I know, I know – it’s not nice to wish death upon people. But I’m not doing that. Everyone, Dick Pound included, is going to die someday. I’m simply compiling a list of the Top Ten ways in which I’d like to see him pass on.

It was extremely hard to limit this to ten items, by the way, so feel free to add any you think should have made the cut in the “comments” section.

Top 10 Ways I’d Like to See Dick Pound Die

10) Starving to death following bankruptcy after being forced to pay accused dopers’ legal fees.

Eurosport reports that Ivan Basso has been officially cleared to race. Note how they’ve sloppily insisted that Basso “served out a four-month suspension having been linked with the Operation Puerto doping probe”. That’s the biggest syntactic dry-hump since Super Bowl XXXVIII’s “wardrobe malfunction”. Using the verb “served” would imply that Basso’s suspension was a predetermined sentence, handed down by some sort judicial body after a legitimate trial. And it was nothing of the kind.

Ah, Paris-Roubaix. There is no finer example of bike-racing spectacle. Fabian Cancellara proved once again that the secret to victory is to keep your head up, attack once, and finish alone. Most news reports state that the CSC rider “dropped” Vlad Gusev to make good his escape, but this implies the Swiss rider made specific efforts to do so; a more accurate statement would be that Cancellara flat rode the Russian off his wheel. Walter Godefroot called it perfectly (search “Cancellara”) in selecting the former maillot jaune, as it would have taken a freight train to stop his charge to the finish. And strangely enough, that almost happened. In the end, though, the transient locomotive’s only impact on the race was to annoy Tom Boonen and to disqualify a chase group of Leif Hoste, Vlad Gusev and Peter Van Petegem, who apparently violated a UCI regulation against independent thought by realizing that they could cross the tracks without getting hit by the train

It’s baaack! And you thought I had gotten sick of it. Today’s match-up: Utah’s own Dave Zabriskie vs. the 1970 counter-culture classic Zabriskie Point. Click here for a listing of the previous battles.

Communism! That is the only way to describe this story on the restoration of the Arenburg cobbles in Paris-Roubaix. Don’t these silly Frenchmen understand? The correct way to fund a sports event is to get a huge corporation to throw money at it, not to waste public funds that ought to be going to letting the people know when the risk of terror attack is elevated.

Without sponsors, how will people know what to buy? See, look here: how does HealthNet get faster? Not with drugs, or with training, but by riding a Cannondale. Now I know that when I want to go faster, I just buy a Cannondale. How hard is that to understand? No wonder French cycling is so poor at the moment; they don’t have corporations sponsoring everything and letting them know what gear to buy.

The Italians clearly get it. For the past 3 years, if you wanted to be a fast sprinter, it was obvious – you just used Fassa Bortolo concrete. And then, after everyone who wanted to be a fast sprinter had used their concrete, the company pulled out. Now, the company is planning to make a concrete for fast GC riders, which will let them be a sponsor again. I’m telling you, the system works.

Only when jerks (like these Frenchmen) screw around with the system do people get hurt. Like when Sony-Eriksson thought that its wireless phone service made you a faster rider than Boygues Telecom or T-Mobile’s wireless phone services. Turns out it doesn’t, so the company pulled out, and these guys are out of work because of it. Mark my words: someone will be watching Roubaix next spring, and when the riders hit Arenburg, he’ll be frozen with fear, unable to know which beer to buy. And he’s gonna have to wait all the way ’til Amstel Gold to find out.

In less sarcastic news today, Charly Gaul has died. The rider, dubbed the “Angel of the Mountains” is widely regarded as one of the best climbers of all time, and the first “pure climber” to win the Tour. His gutsy performances, especially in rough weather, are the inheritence of today’s top mountain men, including Jose Rujano, who was recently awarded Venezuelan Sportsman of the Year. Gaul was two days shy of his 73rd birthday.

Despite that sadder news, from Luxembourg to Venezuela, the Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, Festivus, and whatever other spirits you may believe in, continue to grow. If you’ve ever been curious as to what the holiday season means to the big names in pro cycling, wonder no longer.

Whew. What a freakin’ week. Time to go back to the states and get a job or something.

Bike racing draws in stupidity like a vacuum. And, even though Laurent Fignon became le professeur simply because he had spent some time in college and wore funny glasses, I’m not talking about the intellectual quality of the riders, here. I’m talking about things like BioPace and performance-enhancing coffee . Or Cyclo-Zen, which suggested that your inability to climb might not be due your poor watts/mass ratio at lactate threshold, but instead to your lack of mental toughness. And though each of these things is pretty silly in its own way, by far the dumbest thing I’ve ever come across during my (admittedly short) time in cycling is Dopers Suck.