Sunday, July 20, 2008

Smells Like Team Spirit

Well, It Smells, Anyway: having unilaterally totally coincidentally pulled out of the Tour for no reason related to systemic team doping whatsoever while Liquigas and Barloworld--their honor likewise besmirched by individual rogue doping skanks--totally coincidentally stayed in, the boys at Saunier Duval have now taken it on themselves to protest their innocence and fealty to clean sport to the sponsors by an earnest letter decrying the treachery of Ricco and Peipoli and swearing that they had no idea the knaves were doping, primarily because they too were doing so alone in their hotel rooms per discreet team management directive. Wait, did I translate that last part right? Ten bucks says I did whether they spit it out or not!

Man, That Flintstones !@#$ is Stronger Than I Thought: so our disgraced twerp hero, having already bravely sent his sister, fiancee, and mama on the attack, has now come up with an argument of his own: all he was taking was vitamins, and everything he took was prescribed by the Saunier Duval Spanish team doctor (take that team management!) or his personal doctor in Italy. And hey, when you know your entire career hinges on a positive test at the Tour, why *would* you question what they're giving you? Especially when you're so naive a sweet innocent jailbait who relied on Leonardo "Wheezy" Piepoli for additional guidance...

Six Degrees of Cheateration: All right, so we all know the riders are doping, and after Festina T-Mobile and Liberty Seguros, and some other teams I won't name that can currently afford expensive and intimidating legal counsel, you'd have to be a raging idiot to think the teams aren't helping the riders doping. Now, though, from our journalist friends at the BBC and particularly our dearly departed (from the peloton) bitter friend Jorg Jaksche, comes the latest in intrigue: the team doctors are working with the labs to get the latest info on how to beat the tests. Okay, I'm a soulless bastard condemned to hell, but so help me, if it turns out Dick "Dick" Pound or Pat "Dick" McQuaid were ever aware of such hijinks and failed to act, I'll drop down on my knees and absolutely build a giant gilded temple to the karma gods. Bestill my beating heart!

Question o' the Day: meantime, an inquisitive local has recently asked, "Racejunkie, if the riders thought UCI was really serious about the biological passport, wouldn't they have all jacked up their baselines *before* their values were established at the start of the season?" Why yes, yes they would. But as you know, grasshopper, such conniving is purely the province of the banned and retired ones, and the "new peloton" is entirely clean. Next!

Congrats o' the Week: to early-season sad-sack we love Paolo Bettini, snagging another win and back on form for the Olympics, as Tyler "I Ate My Twin" Hamilton--somehow left off the US roster--crushes the field at the Tour of Qinghai. Welcome back Tyler--you gonna start sobbing for the cameras and snag yourself one last ProTour contract next season before you call it quits?

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin' (Loser Prediction of the Day): finally, as we love big brother Schleck barely gets to enjoy the maillot jaune before the press starts hocking him about how he'll feel when he inevitably loses it in the time trial, then turns to Carlos Sastre to squash salacious rumors about internecine CSC warfare, and even Cadel manages to get in a dig at the team amidst all the humble pie that for all their attacks they really didn't get that much time on him, Alejandro Valverde has declared himself back in GC contention, which leads to me to think two things: he's going for the win tomorrow, and if he knows what's good for him when the narcs inevitably come a-knockin', he better not perform *too* well, catch my drift "Piti"?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

question of the week: if tyler hamilton ate his twin does that make him a cannibal? (er you can laugh now)