There Has To Be a Morning After

The Hangover: well, the streets of cyberspace are littered with the prone sobbing corpses of Landis fans everywhere, and as for us legal weens, I gotta say I'm even in more in mourning for the disgusting discredited spectacle that the antidoping conviction mill has become. Oh, Iban, it's clear little "procedural irregularities" like having to send your Z sample to freakin' Mars before they can find a backup test that'll finally bust you aren't going to bother the stalwart witchhunters at CAS--get the hell out of Dodge before these powermad playground bullies extort your lunch money with their fists!

How Far the Sprinty Have Fallen: as a hangdog Petacchi apparently loses all hope for a cash-cow ProTour gig, there is perhaps a small consolation prize in the offing: a job with LPR, home of similarly disgraced compatriot Danilo Di Luca and the flawless Paolo Savoldelli. Considering their "domestiques" largely wiped the floor with Il Killer this Giro, Ale-Jet, perhaps you'll end up with a halfway worthy lead-out squad (or internal competition) after all! Meantime, congrats to we love Gilberto "Basso Non E' Uomo" Simoni, who not only took a handsome top-ten placing in the recent mountain bike world championships and welcomed bambino #3 to his family, but has also fruitlessly raised my hopes for one last Giro stage win by signing with Diquigiovanni for one final year, though if he bags the Giro in favor of an entire off-road season, I may be personally forced to schlep to the Giro in '09 anyway just to heckle that twerp Ricco' into making even nastier remarks to the press come May. Forza Gilberto!

Fried Chicken: as Big Bad Antidoping Crusader/UCI Apologist Pat "Dick" McQuaid gets to preen himself over the crap Landis verdict, the boy he let race the 2007 Tour de France for 2 1/2 weeks knowing full well he'd missed a passel of antidoping controls--which apparently cemented, for some incomprehensible reason, our loathesome weasel's well-deserved rep as Mr. Zero Tolerance--has now been suspended for two years by the Monaco cycling fed. In memory of our wily little Rasmussen ('cause at his age, it ain't likely he's coming back to ride with the big boys), I hereby give you a secret video of him taken that nefarious pre-Tour spring when he was snowjobbing the clueless innocent UCI bloodhounds:

'Bye little Chicken--aside from the occasional horror-show time-trial debacle--and perhaps particularly then--it's been a pleasure!

The Tears of a Clown: speaking of Satan-in-a-suitjacket, as the ProTour spitefully decides to schedule new attractions like the Tours of Russia and China at totally coincidentally the exact same time as the Giro and Tour de France (and not to go out on a limb here, but I'm pretty sure the GC contenders ain't gonna ditch the latter for the former anytime soon), Pat "Dick" McQuaid has really taken the deathmatch between the UCI and the Tour organizers to the next level: that's right, he's gonna stay home and watch the Tour on TV. Holy crap, people--imagine the impact this vicious act of sabotage could have on the Tour! Before you know it, Valverde'll bail even before he even crashes out, Cadel'll order his new posse to pack his bags so he can head home, the sponsors'll all withdraw, the podium babes'll have to turn tricks to make a living, the hotels and restaurants won't be able suck millions of Euros out of the crude foreign fans they so despise--the whole entire race, and half the French economy, will collapse! And all because Pat decided to diss the race from his Barcalounger...oh, the humanity!