It’s a question I’ve turned over many a time in my head. To an American, it seems like a gimme for lunks in shoulder pads. American football players are universally acknowledged as big, dumb sacks of meat, while most cyclists this side of the pond are skinny, smooth-legged oddballs with the means to buy three-thousand trinkets toys on an almost yearly basis.

But upon closer scrutiny, the question is not so obvious. After all, every NFL player has to enroll in something that is at least nominally a higher education; two-time Tour de France winner Laurent Fignon was known as “the Professor” because he had round glasses, and - unlike most of the peloton - briefly went to college.

Furthermore, many pro football players go on to notable secondary careers in acting, car sales, and politics. While there’s no shortage of talk about the political futures of a certain Texan, most cyclists seem to have a way of living out their non-sporting years broke and miserable.

While quirky figures like Bob Roll and Dave Zabriskie carry air of scramble-headed genius about them, you’ve really got to wonder about David Clinger’s disappearing/reappearing facial tattoo, and Frank Vandenbroucke’s disappearing/reappearing, well, sanity. Sure, football players do weird stuff, too, but when you go to a stripclub with $81,000 of your cash in a garbage bag, you’ve got be ready to lay down the law.

But the most damning evidence against the smartness of cyclists is this: in the entire history of the NFL, I can only think of a single touchdown lost because someone celebrated a few seconds too soon. Granted it was in the Super Bowl, but still - cycling’s best racers continue to lose entire events by putting their arms up before they cross the line. How smart can you be if you toss away the wins you’re being paid millions of dollars to get?

Forget drugs. This is what makes me fear for the future of the sport.

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Instead of reporting on cycling news this week, I’m going to turn it into a fun, interactive quiz game called “Did We Know Know This?” I’ll present you with a news story from the past few days, and then you try and guess whether or not we knew it already. All set? Great! Here we go:

Question #1: Bo Hamburger admited to using EPO during his cycling career. Did We Know This?
Answer: Yes. In fact, Hamburger was the first professional cyclist to return a positive EPO test, back in 2001. Months later, he became the first athlete to be cleared of an EPO positive, because his B sample wasn’t quite positive enough. However, Hamburger maintains he only doped between 1995 and 1997, most likely to keep his feud with the Danish Cycling Federation alive and kicking.

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After the omnipresent specter of doping, cycling’s biggest problem is an obvious shortage of Oligarchical Oversight Organizations Whose Names Readily Form Acronyms. While existing OOOWNRFAs such as the UCI, ASO and WADA, control a few important aspects of professional cycling, the sport still lacks a unified body with ultimate authority over who can race and who cannot. Thus, I am unilaterally declaring myself the Peloton Access Restriction Committee, referred to with more brevity by its French acronym, the CRAP.

The findings of the innaugural congress of the CRAP are as follows:

Andreas Klöden may not race in an Astana kit without the rest of his team. It is the decision of this committee that he instead must choose whether the correct Anglicization of his name is with an “o” (no umlaut) or an “oe”, and use the resulting moniker as his team name.

Michael Rasmussen may continue to race, but only on pancake flat courses guaranteed to end in a group sprint, or multi-sport events involving some form of competitive eating. At international events and all non-EU border crossings (Mexico, for example) Rasmussen’s shoes must also be smuggled through customs in boxes of artificial hemoglobin.

Danilo DiLuca is henceforth required to race continuously until Alessandro Petacchi suffers a mid-race asthma attack that actually requires the use of a rescue inhaler, or until the Italian Justice System begins to make sense.

Team Relax-Gam may only race the 2007 Vuelta if all their Operation Puerto suspects participate in the event, and agree to donate a pint of blood before every mountain and time trial stage.

Floyd Landis may not compete in the Leadville 100 unless he uses his “Praying Landis” time trial position. Landis may only leave the aerobars if Lance Armstrong uses the Kids on Bikes keynote address he’s attending instead of Leadville to confess to doping.

The top two finishers in this year’s Tour de France are hereby suspended from racing until they admit that it is not only possible, but indeed likely, that someone ahead of them at the Tour was cheating. Similarly, until Dario Cioni admits that at least two days of the ‘07 Tour totally sucked, he shall be considered mentally unfit to start.

Patrick Sinkewitz, Mattias Kessler, Jan Ullrich, Tyler Hamilton, Alexandre Vinokourov, Cristian Moreni, Raimondas Rumsas, Dario Frigo, Roberto Heras and Danilo Hondo may all return to ProTour racing at any time, but only as stokers on tandems piloted by Frank Vandenbroucke.

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You’ve probably wondered how I decide which races I’m gonna talk about here on Cyclocosm. Well, there’s a method to my madness; I call it the “HR Department Solution”. Obviously, at this point in the season, there are more races than I have time to cover, so when some race I’ve never heard of before, like Paris-Camembert, appears on my computer screen, this is my process:

1. It’s sounds foreign, but not so foreign that it might be in Asia or Africa. So I’ll keep reading.
2. “huh, isn’t Camembert a type of cheese?” Food names, like Amstel Gold or Classica Haribo, are good signs.
3. Click the link and go immediately to results - What? A French podium sweep?
4. Obivously, a good candidate for the circular file.

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Only hours left but it came to me in a cocaine-and-Cadbury-egg induced haze. The race will go off on muddy cobbles but under clear skies with Paoli Bettini in the early break. He’ll get clear and stay away until the Muur when the ghost of Gino Bartali will emerge from the nearby church and force him to stop, enraged that people would hold a race on Easter.

The phantom will craft a new body for himself out of Flandrian mud and Bettini’s broken rib, and begin issuing righteous beatdowns to all intoxicated spectators. This will disturb il Grillo only slightly, since it will be plainly clear to everyone that he would have won the race, and he’d been planning to retire afterwards anyway due to DNA testing.

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Not sure how many of you will find this useful, but here goes: alcohol has long been used to augment classics of cinema, and I have here attempted to carry that spirit over into the classics of cycling. I know that most of Cycling.TV’s races air between 7 and 9am EDT, but that’s what they invented Bloody Marys and Mimosas for, right? I think the real issue may be that college students, who seem to find the most use for such boozy diversions, are either asleep or racing on early Sunday when the races are run. I suppose you could do it to their on-demand race highlights, but where’s the fun in that? Anyway, this should make tomorrow’s Liege a blast, no matter how conservatively it’s raced.

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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.

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OK, so you got Christmas, the first night of Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa off. Break’s over kiddies, and school’s back in session. First item of business is a late Festivus, beginning with the traditional Airing of Grievances, otherwise known as the Worst of Cycling. Unit of measure for worstness is one Pavel, defined as the amount of frustration required to raise my systolic blood pressure 10mm of mercury. So, in no particular order, here is an abbreviated list (otherwise, we’d be here ’til Groundhog’s Day) of the Worst of the 2005 Pro Cycling season.

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Now we’re talking. The drummer of one of the all-time great metal bands versus the eternal challenger for the TdF title. Both German-born, both constantly disappointing me, both with the same last name. Oh, yeah, this is a gonna be a good one, folks. Far better than these other whimpy fights.

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I really don’t know how these two combatants got tangled up. I mean, can you think of two things less related than a well-regarded vintage bike tubing and a smooth finishing, oddly glowing malt beverage? I guess it might be a make-up call for last week’s pathetically obvious battle. Rounds 1 and 2 can be found here and here, respectively. Now let’s get down to seeing which steel is more real.

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