young hostesses.

The drug-taking is a shame, admirers say, but it should not be allowed to harm a three-week communion in which France celebrates its landscape, history and even its soul with a gruelling, drawn-out gladiatorial contest.

“It's the old Roman rule of bread and circuses,” Bernard Chambaz, an historian and cycling expert, said. “It is a great free show. The mountains and villages are beautiful. There are still beautiful efforts by the riders and beautiful breakouts from the pack,” he told The Times. “It's a holiday ritual with picnics. In the collective unconscious the Tour is still in the beautiful summer of 1936.”

Perhaps they are in denial but many in France and beyond see the scandal of 2008 more as an aftershock, an inevitable recurrence as the sport purges its dark side. The great cycling contest is unfairly treated when many other athletes use drugs, it is said. This view was widely expressed yesterday. “Do not judge. Try to understand,” Christian Laborde wrote in Le Figaro. “The champions are not paragons of virtue, just heroes. And the hero is not a god, just a demigod.”

That view was echoed by organisers and surviving riders. “We said we wanted to fight doping, but it will take time,” said Patrice Clerc, president of Amaury Sport, which manages the Tour. “The majority of the riders are clean and the cheaters are getting caught and kicked out of the race.”