French Kiss, and, Holy Crap! (Spoiler)

Holy Crap! News Update: Bad enough that Rasmussen was booed today like a Yankees fan at a Sox game (see below) as he took the Col d'Aubisque, but now the boy's been rewarded by being yanked from the Tour by Rabobank for "breaking team rules"--that they've known of for about a month? How is it possible that a proud 100-year history of doping cheating lying and scumly backstabbing is only now bringing this beautiful race to its knees?!

Screw the Tour. You got your win now Bruyneel, whether your "Next Lance Armstrong" even fully earned it or no. Meantime, I'm going back to the Giro and the Vuelta. Can't these disorganized @#$%s run a goddamn race?

Be Careful What You Wish For: yes, mere hours after the French teams whined in unison sharp enough to shatter glass and a righteously enraged Eric Boyer of Cofidis railed that "[Vino] told us that we French didn't know how to manage, that we were weaklings. Now we can conclude that he was a real bastard...I demand that the whole Astana team leave cycling!", his own boy Cristian Moreni not only tests poz for exogenous testosterone and gets led off by the narcs like the Dope-of-the-Day on "Cops," but he refuses to even request a B sample test, leaving Cofidis no choice but to flee the course like vampires from sunlight. What was that you said again about bastards and leaving, Eric? Don't worry Cofidis--I'm sure you'll manage to pass this off as just another renegade Pantaniesque cheating dirtbag Italian spoiling the purity of a fine French team, just like with Richard Virenque. Oh, wait...

In Vino Veritas, at Least On One Issue: while we're at it Cofidis, I'm indeed sorry about what happened, but whatever else Vino did or didn't do, he's clearly right--at the moment, by and large, the French *don't* know how to manage, and their riders *are* relative weaklings (we love impending retiree Christophe Moreau excepted). After all, when the hell was the last time any Tour GC contender was trembling in his cleats waiting for FDJ to put the hammer down? The truth hurts?--fix the problem, and stop crying that every other team doping but yours is the reason your kids can't win more'n one race a season! Meantime, as the detectives crawled over Astana's team bus extracting bags of evidence, Vinokorouv took time from relaxing in Monaco to believably promise the press that he's clean, and this whole homologous blood doping hoo-ha was, his doctors have assured him, merely a function of a surfeit of his own blood in his hurt-and-healing thigh. What? Anyway, it's damn lucky he wasn't on course today, as the poor little Chicken, by contrast, was verbally abused by outraged fans presumably still pissed that the French haven't won a Tour in like 80 years, I mean, that a sport they love has been brought into disrepute solely by Michael Rasmussen's failure to update UCI on his schedule when his flights changed. I'm sure the latter's really the root of the hostility!

Movement for Contaminated Cycling: Y'know, entertaining as all this has been in a furtive shameful National Enquirer sort of way--particularly in the wake of the French and Germans forming a get-tough gruppetto to cleanse the sport (being such sterling examples themselves, right T-Mobile?)--I must ask UCI and ASO, who have spent the last year attacking Floyd Landis for daring to speak out in his own defense while they prematurely raked him over the coals to every TV show and magazine on earth short of Sesame Street and "Highlights," where is your outrage over the blabbermouthed protocol-ignoring and above all incompetent LNDD lab monkeys leaking Vinokorouv's results to everyone on earth (just like with Floyd) before the ink's even dry on the latest set of mislabeled samples? Forgive me, I must have forgotten that the rules needn't be enforced against the self-righteous hypocrites who knowingly let a gigantic pool of dopers into this year's Tour in the first place...

A Note to Our Dear Disillusioned Newbies: Sure, this all maybe doesn't look so good, but don't give up on this beautiful sport yet. This is merely the latest incarnation of a reliable ten-year doping-scandal cycle that will surely blow over, just as did, say, the Salem Witch Trials, if with rather a similar body count. Additionally, 99.9999% of people on this earth could snort enough amphetamines to double their body weight and *still* not be strong enough to climb in a lifetime what the lamest undoped boys in the peloton can do in a leisurely off-season spin before breakfast, so let's at least recognize the base level of athleticism we're dealing with here. And come on--do you really think those goon-squad football players you watch all season have necks the size of municipal sewer pipes *naturally*?