After Contador's drug shame, French TV satire raises Spanish hackles

France's genius for getting up the noses of its neighbours has switched– temporarily, no doubt – away from the Channel and towards the Pyrenees.

A Franco-Spanish legal and diplomatic war of words has broken out over a series of skits mocking celebrated Spanish sportsmen on the French satirical TV puppet show Les Guignols ("The Puppets").

In the wake of a drugs scandal involving the Spanish cyclist Alberto Contador, the skits suggest that Spain's excellent record in recent years in tennis, football and basketball may also be drug-assisted.

Spanish anger – including a threatened legal action and diplomatic protests – was especially roused by an elaborate sketch this week attacking the former world tennis number one, Rafael Nadal.

Les Guignols, shown nightly on Canal Plus, showed a Nadal puppet driving a Range Rover into a petrol station. Instead of filling his car with petrol, the puppet Nadal drinks a bottle of water and then urinates into the tank. He gets back into the car, drives away like a rocket and is stopped for speeding. A slogan flashes on to the screen saying: "Spanish athletes. They do not win by chance."

Drugs allegations against Contador were upheld this week and he was stripped of his 2010 Tour de France title.

French insinuations about Spanish sport are not new. Last November, the former French tennis champion Yannick Noah caused consternation in both countries when he suggested in a newspaper article that Spanish sport had a "magic potion".

Nadal responded to the Guignols sketch with as much good humour as he could muster. "It's the kind of humour that for one day is fine but if it is repeated over and over again it's not right and I think it oversteps the line," he said.

The Spanish tennis federation says it plans to sue Canal Plus. The Spanish government has asked its ambassador in Paris to protest formally to all French media.