It’s been a bad week for the UCI: the Swiss courts went over their heads to let Danilo Hondo off the hook, former convicted doper Filip Meirhaeghe won a race, and Roberto Heras, who is currently appealing his own drug suspension, successfully blocked the revised Vuelta awards presentation. Now, this series of events would make any sports governing body feel emasculated, but apparently, neither essentially banning an innocent rider (search “Bouyer”) for life, nor hounding pro riders out of unsanctioned training races was enough to shake that sensation of impotence. So now the UCI has decided to make the declaration that competing with a currently banned rider gets you an automatic one-month susupension.

*Sigh* – I knew I should have posted yesterday morning. But then I got all caught up in doing stuff and now it’s today. So I missed talking about some new Australian beating a few notables (Eeckhout, Cooke) to win some French race, where, on the start line, folks were upset that the UCI won’t let Franck Bouyer race because his narcolepsy medicine is on the banned list. Apparently, a rider passing the f*ck out in the middle of a bunch sprint and taking down half the field is less damaging to the sport than a guy using drugs to lead a normal life. Ah well. Today’s racing is way more important, anyway, since an American team went 1-2 at Castilla y Leon. In France, details are sketchy, and the report somewhat apocryphal (coming from the winning team’s DS) but it looks like TIAA-CREF has scored its first big European win. And, to complete the American trifecta, here’s Road Cycling’s latest Team Discovery Channel report.

For the rest of today’s post, I’d like to go over an interesting little story that’s been brewing stateside this past week. It seems that one Tyler Hamilton was out racing this past weekend at a local, unsanctioned criterium in Boulder, Colorado. Yeah, he’s supposed to be suspended, but the UCI has no power over unsanctioned events, and Hamilton has done it before without causing problems. For some reason, though, the UCI decided that, this time, it’s not ok, and complained to USA Cycling; USA Cycling reacted by threatening to not exempt UCI License holders (generally Cat 1/Pro racers) at the event from a largely-ignored ban on unsanctioned racing. (UCI Rule 1.2.019). Bisceglia’s comments from a recent Velonews article are as follows:

People all whining about how we “need” to change the Milan-San Remo course – please. What could you possibly ask for from a bike race that today’s event did no give you? A strong early move staying out 200k+, right up to the foot of the Cipressa, attacks flying every which way, two late moves packed with dangerous riders, and a desperate group charge to the line that almost-but-not-quite brought back Quick.Step’s blonde dark horse, Pozzatto. Certainly the Q.S squad was strongest on the day, and Pozzatto’s personal effort, a quarter-mile suicide move after pulling the field back up to one late-race move, then jumping to mark another, was a tour de force. But Boonen’s excitiment at his teammate’s win allowed him to be pipped for 3rd by Luiquigas’ Luca Paolini, which turns out to be a 2,500 Euro (scroll down) mistake. But I guess if you’re the World Champion, you can get away with that. Big losers on the day? I want to say Milram, as Petacchi’s train was all but devoured by the Poggio, but Ale-Jet still almost won. I’ll tag Alexandro Valverde, whose new bike was nowhere to be seen when the attacks were flying, and Eurosport, for misrepresenting the race finale, as today’s donuts.

San Remo Fever: catch it! The final round of previews is up: Velochimp gives the nod to Igor Astarloa as a dark horse pick if the group sprint doesn’t come together. He also suggests that Gazzetta dello Sport‘s recent award to race favorite Tom Boonen may have been a sneaky attempt to wear the Belgian down with pre-race travel; if this photo is any indication, mission accomplished. Some dude named Stephen Farrand notes on Yahoo! Cycling that no Italian rider has pulled off back-to-back wins on the via Roma in over half-a-century, a very strange thing considering the predominantly Italian character of this event. Velonews’ Andrew Hood begins his preview by stating that “the Via Roma finishing straight at Milan-San Remo belongs to the Italians”, which is so obviously inaccurate it makes me want to throw up. Eurosport feels like wasting my time by reporting that Petacchi, not Zabel, will lead team Milram tomorrow, while “Ete” himself says in this interview that he won’t rule out looking for the early break.

Lemme just hold off on the continuing torrent of San Remo news to rip apart SRAM’s BS Sea Otter Press Release. Scroll down past “SRAM Force in 3-D” and you’ll discover the following passage:

“So far only members of the Kodakgallery.com-Sierra Nevada and Orbea pro road teams have sampled SRAM’s Force road group but that’s about to change.”

So it occurred to me this morning, as sheets of snow and driving wind swirled about my window, that it’s only Wednesday, and that I still might get some racing in this weekend. This came as something of a surprise, for the way the cycling media’s gone MSR craaazy, you’d think it was the night before the race. Pez has both a full-length preview, in which he attempts to defuse the Boonen/Bettini conflict (though by his logic, the Petacchi/Bettini combo at Worlds should have worked out, too), and a heart-rending memoir from Max Sciandri, the former Motorola rider who almost-but-never-quite won San Remo. BiciRace has a preview as well, while VeloNews chips in with a start list. Pretty much all I’ve learned from all this discussion, though, is that, despite what rumor and Wikipedia may have told you, this map at Cyclingnews is correct; the Pompeiana has not been included, and the last 30k of the race remain unchanged.

Hard to pinpoint the top story of today; guess I’ll start with the racing, which was the final stage of Tirreno-Adriatico, in which Alessandro Petacchi, with a little help from 4 (and almost 5)-time winner Erik Zabel, fired the final shot in the pre-San Remo skirmishes. Tom Boonen, the bookmaker’s choice for la Primavera, has made it clear that he’s done his homework (scroll down), and is as ready to go this weekend as he’s gonna be. Meanwhile, Boonen’s teammate and potential MSR spoiler Paolo Bettini (a steal at 30:1 for a win) has announced he’ll be on the start line come Saturday, and will give it all he can, making me wonder if these pain faces weren’t an attempt to get T-A organizers a red card for racing in dangerous conditions. Somewhere in all this slop, young Dutchman Thomas Dekker (no relation to teammate Erik) took the overall title, perhaps with a little help from a weather-altered Stage 5. And, finishing up with the joke I used to kick off this race, though T-A is done with cycling for ’06, cycling is by no means done with T&A.

Why does all the interesting stuff happen on the weekends? Ah well. Let’s begin with Paris-Nice where absolutely nothing happened, and save the interesting stuff for later. Floyd Landis went on to win the race pretty much uncontested; ok, yeah, a few breakaways won stages, a French director sportif pretty much said “No, I don’t want to keep my job” (scroll to “The Cofidis question”), Tom Boonen, after riding exceptionally well, dropped out on the last day to train for Milan-San Remo, but all in all, nothing interesting happened. This is probably because Tirreno-Adriatico was hogging all the action for itself: there was Bettini’s tumble, which I predicted (though Bettini himself saw portents of doom), there was Stuart O’Grady getting smashed up right before his targeted races, for the second time in three years, there was CSC’s first (ok – second) win of the ’06 season, there was Oscar Freire’s return (with Astarloa just behind him), and there was Petacchi losing twice; once getting burned by a suicide attack, and once getting flat out beat by Thor Hushovd. What more could you ask for?

Sex or Bike Racing? It’s the eternal question. Among my race-obsessed friends, the preference is generally whichever they’ve had least recently. So, it being some 6.5 months since my last road race, it seems like a three-hour trip to Bethel would be a no-brainer. But given my history, you never really know, do you? In the end though, it’s all moot, as last Sunday presented me with only one of the two options that begin this paragraph. And so away I went.