I had some thoughts on cycling—on the honest-to-goodness racing of bicycles—earlier this week. But dang if I didn’t get a little distracted by the bellowing and harrumphing of bands of lawyers as they debated, at a micrometer level, whose client had the more impressive virile organ.

And you know, it could almost be passable fodder for drama if the various parties involved weren’t so irretrievably bad at finding engaging, creative ways to tell each other to screw off. Their press releases are routinely so terrible that there isn’t a cycling fan left who hasn’t thought “man, even I could do this better”.

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.