Final Protective Fire

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

 

We've been watching the Tour de France this summer. Interestingly, my wife and I were taking a shuttle van to the airport at the end of May and we were riding with a guy who was in the business of sports conditioning consulting, and consulted to several professional cyclists. In the half hour ride, we discussed the upcoming tour with him and expressed our dissatisfaction with how the sport had been handling doping and other cheating. We were big Floyd Landis fans and we are still puzzled about what credibility to give the lab results that resulted in Floyd's loss of the title. The trainer told us that he thought Vinokourov was the rider to follow this year.

Now, its gotten completely ridiculous. A handful of lesser lights have been thrown out of this Tour for doping, and then Vinokourov was thrown out together with the whole Astana team ( taking out then-fifth-place Andreas Kloden as well, although I've not seen any specific allegations against him ).

Now, after a brilliant defense of his yellow jersey, Michael Rasmussan was fired by team Rabobank and withdrawn from the Tour for lying to them about where he was training - the same issue that had earlier caused the Danish federation to expel him from the Danish cycling team for the upcoming Olympics.

Now I'm completely disgusted. Evidently the most honest sport in the world actually is Professional Wrestling. I've got to go to Vince McMahon for a sport with integrity. At least we all know how its fixed.

Robin 5:24 PM