Cyclocosm

Looking to defend its ‘World’s Least Contiguous Stage Race” title, the Tour de Georgia announced it’s 2006 race course today. The route forms a rough northbound stepladder from Macon to Tennessee, staggering East/West like a drunken redneck all the way. Details and the biggest photo I could find here. It’s all the same to Gibo…

As the old saying goes, you know it’s gonna be a s&!††¥ day when the lead story is Ag2r becomes 20th ProTour team. Actually, I just made that saying up. But it surely is a harbinger of doom when the big story was a fait accompli last month, right? Because now there’s a…

One of the nicer things about having poor Italian and Spanish (and also being asleep when Europe wakes up) is that I don’t get drawn into these “no story” stories. Somewhere, a comments section has a link to a Todociclismo article (Babelfish may prove to be of some assistance to my fellow Anglophones) reporting that…

Arg. I am so sick of reporting doping news. But I suppose if I didn’t want to do that, then I picked the wrong sport, yeah? Anyway, the first rider to lose his Grand Tour title due to a dope offense requires some attention, right? Here’s a stack of rider reactions (following a brief summary),…

Yes, so they think it is conclusive this time, and there really is EPO (or evidence of it) in Roberto Heras’ urine sample. Though under normal circumstances, this would mean a two-year ban from UCI competition and a further two years of ProTour non-participation, it probably just means about five more years of legal struggle,…

The nice thing about having a comments section is you can let other people report on breaking news for you. Like yesterday, when someone dropped the comment on Heras’ inconclusive B sample. 24 hours later, confusion still reigns. Perhaps the clearest explanation comes from ProCycling’s story, though you could search all day and not find…

People often ask me “How exactly does being independent make your cycling page better? Doesn’t it mean you just don’t have any real sponsors?” Well, yes, that is one (somewhat simple-minded) distinction. But here is another: Cyclingnews recently published this review about Zipp’s 303 ‘cross wheelset. I felt it was a pretty even-handed article, overall…

Most team training camps in the Alps involve reconnaissance on the big Alpine passes of the Tour. Not so for T-Mobile, who, perhaps realizing that heavy snowfall would foil any cycling plans this time of year, engaged in a military style team-building exercise. Once entirely the domain of overpaid business executives with an unhealthy fixation…