(The UCI may not be specifically to blame as I’ve indicated here. The arguments that follow remain valid, and apply to all testing bodies.)

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 internal ethical code [PDF].

We’re barely through the second of 3.5 stages, and already The Pain has taken a toll – Leif Hoste’s well on his way to another unhappy Ronde, to go with his flag-in-spokes from ’03 and leave-stronger-teammate-behind-before-losing sprint from ’06. It’s all fun and games for Tom Boonen, of course; he seems awfully relaxed for a guy whose biggest performance this year has been at Tour of Qatar.

At T-minus 4 days, the Flanders hype machine is running full-bore: check the bergs n’ cobbles pain scores over at Podium Cafe, or see what UK hardman Barry Hoban has to impart from his fistful of rumbles over the undulating pavé. Despite not considering Cipo’ one of the best sprinters of all time, Hoban still manages an insight or two – though someone ought to drop him the memo that his “man’s race” does indeed have a woman’s event.

Ah – now for the fun stuff. While a friend of mine calls 1 April “Internet jackass day”, in honor of all the fake news, he might as well have been referring to the “final” Danilo DiLuca hearing, which was both skipped by the accused and delayed by the judge. Yes, it seems cycling’s allegedly new attitude toward the dopage might still need a few refinements. And you know it’s not going to help that the governing bodies still can’t seem to stop chasing their tails. Isn’t there some way the Federal Reserve could maybe step in and fix this?

Right…so I took on a third job last week. Questionable judgment on my part, I know, but it appears to be a short-term kinda thing. At any rate, some of my predictions in last week’s post have already begun to come true. Astana – not invited to the ’08 Tour. No Kloeden, no Levi, no Condator. Sylvain Chavanel just got that much closer to his first TdF win.

And don’t bet on another High Road-style change of heart. Not only does High Road have a different sponsor, but its “clean” new management also didn’t spend the past 8 years winning the Tour de France under an ever-thickening cloud of suspicion. That’s not to say that the cleaner-looking members of Astana aren’t giving it the old college try in hopes of a TdF ride, but folks, it’s just not happening.

I don’t know why you’d want to start up a new race in cycling’s current environment, especially at this time of year, but the people of Grosseto thought they’d give it a whirl anyway. Didn’t work out so well. Just down the coast, the more established Tour Med concluded with another two French successes to add to the tally – Cofidis’ Chavanel with the final stage, and CA’s Botcharov with the overall.

And yeah, fine. I’ll mention the Tour of Cali. But it’s a bitter thing to me, this California; so close, and yet so far away. Also, I don’t have cable (yet). But it’s worth mentioning, as after the Puerto reopening in Spain, the ToC organizers managed to both exclude a bunch of Puerto escapados, and STFU Michael Ball in one sweet swoop. I wish that windbag a perpetual case of laryngitis.

It was a rough Sunday out here in New England. First was the Pats loss, and then came word of Sheldon Brown’s passing. It’s not so much that without Sheldon’s site I wouldn’t be writing this; it’s that I wouldn’t be on a bike. At all.

Riding a bicycle, especially an entry-level machine, causes stuff to break all the time. Waiting on the local shop (yes, that still says ’06) to fix it simply won’t keep you rolling, and Sheldon’s pages made it so anyone with access to Google and a set of metric Allen keys could keep their ride in order, and learn more than they’d ever dreamed in the process. To say he will be missed is understatement redefined.

Leaping from the loss of an immense societal contributor to the stubborn continuance of a societal leech, Italian media conglomerate RCS announced invitations for the ’08 Giro d’Italia last week. Not invited? A whole fistful of international powerhouses. Invited instead? Local Italian teams! Awesome! Evil media conglomerate’s rationale: “ethics, quality, international character [and] the historical relationship with RCS Sport”. Ah, what lofty criteria from a country so corrupt it’s drowning in its own garbage.

Seriously, though – LPR Brake’s roster features Danilo DiLuca, who spent the runt-end of last season suspended after being mired in at least two dope scandals; one of them even involved suspicious test results from his ’07 Giro victory. Perhaps to ease the obviousness of this contradiction, RCS has now dropped hints that maybe they’ll invite anti-dope pioneers Team High Road as a 22nd squad, because they might bring a little “sporting quality” and “respect for the rules” to the event – no doubt to compensate for RCS’s lack thereof.

But enough bitterness! Time to revel in the flat, sunbaked, sprint-happy glory that is the Tour of Qatar! Slipstream almost won the first stage, which is (IMHO) a fine start for the burrito powered squad. Things went pearshaped a bit when Backstedt broke his collarbone, but the big guy still has hopes for Roubaix. For me, the story of the race was Tom Boonen only winning half the stages. Last year he won nearly every day, missing only a long escape in which a teammate sealed GC victory. Could Tornado Tom be slipping?

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.

Seven days? Has it been a week already? Oh, right, there’s no Züri Metzgete, which makes for a pretty sizable gap. Some 30 day stretches are jam packed with up to five overlapping races, but suddenly the racing scene’s a barren wasteland (slight apologies due to Franco-Belge). No wonder there’s such acrimony over scheduling.

Anyway, cycling’s in such an advanced state of regression that even the doping news has been dominated by other sports. Rodney Harrison returns from his four-year…er, I mean, four week suspension for a steroids positive. Harrison, by the way, is the second NFL superstar to be exposed as a doper in as many years, and this under a drug testing policy that could best be described as pathetic. No word yet on how American football is in danger as a sport, but I’m sure the editorials are coming…

And Marion Jones – who didn’t see that coming. The only thing Travis Tygart and Dick Pound want on their mantles more than Jones’s medal cache is Lance Armstrong’s one remaining testicle. Forget what the two clean-sport terrorists actually said to the press after Jones confessed, the implicit message was “Lance, you’re in our crosshairs through July 2013. And don’t even try flaxseed oil bullsh!t with us.”

That’s not to say there wasn’t any cycling dope news, though. An apparently suspended DiLuca managed to still race at the GP Cimurri. How? I don’t even know any more. Ask me next spring, at which point maybe the Rasmussen saga will be properly sorted out, too. What interests me is whether or not DiLuca will be stripped of his season-long ProTour title (provided he wins it) as a result of his looming suspension.

So I’m going to start the day in Denmark, where Matti Breschel became the first Dane to win a stage at the Tour of Denmark in nearly half a decade. No word yet on whether to chalk that winless streak up to bad luck, or an active anti-Danish campaign by embittered Rasmussen teammates.

Speaking of the Chicken who would be king, apparently a hacker broke into his email account, and attempted to sell its contents to a Danish tabloid. The unwritten code of hacking celebrities, however, dictates that all stolen data be openly released, so I in no way feel bad about the hacker’s eventual arrest. At any rate, hacking onto Rasmussen’s eBay account and selling hemapure and Rabobank jerseys would have been a much funnier prank.

Moving on to Spain, we find that a former Vuelta winner has tested positive. Wait – isn’t that old news? Maybe it was a previous winner – no, still no surprise. So who was it? Aitor Gonzalez? But isn’t he already suspended? Oh, wait, this was a real-life drug test – man, DUI and cocaine! Looks like someone’s a bigger LiLo fan than you might think. Still, I don’t think cyclists will be switching from their old standards anytime soon (although blow was once a six-day racer’s favorite). To be completely honest, if it weren’t for the fate of Marco Pantani, I’d almost prefer to see cyclists on more mainstream drugs; I doubt Promises has much experience with the psychological addiction that must form to tracing with your hematocrit up around 54.

Regardless of what riders ingest, though, Stuttgart will be watching – a total of 350 controls will be administered for the one-day World Championship event, which usually sees less than 50 finishers. For those scoring at home, the World Champs are one of only a handful of races run and owned completely by the UCI, which would seem to dent the ASO’s theory that the UCI “never wanted clean cycling”. Maybe that’s why the two bodies are reportedly squashing the beef.

On the ride to work today, I hatched this theory that maybe the “men in black” weren’t really Astana like everyone’s been saying. Maybe they were Caisses d’Epargne, a squad that tends wear black kits, and has had a few scrutinized riders. Well, looks like it’s back to the drawing board for me. Matthias Kessler has (of course) no idea how his testosterone became elevated, and Lord knows, asking his team manager, the famously unaware Walter Godefroot, won’t provide any answers either. But I bet Floyd Landis could offer a few suggestions to the young German – provided he doesn’t mind not racing in France for a bit.

Too bad about Kessler, though. I always admired the guy for manning up to finish a Tour stage with a collapsed lung in 2004. I don’t care how much dope you’re jacked up on – that’s some hard guy stuff right there. A decidedly less hard guy is also in hot water on the eve (figuratively speaking) of this year’s Tour – recently re-crowned sprint king Alessandro Petacchi. His offense? Too much asthma medicine. It seems like a stupid exclusion, but as I understand WADA’s draconian rule structure, if Petacchi’s above the the 1000 ng/mL line, then Therapeutic Use Exemption or not, that counts as a doping offense.

Jumping momentarily from those excluded to those inexplicably invited, Cyclingnews has a nice feature on the Barloworld squad. Robbie Hunter aside, I’d still rather see Unibet, or even Tinkoff, toeing the line instead of these guys; that having been said, almost anyone would be a step up from Agritubel. While not nearly as aggressive at recruiting refugee dopers as Team Relax has been, I suppose I can see the ASO harboring some ill will against Tinkoff for hiring Tyler Hamilton and Jorg Jaksche. But excluding an exciting spring performer for purely political reasons really defeats the point of selecting Wild Cards in the first place.

Now that’s how a one-day race is supposed to end. 30k of attacks while the creme de la creme try to whittle each other down. DiLuca and Schleck making the-all-or-nothing move at 4k; Valverde, stuck back in the group, trying to will the field back together; the daring jumps by DiLuca and Valverde as they realize their only chance of victory is solo; Frank Schleck, broken vertebrae and all, trying to churn through the lactate to fend off Valverde – sure beats the hell out of watching guys throw kid-glove attacks for 200k before having a mosh-and-weave contest up a 25% grade.

Ah, [inhales deeply] no racing today! (Ok, well, a little racing. But I’m gonna ignore it.) Nothing to fetter my otherwise irrepressible polemicism! I’ll begin with Bjarne Riis, who regrets nothing about the Ivan Basso affair. Bjarne, you bald-headed hypocrite, just a few months ago you were pining away like a jilted lover. You can’t be like “oh, I have regrets” one minute, then be like “I regret nothing!” the next. Sinatra would not approve. Furthermore, when you mumble about this “doubt hanging over the team”, are you forgetting about your old nickname? Or your earlier protege? Count yourself lucky there was no blood doping test when T-Ham rode for CSC.