Yesterday in Sardinia, Damiano Cunego took his first win in 527 days. While it may only be February, it’s still a noteworthy victory, coming over Peter Sagan, who—thanks in part to the extra-dessert-worthy efforts of his teammates—is confirming some of the form he showed at the top one-week stage races last season.

But a 500-day gap is a dishearteningly long time for a rider with Cunego’s expectations to wait for a win. It’s not that he hasn’t been slugging it out with the elites—he had some notable digs in the 2010 Tour—but for a guy who won a Giro at age 22, “among the best” is widely considered an underwhelming achievement. He’s had to defend his riding far more than any other winner of a Grand Tour and four classics, I can tell you that.

It’s a complicated thing to be a sprinter in this sport. Riders without that taste for risk and a talent for velocity, especially at the lower levels of the sport, seem perpetually envious of the speed merchants.

But a strong finishing kick is not the blessing that it seems. There are many factors that play into success in the closing kilometers; a few you can control, many you can’t. And there never seems to be a consensus on exactly which matter most.

“I always said that doping was generalized and you could say even democratic up to the time when they developed a test for EPO, then it became elitist. You needed cutting-edge methods to get around the tests from that point on—methods that often only the big riders and teams could access or afford.

      —Filippo Simeoni

[photo by mcalamelli]

Tom Boonen, Heinrich Haussler, Tyler Farrar—all names you’ve heard of before. And all names you’ve seen taking wins at the bevy of tune-up races filling space underneath this week’s doping headlines.

Even the Etoile Besseges—the second peloton’s tune-up race—you’ll catch a glimpse of a few names who’ve stolen a Tour stage, or at least featured in some post-stage drama on the sport’s biggest stage.

Yes, say what you will about the goofball photography and technical mishaps, but Qatar, and the more mountainous Tour of Oman are serious races, and not only because they’re must-air components of the multi-million dollar broadcast rights package that the UCI uses to sell the Tour de France.

When Paul Kimmage released the full transcript of his interview with Floyd Landis earlier this week, it didn’t take a PR expert to predict what the UCI’s response would be. Pat McQuaid flatly denied all allegations made in the interview, claimed that “there has never been corruption in the UCI”, and went on to take a few swipes at “bloggers and so forth”.

While it may be true that a good deal of Landis’ allegations are difficult to substantiate, paperwork obtained by Cyclocosm indicates at least one claim happens to be very well-documented: Floyd’s back-and-forth with the UCI over unpaid wages from 2001.