I only know one person who is going to be as interested in this news as I am, and he's on his way to work right now. So because I need to get the "Holy s---!" out of my system:
Ullrich, Sevilla and Pevenage suspended
More riders suspended: Basso and Mancebo out
For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, this means that the two riders favored to win the Tour de France are out.
(For those who only give half a damn about bike racing and only then if it's an American doing the winning, this is actually good news for Floyd Landis.)
But overall, it's bad news, the doping. I don't pretend to understand the legal workings of UCI, but it looks like the proof that the suspended players doped is that their names were on written records found in the offices of a Spanish doctor arrested in May. They also found a ton of blood, and it seems to me that testing the blood to see who it belonged to would be more conclusive than names on a list.
On the other hand, I'm not jumping up and down saying "They was framed!" I've said before, finding out that any pro cyclist doped...any one of them...does not surprise me any more.
Interestingly, I first got hooked on cycling in 1998, when I stumbled across the live daily Tour coverage on the Internet. The thing that really got my attention was the sit-down strike on Stage 17, when the riders stopped riding to protest to middle-of-the-night drug raids. Now that I've come to love the sport, I hate to see the doping taking the spotlight again this year.
Posted by Nic at June 30, 2006 06:21 AM | TrackBack