Say what you will about Lance Armstrong, but you must admit, the man has cajones. Er, un cajone. Or something.

Anyway, going over the UCI to race at Gila, donning the mysterious black kits a day after Der Speigel put a doping story on his teammate back in the headlines, and, just for kicks, smashing everyone to help his teammate win the first stage. Armstrong is nothing short of Odyssean in his defiance of the cycling gods.

Dave Zabriskie, applying his favorite chamois-related product at the ToC. Words fail. (@dzabriskie, via @muddylegs.)

How is doping like a pregnancy? Because—according to the IOC, anyway—you’ve gotta wait nine months to find out whose responsible.

I don’t know if they’re still sleeping in Boulder, but Velonews has yet to report that Rebellin’s positive has indeed been confirmed by IOC. Not that this means his guilty, of course, but just that “due process” against him is underway. Still, I’ve gotta commend VN for not leaping into the fray of condemnation after Gazzetta dello Sport named him as the Italian positive. Rebellin himself protests innocence, the B sample is still out, but Twitter has already handed down its verdict.

Video from this year’s decent LBL. Great teamwork by SaxoBank, but the performance was almost too dominant. Philippe Gilbert and Lotto took a shot at it, but I really would have liked to have seen more organization out of the other teams. That having been said, I can understand why their legs all would have been toasted.

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Vimeo and YouTube are also up.

There was a great example in Fleche Wallonne this Wednesday of proper bottle handoff technique. As most of you probably know, it’s far more complicated than simply passing a bottle through a window. Why waste all that gasoline keeping the car moving forward when you could just as easily use it to accelerate your riders?

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1. Observe DS extending bottle out the window
2. Extend arm out, with thumb facing down
3. Wait for DS to shove bottle into hand
4. Upon contact, brace for acceleration

Fleche-Wallone Video at last! Sorry about the jerkiness of some of the video playback—that’s from the live feed, not from me. YouTube and Vimeo at some point are now up, though not right now because I am way tired yes right now because I am crazy.
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Also made a few changes to the site as a whole—added a Twitter plug-in and changed the feed to ping FeedBurner, which is groundwork for a video podcast at some point. I’ll probably also spend some time this weekend normalizing the categories a bit.

This is why George Hincapie will never win Paris-Roubaix.

It might be OK if George were banking on his toughness to hock Carhartts or Dickies or a similar hard-wearing, blue collar brand. But multiple lines of fashionable, designer jeans—sold at the Dura-Ace price point of $145 a pair?! For shame.

Look at Johan Museeuw. More specifically, look at his hair. This is a man who’s won Paris-Roubaix three times, and clearly, fashion is not his native tongue. Roger deVlaeminck, who’s won PR more times than anyone, ever, was known as The Gypsy—not exactly a ringing endorsement of his choice in clothing.

Amstel Gold! Ivanov wins a classic heads-up hill sprint, with daring attacks and savvy teamwork throughout. Also on YouTube and Vimeo.
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Note well that all Americans do not hold such stereotypical views of the Netherlands as expressed in the opening of this movie. My implication that most do is purely for the sake of humor.

Since I’m stuck at work on Marathon-freakin’ Monday, instead of at home making an Amstel video, I’m gonna burn my lunch break weighing in on the crash (around 3:40 in the above video) from the final day of the Presidential Tour of Turkey.

Public opinion seems arrayed pretty heavily against Theo Bos, all the more so because no sanction was leveled against him. But there’s been a pretty massive rush to judgment in this whole thing, which wasn’t really helped by the fuming voiceover of commentators before they’d so much as seen a replay.

Coincidence that Velonews used the same idiom to describe the same action by the same rider in the same race as I did, just several days later?

Not that I care—I mean, we all know which video report you’d rather be watching, right?