Freaks O' Nature

As I Said Yesterday, I Don't Give a Rat's @#$ if Iban Mayo is Doping: yet I still feel like I'm absolutely gonna yack, so apparently I'm not only a hypocrite, but a total failure at shedding the presumed-dead remnants of my pathetic naivete, tho' Iban's spankin' new poz test for elevated testosterone at the Giro is already being blamed (not only by his own hacks, even) on his long-established, UCI-approved wildly swinging hormone levels. Which isn't stopping anyone from checking for exogenous testosterone a la' Floyd, but hey--can't a guy have a little male PMS without everyone treating him like a criminal? As for well-known chronic asthmatics Alessandro Petacchi and Leonardo "Thank God It's Not Simoni" Piepoli, newly poz for salbutamol? Luckily for the boys, (1) they've got the same handy Therapeutic Use Exemption as 90% of the rest of the sickly peloton, including virtuous Tour runner-up Oscar Pereiro and (2) thanks to the total lack of WADA limits on what constitutes unacceptable amounts of asthma drugs, you can apparently take enough of this crap to blast a Chunnel through your chest at the base of any given decisive climb without arousing suspicion. So with virtually every damn rider in the ProTour either a genetic freak, a speed-snarfer, or the sort of delicate gasping flower who can still somehow ride 150 miles a day uphill for 3 weeks without bonking, can anyone explain to me why Landis should get nailed for anything even if he were to slap a thousand testosterone patches on his works right in front of Pat "Dick" McQuaid and Dick "Dick" Pound and a thousand assembled press corps? Anyway, free Iban, and bite me, Euskaltel, you still @#$%ed up firing him!

Dauphine'! Libere'! Fraternite'!: indeed, it's downright dandy to see defending Dauphine champ (considered a climber apparently, though I tend to think of him as more of a time-trialist lately) we love Levi Leipheimer doing so well in the GC, right? Wrong!, according to Johan "Basso Who?" Bruyneel, who's said Levi blew himself for the Tour de France last year actually working hard enough to win the Dauphine and, since he's absolutely always been their solo GC conteder for the Tour, with no-one else ever even considered for the post, he's not gonna let that happen again. Right, because Disco coughed up 6 million euros for Ivan Basso to be some low-rent twink daily schlepping bottles of Gatorade up from the ass-end of the peloton at the team car to the real riders on the team! Y'know, it's great to see Levi not getting completely screwed by Discovery for the first time since Prince Charming bailed out of CSC, and even being supported in his desire for the maillot jaune this year, but aren't you insulting his dignity just a little bit more by your over-pious--and ridiculous--revisionist history spouting every two seconds for the cameras? Keep yappin', Johan!