de France race a week later. Then, during a trial for the Casino professional team at the Tour of Saône et Loire, he won three of the four stages. In total, Vinokourov would win ten races for his amateur club, leading Vincent Lavenu to offer him a two-year professional contract to ride for Casino in 1998–1999. 1998–2002 Vinokourov won six races in 1998, his first year as a professional, including the Four Days of Dunkirk, the Tour de l'Oise, and stages in both the Tour of Poland and Circuit des Mines. In early 1999, he won the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana stage race, and three months later took two stages of the Midi Libre. Vinokourov also won the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré, beating the American Jonathan Vaughters along the way. (He lost the yellow jersey to Vaughters after the Mont Ventoux time trial but regained it on the following mountain stage.) In 2000, Vinokourov joined . He won the combination competition in Paris–Nice and finished third in the Critérium International. He came 15th in the Tour de France after working for captain Jan Ullrich. His first win for the German team was stage 18 in the Vuelta a España, in which he caught the two riders in the breakaway and sprinted past Roberto Laiseka and Vicente Garcia Acosta in the last 300 metres. He came second several weeks later in the Olympic Games behind Ullrich and in front of another Telekom teammate, Andreas Klöden. Vinokourov time-trialed to a stage win in the 2001 Deutschland Tour and took the yellow jersey from his Telekom teammate Erik Zabel. The dominance of the Telekom team was evident the following day when Rolf Aldag won and Vinokourov gained a minute and a half over the peloton to ensure victory. He rode the Tour de France that year in support of Ullrich, where he finished 16th overall. Vinokourov won Paris–Nice in 2002, taking the leader's jersey after attacking Laurent Jalabert and Andrei Kivilev on Mont Faron. The penultimate stage to the Col d'Eze, a mountaintop finish, Vinokourov kept his lead and won Paris–Nice the following day. Later in 2002, he won the first mountain stage in the Tour de Suisse but several stages later he fell on a mountain descent and was taken to hospital after the stage. Vino abandoned the race to prepare for the Tour but it was discovered two weeks later