A place to record the things that my brain comes up with.

20 September 2007

Well, so much for that.

Hand another victory to The Man: Floyd Landis was found guilty today and got a 2-year ban.

Will he appeal to the CAS? Stay tuned.

Well hello there.

I figure that after two months, it's about time to post something on the ol' blog again. Partially, this is to see if anyone still checks it any more - which, after Carrie's comment on my last post, I don't think they are.

I'm also trying, a little bit, to get Clark's Grammar Nazi to come over here and reveal his or her identity. I'm not going to do that by deliberately making grammatical errors, but I figure that my complex sentence structure leaves plenty of opportunity for inadvertent mistakes. At least this thing has spell check, right?

I don't really have a good excuse for why I haven't blogged in a while, though blaming it on the exasperating Tour de France seems as good a reason as any. That thing sure was a mess, wasn't it? The doping rumors surrounding the winner, Alberto Contador of Discovery Channel, have died down, but the whole doping circus continues unabated. Jan Ullrich is getting swept back into everything again despite having retired, and the wolves are out for him because under the statute of limitations they can still revoke his wins. Bjarne Riis, now sport director of CSC, admitted to doping during his Tour win but did it enough years ago that they can't actually do anything to him now.

We are still waiting to hear who is the official winner of the 2006 Tour de France. The Landis affair seems to be a never ending thing. The whole "trial" happened in May and the verdict should be out this week. It will be interesting to see what the result turns out to be. No rider who has gone before the panel has ever been found innocent. I think, however, that Floyd and his attorneys made some very compelling points about the accuracy and competency of the lab in question - enough to introduce "reasonable doubt" as to the veracity of Floyd's test results.

The whole Greg Lemond issue I am not going to touch, even with a ten-foot pole.

It's all a mess, really. It's even so bad that sponsors who have been in the sport for years are starting to fall away. T-Mobile ultimately decided to stick with it, as has Astana (currently the dirtiest team, in my opinion), but the big shock this summer is that Discovery Channel/Tailwind Sports is throwing in the towel. Current champions of the Tour, winners of the Tour 8 times in the last 9 years (several as US Postal Service), champions of Tour of Georgia and Tour of California, winners of the Vuelta and Giro, holders of the US National Champion (George Hincapie) . . . gone. This is the team co-owned by Lance Armstrong.

If Lance Armstrong is giving up on professional cycling, something is wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong. And I don't know what it is. I don't know how to fix it. But I'm troubled. How far back do we have to go to find a Tour winner without an asterisk next to his name? How far down the placement list do we need to go to find the "clean" winner? Why don't UCI and WADA get along? Why can't French labs seem to do anything cleanly? Why can't the UCI and ASO get along? Why am I investing so much energy on this when football season has already started?

These are the mysteries for the ages.


p.s. I started a sentence with "and." Sue me.