News Archive

It’s in all the papers today: rumors of a split stage to end the ’06 Giro d’Italia. Split stages have been a bit of a bugaboo for the peloton in the past. The stage (or stages, depending on how you look at it) would consist of an uphill timetrial in the AM and the final…

It’s barely mid-November, and already Jan Ullrich is getting it in gear, gaming up for what could be his most difficult Tour de France to lose since, like, 1998. Good for him. Chances are, the big German won’t have to worry about George Hincapie; he’s been selected as a “protected rider,” which has been an…

Yes, kiddies, today’s lesson is on the three R’s of off-season cycling journalism. First step is Reduce: Check out Cycloblog; maybe four, five posts in the past month? And TDFBlog hasn’t posted since, what, like August? Even Cyclingnews has to cut down from its three-news-posts-a-day peak. Of course, you’ll see no post frequency reduction here….

So, in case you missed it, the big news is Roberto Heras has tested positive for EPO. Coverage has been pretty wide-spread so far. While Heras has maintained his innocence and blamed a lab mix-up for the positive, the news couldn’t have come at a worse time for his team. The positive sample, from Stage…

Or more accurately, “non-negative”, though if it’s not negative, there’s really only one thing it could be. According to Cyclingnews, the non-negative A sample came from Stage 20, in which Heras rode a blistering TT, coming in second and expanding his lead over Denis Menchov. He could, of course, still be exonerated by a clean…

So the first annual Red Bull Road Rage went off without a hitch this weekend, though whether or not you want to call it a success would depend on your point of view. Winner of the both the Time Trial and Pack Race events was former DH MTB World Champ, and amatuer botanist Myles Rockwell….

Since the news broke that AMGEN would sponsor the 2006 Tour of California (now with stage details), editorials have sprung up everywhere, saying essentially “Hey, don’t listen to those naysayers! It’s ok that guys that make EPO are sponsoring this race. Sponsorships make for strange bedfellows, and this will be a great race no matter…

Alright, I admit it: I made a blunder yesterday, on par with the Boston Globe’s April Fool’s Day Debacle. It seems that Valsir is a subdivision of Fondital, which means that the change in co-sponsor of next year’s Lampre team will most likely not affect Igor Astarloa’s position on that sqaud, as I reported yesterday….

Yesterday, the Tour of California (thankfully, not Tour de California) was just a grim, jagged profile in the night. Now all of a sudden *BAM* the watertight compartments are flooded and Leo’s waist-deep in 35-degree seawater, trying to find an axe to hack off Kate Winslet’s handcuffs. Congrats to the Tour of California marketing board…

Maybe you thought that Erik Zabel ended his T-Mobile career with a win back in October? Well, seems you were wrong. The Green-Jersey-Wearingest rider in the history of cycling didn’t totally finish racing for T-Mobile until today, when he and Rolf Aldag defeated all comers at the Dortmund Six-Day. Given the, uh, somewhat shady history…