The Bromance Is Officially Over, Baby!--and, Win Free Stuff Part Trois!

Of Course, It Was a Sick !@#$ing Train Wreck to Begin With: yes, to the surprise of none, Johan Bruyneel has announced that, given those whiny Kazakhs' ridiculous insistence that they get to have a say in who's hired for a squad they're entirely paying for, particularly their nonnegotiable "take it or leave it" with regard to their psycho doper supremo Alexander Vinokorouv, he's gonna leave Astana at the end of the season to put together a incredibly irritating media-whore of a team with Lance Armstrong. Right, 'cause the same egregious hypocrite who jumped like an amphetamine-stuffed monkey to hire Ivan Basso the second he was implicated in a huge blood-doping scandal's obviously got the moral high ground when it comes to calling another druggie on the carpet! Alberto Contador, meanwhile, was clearly surprised by the news, not least because it was delivered to him by the already-up-to-date press corps. Way to show respect to your team leader, Johan and Lance you wanks--mightn't you have allowed the boy to retain more of his dignity if you'd simply, say, sucker-punched him smack in the manly bits for the cameras instead?

The Great Escape: Speaking of Astana (what's left of it anyway), I see the authorities searched the Astana team car for 3 hours and reportedly found--"nothing." Probably because it was all back at the hotel. Ba-dum-bum!

Eat It, Fedrigo!: Yes, the mountain kings at Euskaltel-Euskadi, already in every breakaway this Tour, have scored one at last: Woo-hoo Mikel Astarloza, aupa the fabulous Euskaltel!

I Love That Dirty Water: in non-Tour news, 2008 Tour cheat-scum Bernhard Kohl's ex-manager has now accused Kohl of giving Dynepo and other doping products to other boys at Gerolsteiner in 2007 and 2008, and he knows this because, of course, "he got it from me." Well, Kohl's retired, and no other rider is going to hire this degenerate loud-mouthed weasel to work for him--anyone else smell a lucrative book deal before the gravy train is gone for good? Bernie's attorney, meantime, rushed to say the boy only *referred* another Gerolsteiner rider to the manager for drugs--and gee, does that clarification make Kohl look a lot better--but seems to be a bit hamstrung by the fact that his client did, in fact, admit such nefarious deeds in an interview. Refer, procure, what's the dif--must we focus on such unpleasant trivialities?

Get Well Jens!: finally, as the news after eager-beaver-attacker-of-the-gods Jens Voigt's monstrous crashmercifully starts to look up, let's remind ourselves of just a tiny fraction, on happier days, of what makes us love him so much in the first place: