Oh yes. This is totally the direction I want to see the sport going in. Take the sponsor who’s pleased enough with a gutsy third-place finish to put the bike in their museum, then dissolve their team. Follow that up by reintroducing the guy who was caught in a police sting at an illicit blood bank with 50,000 euros in cash. 2011 looks like it’s going to be a great year.

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For riders not invited to the Vuelta and unlikely to fare well at Lombardy, the World Championships are now the primary concern, and, stuck with a comparatively runty team at the event, Andreas Kloeden has gone online to voice his crankiness.

Kloedi encouraged his fellow riders to “stop arguing on Internet” and earn more points through the rest of the season, before going on to trash the management of the German cycling federation over Twitter; unfortunately, at last check, the UCI did not award points for irony.

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Recently-hired Armstrong defense lawyer Bryan D. Daly dropped a few jewels in yesterday’s New York Times updatae about the investigation into the seven-time Tour winner.

After citing a lack of “scientific evidence” (there’s actually a bit here and there, if you’re truly curious) presented in the press thus far, Daly attempted to play up the “witch hunt” aspect of the case, saying:

“If Lance Armstrong came in second in those Tour de France races, there’s no way that Lance Armstrong would be involved in these cases,” Daly said. “I think that the concern is that they are caught up in the pursuit of a celebrity to catch him in a lie.”

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It’s tough to argue that this latest installment of the Grande Boucle wasn’t an entertaining spectacle. The first week alone furnished more action and GC changes than the 2002 version in its entirety, and close races in all the major competitions marked much of the event.

Most of the race—certainly its chaotic opening—still seem compelling; Chatreau and Pineau trading off breakaways and battling for KOMs was good fun while waiting for the GC riders to open hostilities. And seeing the aggression pay off for so many breakaways was a nice change—something many have taken as the sign of a cleaner race, though others are not so convinced.

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Wednesday may have been a rest day for the peloton, but for the data nerds, it was Fight Night. Statistical Skier, getting in some off-season training, made a deeper investigation into my question on the increased GC impact of downhill finishes this year, and found some tentative support for my thesis. Junk Charts, meanwhile, did some meta-analysis of Statistical Skier, and pulled up another set of TdF data visualizations as well.

But the main event among the stat-heads, as it always seems to be these days, was the battle over how to interpret the latest batch of power and performance data from this year’s Tour de France.

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That’s what today’s stage—at least from the recaps, reports and clips through which I experienced it—seemed like to me.

In the rain, many contenders couldn’t take risks. With no time bonuses in the coming days, sprinters couldn’t really justify a run for yellow. Over a pancake-flat parcours, climbers couldn’t make any statements. And with all the variables in the equation, a suddenly fourth-placed Lance Armstrong couldn’t make any assessments of the day’s implications for the rest of the Tour.

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Bah. You know, back in the day, this sort of thing required at least a modicum of skill. You’d look at the calendar, notice the week-and-a-half that had passed without any real news, see the Tour was about to start and you’d write something like “I sense a dope story is near”. People were once very impressed by that.

But no. Now you’ve got your rumors and your blogs and people just up and posting it and suggestive no-details Tweets that blossom out into a variety of @-replies and “what’s-that-supposed-to-means” until absolutely everyone already knows and the NYT has to print a story early.

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I realize I burn off a lot of text trying to drive the point home. This screenshot probably does a better job:

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I take a few days off to relocate myself in meatspace and the biggest story that surfaces is…motorized doping? Didn’t we already do this? A YouTube video is all it takes to sway you zombies?

Didn’t we already decide that whipping the cranks above 90 rpm (I count 19 pedal strokes in the first 10 seconds of Cancellara’s race-winning Roubaix attack—that’s 114 rpm) removed any assist value?

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I had initially planned to write this earlier, since yesterday’s group sprint outcome was almost a sure thing, but I take nothing for granted with this Giro.

It’s a strange situation the race finds itself in now. Arroyo’s defense of the maglia rosa has been both spirited and intelligent, and the Spaniard, if he does manage to hold on through the two hellacious remaining mountain stages, plus a final “eff-you” time trial, will have proven himself a worthy winner.

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