T-Mobile and German TV agree to end contract

T-Mobile will sponsor a team in the Tour de France this summer but it will no longer sponsor the race itself as an advertiser on German TV. The German channels ARD and ZDF announced that they have agreed to end the sponsoring contract.

The company announced last week that it planned to pull its sponsorship. The message "The Tour de France is brought to you by T-Mobile," was to have appeared before each show.

"We have full understanding for the wish to cancel the sponsoring contract and were glad to do it," said Claudia Scheibel of ARD's Sales & Service division, according to the dpa. Deutsche Telekom, the mother company of T-Mobile, will donate the money that would have been used for the advertising to "the fight against doping," according to company spokesman Christian Frommert. "We want to make this point."