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.

“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]

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:

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 strange, really—crafting a race strategy and timing that perfect attack doesn’t seem so different from devising a policy for dealing with the media and scheduling your tidbits to the press for maximum impact. And yet, cyclists and those involved in cycling seem to have a near-bottomless penchant for screwing it up.

Take Floyd Landis and his latest set of Postal doping allegations. Sure, they were European television interviews and mostly just expansions on previous statements, but come on, dude—Thanksgiving break? When the few people paying any attention to the news will have to make it past irresistible Black Friday newsoids to read your stuff? Why even bother?

Let’s see…suspended rider to participate in unsanctioned criterium. Why does that sound familiar?

Ah yes—the Tyler Hamilton case. I wish I could tell you more about it, but the massive number of dead links from this otherwise excellent summary article is clouding my memory. Am I the only cycling site on the Internet that knows how to write a 404 page and rock a little .htaccess magic?

Anyway, my understanding of the events surrounding the Stazio crits is that the UCI threatened to suspend clean riders for attending under a rarely-enforced regulation that prevents license-holders from racing at unsanctioned events.

David Walsh, author of the infamous LA Confidentiel and one of the most notable contemporary voices against doping, was quoted in Cyclingnews a few days ago, commenting on the high-profile positives of the past month. “You’ve now got Contador and Mosquera both in trouble” sighed the Irishman, “and you have to think that this sport is going nowhere.”

What is it about this sport that cultivates such an aversion to accountability? It must be drafting or something.

Let’s start with the UCI, who flatly denied a Contador positive to ARD after they were aware of it, and before the story broke. Ignore the fact that most third-graders know to spit back “neither-confirm-nor-deny” boilerplate to questions like that—it’s the frickin’ German media.

While they do seem to have a painfully self-conscious obsession with doping, they’re not exactly known for fishing expeditions. Contador’s positive tests occurred months ago, the UCI had already notified WADA, bringing dozens, if not hundreds of potential leaks into the loop. Did the UCI consider it conincedence that a doping specialist reporter called them to ask about Contador’s positive test?