'Cuz Everybody Knows that Dopin' Ain't Allowed in School: yep, Astana's not only fired its disgraced patron Vinokorouv--disgraced in the sense that he's still a national hero and the Kazakh president and minister of sport are running about proclaiming his innocence like Nixon apologists til the second the helicopter took off--it's suspended ops entirely til the end of August, presumably meaning the boys won't be back to fight over who gets to try to take Vino's Vuelta and leaving poor Andreas Kloden and Kashechkin to twiddle their thumbs and watch soap operas all day long the rest of the season. Fine, Vino's an alleged dirtbag (defense: I'm not that stupid; I sure hope so!) and Kessler's little fall off the wagon didn't help, but am I the only one irked at such team spinelessness? Hell, even without half your powerhouses, you've still got better riders left than most of the French teams, and T-Mobile's got more confessed dope fiends than most small countries, and they're only really talking about bailing out this year! Two dinkmaster cheating scandals and these crybabies are on the floor arms flailing in a full-on toddler tantrum? Grow up you whiners!
Debate Club: while we're at it, whatever you think of Vino's situation, I must give points to Floyd Landis, taking on the universal disgust and guilt-assumption of the cycling world to defend the boy on due-process grounds, which are, to all appearances, by far the strongest and most legitimate grounds Vino has (that, and the same lab monkeys that couldn't keep the labels straight on Floyd's samples were the same idiots UCI is now trumpeting as experts in homologous blood doping.) Oh Floyd. Your lawyers or at least initial advisors may have screwed up from beginning to end--but look what a fine little litigator you've become--right on Landis!
Mayo I Please Be Excused?: So much as Vino's assuring his country that his tarmac skid and resulting healing process wholly accounts for the presence of another person's blood in his body, we-still-love-so-shut-up-I-don't-care-if-I'm-a-hypocrite-Iban Mayo's swearing to his team he "has no idea" why the positive EPO test occurred. Meantime, Pat "Dick" McQuaid helpfully weighed in, triumphantly proclaiming that Iban was considered one of the "suspicious riders" and was "deliberately targeted" by UCI during the Tour. Um, not to keep on beating a dead horse here, Pat "Dick", but didn't you also find the 107 riders in the Op Puerto file you had for a whole month before the Tour start line whose names you conveniently refused to read and deduce when you needed the bodies--particularly some of the high-caliber bodies rumored to be implicated--"suspicious" as well? Of course not, what am I thinking?--nice work there, Sherlock Holmes!
Caddyshack!: finally, in noncycling news, the Italian golf world is reeling from the positive test of Alessandro Pissilli for a banned diuretic/antibaldness drug also coincidentally useful as a doping masking agent. Perhaps it was the sudden American-Werewolf-in-London facial thatch that tipped them off... Anyhoo, okay, Moreni or Basso taking a little something to drag their @#$es over the Alps, one could understand. But to play GOLF?! Let's compare what golfers do (drink gin-and-tonics, hand their heavy golf clubs to their caddies, hit a ball, then meander, unencumbered, slowly over to wherever it fell to make their caddy do all the work all over again) to what cyclists do (climb gigantic mountains in miserable crappy sleetstorms, descend slippery roads at deadly speeds, then do it all over again 6 times that day.) Come on Pissilli--'fess up. Don't you feel like sort of a, well, complete wuss in comparison? Don't even get me started on what they're snarfing at Bingo these days down at the ol' Rotary Club....
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Racejunkie, Italian golfers aren't the only ones. Google Gary Player to see what he claimed they were all on just a few weeks ago - HGH, the lot. Me, I'd need drugs just to bribe me to watch golf.
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