Little Pink Corvettes...

...Babies, You're Much Too Fast (Yes, You Are!): as Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes gleefully concedes himself to be the Master of All Peloton Doping at a conference, then bizarrely professes utter shock at the heretofore unheard-of news that Ivan Basso's already spent nearly a year on suspension for using Fuentes to "try" to do it, Jan Ullrich manages to dodge yet another bullet about his endless payments to said amnesiac bike-crack dealer when his latest newsmagazine dope-slap is upstaged by the even sexier allegations that five, yes five, T-Mobile riders drove up to the Freiburg University clinic for immediate blood boosts after the 2006 Tour de France prologue, when til now even whistleblowing busted dope skank Patrik Sinkewitz has only copped to going there solo. Now, correct me if I'm wrong here, but during the Tour de France, the teams would seem to have reason to be marginally curious about where half their riders are for an entire evening, given that they're paying 'em millions of euros a season not to !@#$ the team over, particularly when Ullrich's just been banned sacked and humiliated and the team's been sent skittering for cover from the press like rats from exterminators, and one would think that the team managers might've, well, noticed that all their boys' freakin' hotel rooms were empty when one's trainer might reasonably be expecting one to be resting up for the next day's fairly tiring race. UCI, any chance *now* you might question management's endlessly ridiculous assertion that the team doctors were acting entirely on their own with individual rogue cheating scumbag riders and the teams as always are utterly innocent when it comes to such outrageously slanderous claims of systemic doping?--Nope, didn't think so!

What the Hell, Bjarne?: meantime, over in actual race news, Lampre's manager has announced that baby Giro d'Italia champ Damiano Cunego might not even ride the beautiful Giro in favor of hopefully maybe a top-five spot at the Tour de France (and, if I were Lampre and the tifosi comments over at gazzetta dello sport are any fair indicator, I'd stay the hell away from a sizeable number of fans from Cunego's home stomping grounds who seem more than irked at the news that some stupid French race has hijacked him), and, worse, Bjarne Riis likewise sez that we love Carlos Sastre, graced this coming year with a Vuelta a Espana perfectly tailored to his climbing style and utterly stripped of its results-crushing time-trialling, likely isn't going to be allowed to race the thing at all, again so he can concentrate his efforts on a Tour de France whose craptastic endless races against the clock are hell-bent on keeping him off the podium even after prepping for this likely exercise in futility by bashing his legs to bits at the Giro. Can someone explain to me exactly why these two most beautiful races get completely hosed every single freakin' year to the benefit of a monstrously overrated Grand Tour whose results have either been clearly foreordained or mortifyingly disastrous for the last straight decade? Free Sastre, and the Vuelta, dammit!