Fun 'n' Backstabbing With Team Sky; Boonen Plans His Comeback; and, Honk (Well, Sign) If You Love Blood Bags!

Kolb Comfort: well,that was a heck of a sprint today at a soaking-wet Giro, as a huge crash on wet paint stripes decimated the field in the final gallop and an absolutely gutted John Degenkolb took it home. Miraculously, the GC contenders all made it in without hardly a dent, particularly good for dear Samu' since our Euskaltel hero's already lost crashed-whammed Pablo Urtasun. Here, the carnage: And, just how tired our poor winner was: . Sure, you can say it was grit, determination, and luck--me, I say it was the porn-stache!

Kalifornication: no, he won't be at the Tour of Cali to make his competitors quake in their bike shoes nor to dazzle the fans, but Tom "Suck Season" Boonen will finally be back at the relatively wee Tour de Picardie. Cav, through the lousiest of circumstances, it looks like you've bought yourself a grade-A lead-out for July--just let him off the least once in a while, willya!

Endless Love: and, the love-in just continues over at Team Sky, with Richie Porte signing on for another 2 years with his own Grand Tour ambitions just as Wiggo thought he was gonna finally be rid of the intra-team competition as soon as Froomey bails for unquestioned supremacy elsewhere, and Brad's Colombian domestiques denying reports that they went all Froome on Wiggo as soon as he started dropping his helpless butt off the back of the pack yesterday. Don't worry, Brad--once you wipe those boys out in the time trial, all they can hope to do is bushwhack you for a coupla stage wins anyway!

The Hell With "Autographs": yes, sign here to save the Operacion Puerto blood-bags before the Spanish courts have 'em destroyed! The tally: a truly impressive 20 for Francisco Mancebo; a neat 10 apiece for Jan Ullrich and attempted-but-never-ever-successful-doper Ivan Basso, and, well, I'm guessing *something* for pretty much the entirety of Liberty Seguros. Emerging tranquillo: ol' Contador play-date LL Cool Sanchez, apparently suspended from RaboBlanc of all moralizing bull!@#$ers over a single stoked-up (alleged!) bag-in-storage but now cleared to race the Tour of Belgium thanks to a little threat o' arbitration. Oh for !@#$'s sake, the clowns *you* coddled for years *after* Puerto decimated the peloton, and you're ticked at some then-powerless jailbait nobody back in the day? Allez Luis Leon--hell, you're not half so bad as some of the remaining weasels-on-wheels left today!

So who'll have the maglia rosa at the end of Saturday's stage? Enter here to prove your dexterhood and win!

It's Operacion Bull!@#$! LL Cool Sanchez Just Busted! And, Yer Race News Roundup

If You're Gonna Do It, Do It Right (Do It With Me): look, we all know the Spanish have long held a, well, business-like view of doping. Which is why it seems particularly ridiculous to have a whole !@#damn tribunal just to establish that--prior to the enactment of actual *anti*-doping legislation in the wake of the Operacion Puerto scandal--they basically did it really well. I mean, you've got Dr. Eufemiano "Gyno to the Male Stars" Fuentes swearing he drugged his clients to the highest standards of cleanliness, sniffing he wouldn't even treat lying rat-witness Jesus Manzano because he did coke for fun which unlike cheating honest athletes out of race wins by stuffing riders full of banned drugs is morally wrong, offering to name names and being shut up by the judge, you've got ONCE/Liberty Seguros mastermind Manolo Saiz saying sure he gave his riders express permission to see Fuentes and happened to be carrying 60,000 euro to pay him at a cafe but it's not like he thought the boys'd actually take him up on it, and the worst-case scenario here is "Naughty Fuentes, you oughta have doped 'em better?" No, we don't want any rider pulling a Riccardo Ricco' and damn near killing themselves with their own stupidity, and yes, it's important that the full story of cycling's shameful history comes out--but now that doping's actually legally *bad* in Spain, why not focus on those more recent scenarios instead? Oh, wait....

Oh, Give It *Up*, Rabobank!: meantime, I wholly believe that Rabobank--which was surely, like UCI, already aware that near-Tour de France winner Michael Rasmussen had missed pre-Tour doping controls before righteously yankin' him outta the race only when everybody else found about it--was shocked to find out that he'd been doping ALONG WITH EVERY OTHER FREAKIN' RIDER ON THEIR TEAM. But what strikes me as particularly moronic is that *today* it's gone and suspended former ONCE/Liberty Seguros prodigy LL Cool Sanchez, who was publicly linked to Operacion Puerto back in 2006 for chrissakes but is only now being found out by a team management who's apparently been reading their newspapers in reverse order for the last 7 years. Not to excuse him for being just an impressionable, bright-eyed kid at the time--which he was, right along with then-fellow nobody Alberto Contador--but can we all quit this idiot fakery where we all buy that no-one's been doping since 2006? Except the Chicken. And Armstrong. And Schleck. And Contador. And...

Wait, People "Race Bikes" In This Sport?: and, in actual riding news this week, Fabian Cancellara's decided to bail on the Tour de France--leaving, if humanly possible, the already Frank-less Andy Schleck even more screwed in July--the 'crossers don their scuba gear for today's flood-ravaged Worlds in Kentucky, Kirsten Wild tore up the tarmac and scared the crap outta her fellow sprinters the whole Ladies Tour of Qatar, and the menfolk get ready to head out on the desert tomorrow. Wow Cav, you're pretty sharp, but even you don't always whale on 'em like this: