The cycling team of Lance Armstrong and of this year’s Tour de France winner is disbanding for lack of a sponsor, the latest evidence that the sport is collapsing under the weight of persistent doping problems.

The team, the Discovery Channel, has been one of the sport’s most successful franchises. Known for the past three years as Discovery Channel and before that as the United States Postal Service squad, the team is owned by Tailwind Sports, a San Francisco-based company partly owned by Armstrong. The only American team at cycling’s top rank, it has been searching for a new sponsor since February, when the parent of the Discovery Channel network decided not to renew its three-year contract.

In a conference call with reporters yesterday, Armstrong and Bill Stapleton, the team’s general manager, said that they had been “90 per cent there” to securing a new sponsorship deal, but that the upheavals in the sport were too much to overcome. “We finally concluded that we couldn’t in good conscience make a recommendation to a company to spend the sort of money that is necessary,” Stapleton said.

Armstrong agreed. “There are too many questions in the sport,” he said, citing, in addition to the doping scandals, the poor relationship that was evident last month between the company that organises the Tour de France and the International Cycling Union, the sport’s governing body, which oversees competition but does not control most of the sport’s top events.

The Discovery/Postal Service team had no shortage of success: Armstrong won a record seven consecutive Tour de France titles, and this year’s winner, Alberto Contador of Spain, and the third-place finisher, Levi Leipheimer of the United States, wore Discovery jerseys.

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