I guess he has nothing to do now that his wingman Matthew McConaughey is busy with a girlfriend and a new baby...

If you haven't heard already, Lance Armstrong plans to come out of retirement to try and win the Tour de France next year, four years after he won his historic seventh.  The full Vanity Fair story is out now online.  

He'll be 37 years old at that time, and I'll be amazed if he actually pulls this off.  If he does manage to win, though, I'll be glad that he can finally put those doubts about whether he raced clean in years past to rest.

Suddenly, the Tour de France became so much more interesting again.

Winning by the (second) slimmest of margins...

It's strange to say it, but all the scandal that led to Michael Rasmussen being kicked out of the Tour de France may have been the best thing that happened to the race this year. While "The Chicken" (as he's nicknamed because of his frail-looking chicken legs) was still in the race, it looked like he had all but wrapped up winning the Tour barring some epic choke in the individual time trial today. The three men trailing him in the general classification would be left to duke it out for second place. Instead, Rasmussen was booted out of competition by his own team for being a complete moron and we had one heck of a competition this morning in France. What usually ends up being a head-to-head competition between number one and two, became a three-way battle royale with the yellow jersey up for grabs.

Going into the time trial today, here were the standings:

1. Alberto Contador Velasco (Spa) Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team 86h 04' 16"
2. Cadel Evans (Aus) Predictor - Lotto + 01' 50"
3. Levi Leipheimer (USA) Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team + 02' 49"

After putting in the ride of his life and winning the stage with one of the fastest average speeds ever recorded at the Tour, Levi Leipheimer came oh so close to not only overtaking Evans for second place, but even overtaking his teammate Contador to win the whole thing. In the end, Alberto Contador also put in a remarkable performance to preserve his lead by a slim 23 seconds, the second smallest margin of victory ever in the Tour de France.

1. Alberto Contador Velasco (Spa) Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team 87h 09' 18"
2. Cadel Evans (Aus) Predictor - Lotto + 23"
3. Levi Leipheimer (USA) Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team + 31"

The slimmest margin of victory occurred in 1989 when American Greg Lemond stuck it to a very smug Frenchman Laurent Fignon by riding the fastest time trial ever recorded at the Tour de France to overcome a 50 second deficit and gain an additional 8 seconds to win the maillot jaune. I remember watching that back then thinking I had just witnessed one of the coolest sporting events ever. Doping wasn't the center of attention then, just the actual sport of cycling itself. Heck, the biggest controversy at the time was Lemond's use of an aerodynamic helmet and aerobars, the first use of its kind in the Tour, and now it's standard equipment for any rider today.

Barring some freak accident tomorrow, Alberto Contador is the winner of the 2007 Tour de France. Too bad the first questions from the press probably won't be too congratulatory, but more in the vein of "Did you cheat?" At this point, I'm not sure I really care anymore. I could have cared less whether they were doped up on testosterone, EPO, bovine hemoglobin, or crack--today was an exciting spectacle to watch, and perhaps reminded me why the Tour de France will live on. Viva la Tour!

(Photo: AP/Christophe Ena)

Now this is just getting ridiculous...

Wow. This Tour gets dirtier and dirtier each day. After all but wrapping up a Tour victory with some incredible riding in the Pyrenees, Michael Rasmussen was kicked off his team and, as a result, out of the Tour de France with just four days left till the ride onto the Champs Elysees. Remember, this is the guy that missed four out of competition drug tests prior to the start of the race. Even though he hasn't tested positive for any banned substances, you've gotta think that his sponsor Rabobank knows something. They say they've got evidence that he was actually in Italy when he said he was in Mexico, and I'm inclined to think they must know even more incriminating stuff to have pulled him while on the cusp of winning the yellow jersey outright.

Levi Leipheimer is in third and now a mere 2'49" behind the current race leader and Discovery Channel teammate Alberto Contador. Making it nine in row for the Stars and Stripes is still a long shot, but not completely beyond reason.

(Photo: AP/Peter Dejong)

Doping scandal in the cycling world. What else is new?

CPimages/AP Photo/Bas Czerwinski)

Another Tour, another doping scandal. Or scandals, I should say. First up was Michael Rasmussen, the Danish cyclist for team Rabobank who currently wears the yellow jersey as race leader, and may very well wear it all the way onto the Champs Elysees, assuming his blood and urine tests during the Tour remain negative. He's been in the lead since winning Stage 8 in the Alps, but was hit with news that he was dropped from the Danish national cycling team after it was revealed that he had failed to update them on his whereabouts for possible unannounced drug testing on two occasions. He also failed to inform the international governing body of cycling, UCI, a couple of times, as well. So simple math says he's done this four times. Three strikes and you're supposed to be out, but technically he had to have been in violation three times to one governing body, which explains why he's still in contention in the Tour de France.

Soon after this news broke, Rasmussen tried to compare himself to Lance Armstrong, saying he has yet to test positive for anything and that the press was just after a story because he has the yellow jersey. I guess that's true, except that Lance never failed to disclose where he was at any time. For a professional cyclist, how hard could that be? And to forget to do this four times? In this scrutinizing environment? Hmmmm.

And to throw even more doubt on Rasmussen's credibility, some amateur mountain biker came out at about the same time claiming he inadvertently got tangled up in almost transporting doping products for Rasmussen back in 2002.

Today, brought even more shame to the world of cycling (if you can even pile on any more). I mentioned in an earlier post how Alexander Vinokourov (pictured above), a scarily aggressive rider from Kazakhstan who was the odds on favorite to win the Tour coming in, was all but out of the race after a nasty crash that left him pretty banged up and in all sorts of pain. Out of nowhere, though, he managed to handily win the individual time trial last Saturday and Stage 15 in the Pyrenees both in inspiring fashion. Like Floyd Landis last year after his remarkable ride in the mountains, though, "Vino" reportedly tested positive for evidence of a banned blood transfusion from his sample after the time trial.

The timing of the positive test in some ways seems to make sense, but I can't shake the feeling that we'll be hearing more about the flawed testing procedures used for cycling. In a sport that's reeling from scandals, you'd think the athletes would be plain scared away from any sort of doping right now, especially high profile contenders like these. It doesn't make any sense to me, but then again, winning at any cost never did in the first place.

The Tour wraps up this Sunday. I fear this year's winner will be marked with an asterix, as well.

Who let the dogs out?

The Tour de France has now completed a full week and change. Despite the absence of any overwhelming favorites due to doping scandals, it's still turning out to be a rather exciting race, and perhaps even more interesting than one would expect. There's at least half a dozen riders still in contention to win the honor of wearing the Maillot Jaune into Paris.

I hate to say what's made this year's Tour so fun to watch, though, has been the crashes. A massive crash just short of the finish line in Stage 2 showed just how dangerous things can get with 189 riders all grouped together jockeying for position on a narrow road. Stage 5 brought about another rash of crashes resulting in some major injuries to top contender Alexander Vinokourov which essentially lost him the race (as he's rumoured to be toughing it out with 60+ stitches holding him together in his knees, no less). His German teammate Andreas Kloden (a contender in his own right) has a suspected fractured tailbone, yet manages to ride on and may be in the best position right now to win it all. The second day in the Alps for Stage 8 brought more horrific crashes and took out two Aussies. Stuart O'Grady had to be lifted out in a helicopter. Michael Rogers slammed straight into a guard rail on a technical descent which likely broke his collar bone as he soon withdrew from the race in tears after valiantly trying to continue on for awhile.

With all these accidents, you'd be tempted to think this Tour was cursed. Well, after Markus Burkhardt's crash in Stage 9, you might be right:



Luckily, it looks like the dog and the cyclist made it out of that crash OK. The same couldn't be said about Burkhardt's front wheel--that thing alone probably cost over $2000.

Levi Leipheimer and the Discovery Channel Team still have a chance to win this thing, too, if you want to root for an American to win for the ninth straight year in a row. The whole thing will probably be decided based on the individual time trial on Saturday and the mountain stages in the Pyrenees right after.

Functional head protection and a Halloween mask all in one...

I saw this bike helmet while surfing on Gizmodo. The mask is supposed to contain a filter to keep all those pesky allergens at bay. Considering how bad my seasonal allergies get, I'd be tempted to wear this thing everywhere I go. I'm not sure if that would make me look like the scariest thing on the street or the biggest dweeb on the planet.

Cycling in the courtroom...

Boy, this Floyd Landis case has turned into an outright circus. Greg Lemond, three-time Tour de France champion and VERY vocal critic of both Landis and Lance Armstrong, took the stand earlier this week and revealed that Landis' business manager attempted to blackmail him by threatening to reveal his history of sexual childhood abuse.

The sad stories continued with the testimony of Joe Papp, a relatively unknown American cyclist recently suspended for performance-enhancing drug use. What should have been a simple testament that low-dose testosterone may in fact be helpful to a cyclist in enhancing recovery from a day's ride instead turned into a sob story of how Papp couldn't keep up with the world's top athletes and caved to the pressures of competition.

Yesterday, Floyd Landis himself took the stand, and spent much of his time trying assure the jury that he had no part in his close friend attempting to threaten Lemond. What that has to do with the actual case of alleged doping is still a mystery, and the entire hearing seems to have gotten sidetracked off the main points of possible laboratory mishandlings and errors. Which ever way the USADA rules on this matter, it's sure to raise a lot of skeptics in the end, and I think Floyd's going to be dogged with suspicion and presumed guilt for the rest of his career.

This blog post pretty much sums up what the most prominent American cyclists have turned the sport into. I guess if you've got as much motivation as these guys to win the Tour de France, it's equally as easy to imagine that they must have some serious issues driving them.

Liars and cheats in the shadow of Lance...

On Monday, Floyd Landis takes his case before the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). If found guilty, the Tour de France will officially strip him of his title from last year's race. I've been pretty vocal on this blog regarding my opinions of the accusations against him, and my belief that he's innocent. This week's revelations that the USADA directly approached Landis' legal team to give up any incriminating information they might have on Lance Armstrong in exchange for a more lenient punishment seemed to provide further evidence that this entire fiasco is nothing less than a witch hunt.

However, a couple of months ago I also put up a post about my disgruntlement with the entire suspension process following the "Operation Puerto" crackdown that forced many of the top cyclists out of the Tour de France last year. Since then, most transferred to other teams or have been forced into early retirement. At the time, I thought this was an extremely unjust way of cleaning up the sport, to equate suspicion with guilt. But maybe the powers that be aren't so petty after all, and have been right all along.

Jan Ullrich (on Lance's right in the picture), who adamantly repeated his innocence and retired from the sport in March, has since been found to be guilty by way of a DNA match between bags of blood found in the Puerto case and a sample he had released just prior to his retirement announcement. Ivan Basso (on Lance's left in the picture), after initially being cleared by the Italian doping agency, abruptly stepped down from his new position on the Discovery Channel Cycling Team upon learning that an investigation into his connections with Operation Puerto were being reopened. Shortly afterwards, he fessed up to "attempted doping" by submitting blood to the Spanish physician at the center of the Puerto scandal, although he still claims he never actually cheated during any of his races. This raises the question of why these two guys felt the need to start doping in the first place, especially after Lance Armstrong retired. My only logical conclusion would be that they were cheating all along, and sort of leads me to wonder how Lance was so dominant over guys that perhaps were doping this entire time.

This is not to say that I think that Floyd Landis or Lance Armstrong are guilty of doping. However, these recent revelations certainly plant just the slightest of doubts in my mind about the integrity of any cyclist, and certainly ruins the entire sport for me as a fan. As widespread as the illegal performance enhancements have spread to the upper echelons of the cycling world, I'm not sure how this sport is ever going to recover.

Living vicariously through those braver than me (or dumber than me, depending on your perspective)...

Yeah, forget what I posted about the Bugatti and crapping in my pants. That's nothing compared to what it would be like to try and follow these guys around:



And just to compete my theme of recklessness, this is a classic short film C'etait un rendez-vous by French film maker Claude LeLouch adapted for a Snow Patrol video. I've also included the original film, if you'd rather hear the nice roar of an automobile engine shifting through the gears as he frantically races through the streets of Paris. Pretty crazy stuff, but pretty cool, too:

Free Floyd!

The professional cycling season is already underway, but this year's races are still suffering from the specter of doping that has carried over from last year. Perhaps the greatest cyclist of the last few years whose name is not Lance Armstrong recently announced his retirement. After being a winner and runner-up five times in the Tour de France, Jan Ullrich has decided to call it quits while still in the midst of unfounded accusations stemming from the doping investigations of "Operation Puerto" in Spain that shook up the entire field last year. Ivan Basso, an Italian rider who is the heir apparent to the Tour de France throne, switched teams after being dropped from CSC due to the allegations and now rides with Lance Armstrong's old Discovery Channel Team this year. He, too, has had to defend himself from the "Operation Puerto" fall-out after being named in the scandal. Yet despite being cleared by his own country's athletic governing body and never actually being proven to be guilty of doping by anyone, rumor has it that the organizers of the Tour de France may still elect to ban him from the race later this summer.

I'm not quite sure what the governing bodies of professional cycling are trying to accomplish with this "guilty until proven innocent" stance they've taken on the problem of illegal performance enhancements. Some of the best riders who may very well be innocent are being pushed out of the sport, leaving a field of relative mediocrity instead to watch. Last year's Tour de France was a prime example of a legendary race being whittled down to a group of obscure riders all on the basis of unproven accusations. And even when the race gets interesting and tries to create new heroes, the sloppy systems of doping accusations and detection manage to screw it up. This brings me to last year's Tour de France champion, Floyd Landis.

As you may recall, Floyd Landis was reported to have had relatively large amounts of testosterone found in his urine samples following a dramatic ride in the Alps where he essentially won the Tour. Further radioisotope testing seemed to put the nail in the coffin by showing that the testosterone in the urine sample was synthetic in nature. Floyd adamantly denied the accusations, but his defense looked pretty paper thin by this time.

But not so fast. In the offseason, Floyd Landis and his defense team have come up with some interesting findings, and what seemed to be insurmountable evidence proving he was using performance enhancing drugs, definitely seems to have some holes. A summary of their defense case can be found on the Floyd Fairness website, but the major points as I understand them are as follows:

1. Floyd's urine sample was mislabeled more than once. Although possibly just a technical issue, this raises some doubt as to whether the "positive" sample was even his at all.
   
2. There is evidence that the urine sample was either contaminated or underwent a significant amount of degradation. As such, any testing resulting from those samples were spurious, and the sample probably shouldn't have undergone further testing at all.
   
3. The lab which ran the tests reported extreme variability in the results obtained from Floyd's urine with one being within the range of normal, and the other raising the suspicion for doping. Since their results on the same sample were so different, the ability of this lab to produce reliable lab results is suspect.
   
4. With carbon isotope testing, a sample must test postive for four testosterone metabolites to be considered a true positive test. However, Floyd's sample only came up positive for one, meaning he didn't even test positive for synthetic testosterone.

I have remained in the Landis camp since the accusations started, and this defense case only strengthens my stance that Floyd Landis is clean and is the true champion of the 2006 Tour de France.

Another American cyclist, Tyler Hamilton, will return to the cycling arena this season after serving a two year suspension on grounds of blood doping that he's vehemently denied to this day. His case has some similarities to Floyd's, as the timing of his supposed use of a performance boost didn't seem to make any logical sense, and he, too, has extreme doubts about the laboratory methods used. I can only hope that Floyd doesn't fall to a similar fate as Tyler. Two years can be a long time.

Trying to enjoy the nicer weather...

So the weather is warming up a bit, and the sun is out here in the Gateway to the West. Feeling a bit like a sloth and having avoided pretty much any physical activity short of the walk from my car to the lab or the effort it takes to lift a burger from the table to my mouth all winter long, I decided to take my bike out for a ride today. Now I've haven't even sat on my bike for about six months now. Basically, it has stood against a wall in my condo looking nice and shiny all year.

To further enhance my poser stance, my bike is a Bianchi, which would have made Wakinoffee drool uncontrollably back in the day. Sounds fancy, until you take a closer look and realize that mine is not of the legendary Italian-made lineage, but a cheaper line made especially for the American market with frames made in Taiwan. Not that M.I.T. bikes aren't made well, but it's kind of like comparing a Lexus to a Toyota. Like any decent poser, I also use clipless pedals (the bike came with them), which actually haven't been that problematic for me...until today.

If you haven't used clipless pedals before, basically your shoe has a specialized cleat that locks into the pedal. This improves your pedal efficiency, but also makes it a bit more difficult to free your feet for stabilization during a stop or fall. Stop without your feet "clipped out," and you remain literally attached to your bike, making for an extremely embarrasing situation for yourself (or quite a humorous one for onlookers).

This is what happened to me this afternoon. I seemed to forget this important principle, and ended up on my back with my bike held up in the air, still attached to my feet. Luckily, there were no eyewitnesses to my goof (at least none that I saw), and I heard no uproarious laughter erupt. Oh well. At least I finally made an effort to get some exercise.