The Sacred and the Profane

In Order to Form a More Perfect Union: well, the constant backstabbing between UCI, the Grand Tours, and (at least some of) the teams seems to be momentarily on hold, as the "sacred union" of Pat "Dick" McQuaid, Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme, and Quick Step's Patrick "It's Only the Spaniards! I Swear!" Lefevere have now agreed that the teams will "temporarily" (now there's a caveat) bar riders "formally" (there's another sweet one) implicated in Op Puerto. To be sure, not *all* the teams are on board, though interestingly there's no word on which ones are dope-slapping the rest of the rider-barring saps and letting their boys hit the start gate--and of course, there's still 6000 pages of docs yet to go through to find the nefarious new 49, not to mention the original 50-odd riders no-one seems to be able to attach a name to, so so far it looks like no-one except the original poor bastard fall guys from last season, most of whom are already unemployed, retired, or booted down to Continental squads utterly unable to render them GC threats, is actually likely to take the hit. Ah, that's the sort of cavernous bull@#$* loophole even a Phonak could love! Stunning suggestion: did any of you overpaid clowns profiting off the wins of the carcasses you pretend to want dope-free, or any of your incredibly deep-pocketed Moral Majority sponsor-hypocrites, think to cough up a few bucks to hire a pack of half-literate nits with a list of active racers by their sides to skim through the docs for the names? (And while we're at it, no one in Spain thought to jot that info down while they compiled all that crap?) Y'know, I'm starting to think, while we're all on this "honesty in sport" kick, why don't McQuaid Lefevere Prudhomme and all these guys just tattoo "We Don't Really Mean It" on your !@#$# and moon the cameras at your next press conference already!