NY Velocity has published a tremendous, unedited, transcript of Paul Kimmage’s interview with Floyd Landis. There’s a ton of information in there—stuff from Floyd accusing Oscar Pereiro of calling the kettle black to more details on that whole “blood down the drain” story—but what really struck me was this exchange:

Kimmage: How many of the decisions you made after that were coloured by this experience you’ve had with the UCI and their relationship with Lance? How big a factor was that in the decision you made to dope?

Landis: That’s all of it.

Did I not mention a little something about there being plenty of room for forthcoming drama at the head of my last post? Good gravy, it’s been a busy week—and it’s only Thursday.

Leadoff: Alberto Contador gets a one-year suspension from the Spanish Federation, or RFEC for those of us who don’t like typing. The RFEC hasn’t announced it yet and won’t make it official until 9 February, Contador’s not talking about it until the 28th, though it’ll all be shuffleboard on the Lusitania if the ban ends upbackdated until last July.

If you’d think this might cause some conflict amongst late-season race organizers you’re clearly not Vuelta organizer Javier Gullien:

Going to a take a bit of a break from the drama and talk about the TdU today. After all, there’s going to be about four weeks between now and the next biggish-kinda-deal event—and that fact is in no way unrelated to my thesis.

Bernhard Eisel recently made some comments that the UCI WorldTour—the sport’s top tier of competition—lacks a lot of unifying feautres; things like a leader’s jersey, a centralized media contact, and real, season-long relevance to the WorldTour points standings—for example, using them to determine caravan order.

Whatever else you might think of Floyd Landis, you’ve gotta give him this—the dude does not hedge.

In 2006, he was totally and completely innocent—a clean rider from a pair of clean teams, mistakenly charged. “Positively False” was his now-smirkingly-appropriate campaign mantra. Then last year, his confessed his unequivocal guilt, and went on to catalogue in detail the transgressions of essentially every other cyclist he knew.

The past 24 hours produced a similarly unflinching turnaround. Yesterday, Landis announced he was retired. Among other choice soundbites from the de-jerseyed TdF champ: cleaning up cycling is “not my fight”; trying to get back into the sport is “more stress than it’s worth”; and finally, “I’m relatively sure this sport cannot be fixed, but that’s not my job”.

Ah—what a day. Floyd Landis retires, and immediately thereafter, a boatload of not-entirely-unfamiliar looking allegations against Lance Armstrong drop.

Looks like the real sporting press scooped their cycling-specific counterparts once again on today’s headlines (with one exception), but at least we’ve got BikeRadar, hard at work bringing us “Profile: Ben Coates“. My journo slang’s a bit rusty, but I’m pretty sure the term for that is a “wet kiss”.

It’s no secret that Philippe Gilbert can shred—especially when road heads downhill.

In 2009, he and then-teammate Cadel Evans put on a fantastic display of recklessness attempting a late-race escape at the Tour of Romandie. So no surprise here that he hit 74 miles an hour tearing down a training camp descent on the bumper of the team car.

Gilbert’s teammates were similarly unimpressed with the effort, and rattled off their own feats, with one in particular cocking my eyebrows: Adam Blythe’s claim of 73 mph on flat ground behind the team car.

Unless the spike in high-priority, all-caps emails on “LANCE ARMSRTONG’S FINAL RACE OUTSIDE THE US” have mislead me, a bunch of clowns in Switzerland who haven’t shoveled my driveway four times in the past two weeks seem to think the season is getting underway again.

Then again, I should count myself lucky that over-zealous and under-coordinated PR is worst of my concerns—I could end up having to pay $13,000 for their approval to write blog posts about how much they suck.