Tour over before it starts.....
I cannot believe we are waking up today, one day before the Tour de France starts, finding out that Ivan Basso and Jan Ullrich are OUT OF THE TOUR!!!
I thought my eyes were deceiving me when I saw a news line item on ESPN.com. It's not April Fools, but mark it down this very well could be FAR worse than the Festina affair from 1998.
How in the hell the governing bodies can INCLUDE the team Astana-Wurth, but EXCLUDE a long list of other riders not on the team is beyond me. Astana-Wurth appears to have had a team doping program in place, and many of their rides are excluded but not all. Reports state all riders on the team weren't participating, but enough of the team and team management were involved as they were the main source of this entire investigation. Regardless if Alexandre Vinokourov is guilty or not the entire organization should suffer the penalty of being ejected from the Tour, but as of now they are still allowed to race. That's a joke.
All of the 58 names supposedly involved with Operacion Puerto are accused of blood doping. The latest evidence is damning and overwhelming they say, and from my viewpoint it better well be 100% accurate.
At this point if you are one of those 58 your cycling career is in boiling water. The actual details of the evidence isn't being provided other than to say if your name is on the list you are screwed. We can only hope authorities have done their due diligence to ensure the guilt of those 58 riders.
ESPN reports the riders excluded will not be replaced in the Tour, meaning a smaller starting field this year.
To think I was actually looking forward to watching tomorrow. While this bit of chaos is causing major concern for the sport as a whole there's a good chance we'll be seeing Landis, Leipheimer and Hincapie swapping the yellow jersey around. Here we thought the Tour was going to be wide open this year, little did we know huh.
While we're at it how about this thought. Suppose ALL of the riders implicated in Operacion Puerto are found to be guilty of doping. Ok, now how about Lance?
I thought my eyes were deceiving me when I saw a news line item on ESPN.com. It's not April Fools, but mark it down this very well could be FAR worse than the Festina affair from 1998.
How in the hell the governing bodies can INCLUDE the team Astana-Wurth, but EXCLUDE a long list of other riders not on the team is beyond me. Astana-Wurth appears to have had a team doping program in place, and many of their rides are excluded but not all. Reports state all riders on the team weren't participating, but enough of the team and team management were involved as they were the main source of this entire investigation. Regardless if Alexandre Vinokourov is guilty or not the entire organization should suffer the penalty of being ejected from the Tour, but as of now they are still allowed to race. That's a joke.
All of the 58 names supposedly involved with Operacion Puerto are accused of blood doping. The latest evidence is damning and overwhelming they say, and from my viewpoint it better well be 100% accurate.
At this point if you are one of those 58 your cycling career is in boiling water. The actual details of the evidence isn't being provided other than to say if your name is on the list you are screwed. We can only hope authorities have done their due diligence to ensure the guilt of those 58 riders.
ESPN reports the riders excluded will not be replaced in the Tour, meaning a smaller starting field this year.
To think I was actually looking forward to watching tomorrow. While this bit of chaos is causing major concern for the sport as a whole there's a good chance we'll be seeing Landis, Leipheimer and Hincapie swapping the yellow jersey around. Here we thought the Tour was going to be wide open this year, little did we know huh.
While we're at it how about this thought. Suppose ALL of the riders implicated in Operacion Puerto are found to be guilty of doping. Ok, now how about Lance?
posted by NashvilleCyclist.com at 6/30/2006 07:55:00 AM
1 Comments:
I've got to say... as uncomfortable as it may be, if Lance was consistently beating these guys (Ulrich and Basso), it makes you wonder if he was ahead of the trend in doping techniques, or if some designer biochemistry played a part in his success.
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