Cycling’s like a room full of fine china, an eight year old, and a hammer. You turn your back for a second and suddenly everything’s gone straight to hell. A much deserved month-long hiatus, and the top cycling story is “Lance Armstrong’s tagging an Olsen twin?” Granted, we should have seen this coming, but really? The guy was winning Tours back when this chick had an official jailbait counter (CiteBite is down; you’ll have to search yourself). If there isn’t something inherently wrong with that, I don’t see how there can be anything wrong with re-injecting your own blood to ride faster, either.
Speaking of, convicted doper Andrey Kashechkin will officially be challenging his conviction on the grounds that drug testing violates human rights. Leave it to the youth to come up new ideas, eh? We’ve had vanishing twins, dirty French labs, the drugs-were-for-my-mother-in-law, but this one really takes the struggle outside the box. For a country that’s struggling to make itself seem less ridiculous, Kazakhstand could stand to keep a much tighter leash on its national heros.
Of course, should hell freeze over and Kashechkin win his case, it’s not too far a leap to assert that no overseeing body anywhere has the right to use invasive means to insure a level playing field. That means we can finally kiss the meddlesome SEC goodbye. I think I still have some Enron stock lying around…who wants in on the ground floor? But a Kashechkin victory would also probably overturn Board of Ed. v Earls, which might just make the detriment to the rest of the world worth it.
Let’s see, what else is out there…transfers, don’t care…Amstel Curacao, don’t care…ah, the 2008 Tour de France. No prologue and no time bonuses. Awesome. The ASO better pray for a breakaway on the first day, or budget reparations to PMU for turning the first week Points Competition into a “First GC Loser” jersey. Of course, with organizers claiming no team has a guaranteed entry, one can expect the field to be composed entirely of low-level French squads with direct financial ties to ASO members; with the crippling loss of viewership that follows, I’m imaging the restitution to the long standing Green Jersey sponsor will be minimal at best.
So it’s mid January. I had been, throughout my previous half-decade of running this blog, under the impression that this time of year was the “off season”. But apparently this opinion is not shared by a cabal of very old, very white men in Aigle, Switzerland.
I’m furious that the first day of the Giro was ruined by another positive cocaine test from Tom Boonen. But my ire is not directed at the Belgian classics rider. Instead, it’s aimed at the authorities who senselessly soiled his name by announcing a positive test which violates no established protocol, and thus constitutes a clear violation of Article 11 of the UCI’s own 
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