You're my wife now, Dave.

This year’s race got off to a predictable start with Fabian Cancellara winning his 5th prologue in imperious style. Camcellara had hoped that this win and subsequent x-raying of his bike would finally kill the rumours about his *mechanical doping* (the asterisk is the blog sarcastic air quote) at this year’s Flanders and Roubaix:

X-raying and not a lead jerkin in sight. Have they not seen 'The Hulk'?

Sadly for Fabian, the results proved inconclusive:

Enjoy Coke

In a further attempt to dispel “the rumours” Cancellara quipped to journalists: “After they checked my bike, I said, ‘You should also check the motor: Me!’”. Despite this evidence to the contrary, Cancellara has had to develop a pretty decent sense of humour in recent months as surely as his years of hard work have developed his *bionic* legs. And any sane person believes that to be true – Cancellara’s victories are thanks solely to his physical abilities and hard work. Although some – those nearer the Gazza end of the sanity continuum – might suggest his similarity to the Six Million Dollar Man doesn’t stop at bionic limbs. For this Tour has revealed that he switches his team radio to “transmit” by tweaking his right nipple:

The simple act of squeezing together his index finger and thumb enables him to both send updates to the team car and a frisson of excitement to himself. By all accounts by twisting his left nipple, Fabian can control the speed of his Gruber electric assist.

His motor was put to good use over the cobbles of the Ardennes as he successfully guided Andy Schleck through the treacherous cobbles (insofar as cobbles are capable of treachery) in the final 30kms of stage 3. Of course, Fabian’s guidance of Frank was less successful but 1 out of 2′s not bad. That stage also produced the shock of the week if most commentators are to be believed. They all professed that feather weight Contador would cross the cobbles of Paris-Roubaix with all the grace, and ultimately success, of a drunk clown crossing a tight-rope. I can only guess at the number of complementary croissants were spat onto keyboards as Contador crossed the line just behind the lead group.

Crash! Bang! Wallop!

As with every Tour there’s been no shortage of crashes in this opening week. Stage 2 in particular, as the riders descended the Stockeu, turned into a decidedly disastrous dress rehearsal of “Le Tour on Ice”. La Grosse Chute – in which every rider was obliged to fall off at least once – put an end to Christian Vande Velde Tour with broken ribs and Frank Schleckt’s was over the next day with a broken collar bone but the “Bad Luck of the Week” award has to go to Armstrong. His legendary bike handling skills appear to have deserted him to such an extent that Denny Menchov has been giving him some tips on staying upright. In fact, so far in this Tour Armstrong’s been on the floor more times than an MP waiting to vote. For someone with GC aspirations that’s bad enough but let’s not forget that Armstrong’s approaching an age where having a “nasty fall” could leave him hospitalised for months. Finally on stage 8 to Morzine-Avoriaz, Armstrong’s bad luck put an end to his challenge for an eighth title – he came off his bike 3 times and lost nearly 12 minutes to the day’s winner Schleck. It was sad to see that the days when Armstrong was able to make his own luck are well and truly gone but at least he can use the bad luck as an excuse as a crutch for his failure to win. And if he keeps falling off at this rate, it’s crutches that he’ll need.

Just as Armstrong’s luck seems to have gone, so too has the dignity of QuickStep’s Carlos Barredo and Caisse d’Epargne’s Rui Alberto Costa. For there are few more pathetic sights than that of a grown man dressed in lycra scrabbling around on the floor with another grown man also dressed in lycra:

A deleted scene from the BBC series Rome.

The fight reached its climax at the end of stage 6 as Costa removed his front wheel and set about Barredo’s head and neck. As bicycle sourced weapons go, a front wheel isn’t going to do much harm to your opponent – unless you throw it like Odd Job’s bowler hat – but I suppose, save an empty bidon, it was all he could removed while he was still in a rage. Costa must be cursing the day bike manufacturers introduced the integrated seat post.

Picture taken seconds before Lance poked me in the eye

But it seemed as if it had all became a little too much for Armstrong as he crossed the line to finish 3rd in the 2010 Tour of Luxembourg. Because as he did so a heckler dared to cry “Liar! Cheat!” from the crowd. And again as Armstrong was being interviewed came the cat-call “Liar! Cheat!”. This was a heckle too far for Lance, and out went the statesman’s poise and in came the bad attitude.

“Come and do that to my face!” Armstrong repeatedly spat back as he mounted the barrier and curled a finger.

Armstrong followed this outburst up by claiming, with some exasperation, that he pitied “the fool who come and do that to my face!”. But fears that the exchange might escalate from handbags into a full blow ruckus – possibly involving a cabbage cannon – were thankfully not realised. And as Armstrong was lead away by his security guard to enjoy a glass of ice cold milk he could be heard muttering “I ain’t flying on no plane with no crazy fool”.

Hear Europeans Boo!

I’m sure you’ll be amazed to learn that the account above doesn’t strictly follow actual events. If you’d like to see what actually happened then have a look at the video below.

Warning: This video contains 5 minutes of booing and particularly grating European voices dully calling “Laaance!”

How to solve a problem like returning dopers?

This particular headache is in no small part due to cycling behaving like a jilted lover who’s hit the bottle to try and forget those those painful memories of someone you loved cheating on you. They’ve been mulling over that pint now for 12 years – ever since the Festina Affair – pretending they’re searching for the answers to their problems but in reality all they’re doing is hiding from them.

But suddenly cycling has been shaken from it’s stupor. The ex is back and they’re looking as good as ever:

Vino’s Got Class

How time has changed since Vino first last crossed the line last first in Liege. Gone was the adulation of the fans and the plaudits of the commentators. Replaced by the jeers of derision (“Boo”) and whispers of suspicion (“Did he just steal my wallet?”). And an overwhelming fear that Vino had just besmirched the otherwise smirchless Old Lady in a way that previous winners like Alejandro Valverde, Tyler Hamilton and Frank Vandenbrouke couldn’t possibly imagine. Even if you drew them an extremely graphic picture of the besmirching using cuttings from Nuts magazine.

Spare a thought for poor Vino himself though. He’s completely dumbfounded by this reaction: “All I did was sleep with your grandma and you’re like all “boo!” on my arse. Give me a break, will you?” – I’m paraphrasing there, but you get the drift.  He seems totally oblivious to his betrayal and remains resolute in his refusal to admit any guilt. He has gone as far as referring euphemistically to his “dark years” but this only serves to makes it sound as if he’d gone a bit over the top with the fake tan rather than taking part in a systematic and premeditated doping regime. Surely if David Millar has shown the dopers anything, it’s that to be accepted back in the fans hearts you got to show contrition.

“Hang Him!”

So how should we treat returning dopers?

Some will claim that letting a former doper return to the peleton, particularly one who continues to admit their own guilt, is like letting a crocked accountant run your finances. It all comes down to an issue of trust – and even if they are now perfectly straight, if they’ve seen the error of their ways, they will always carry an air of suspicion with them. If they’re subjected to the same controls as all other riders and they continue to pass those tests we have little choice but to let them ride.

I still think that cycling would have a better, brighter future without Vino coming back – let alone winning a monument but until the day he does finally retire we’ll just have to wince at the thought of a relationship that could have been so beautiful but turned out to be so painful.

Garmin-Slipstream put out his blood values for both haemoglobin count – the concentration of oxygen carrying protein in red blood cells – as well as, what’s becoming the de facto measure of cheating, his “Off Score”.

Now calling it the “Off Score” makes it sound a little more Terry Thomas – “Your Off Score’s really not on, you absoulte scoundral!” – than it probably is. Here’s how Garmin explain it:

The Off Score, which takes into account the relationship between haemoglobin and reticulocyte concentration is currently used as the reference point for assessing an athlete’s blood profile. Since reticulocytes tend to decrease when haemoglobin is artificially high, the combination of a high haemoglobin and a low reticulocyte raises the Off Score.

Not quite as funny as it first sounded, I think you’ll agree. Maybe closer to some of Thomas’ later work but certainly not up there with Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or Monte Carlo or Bust.

Anyway, much was also made of Bradley’s weight loss in the build up to the Tour – in the 9 months prior to the Tour he lost 7 kilos. Which although might not win him the crown of “Weight Watchers Slimmer of the Year” it’s no men feat for someone who’s not actually a fatso. Of course, for the anti-doping cynics out there this is a hard fact to believe – and Bradley’s partly responisble for this. Judging by the account in his autobiogrphy Bradley used to be an almost Flintoff standard drinker and his cake consumption is estimated to be the same as that of a single woman in her early 40′s.

Which is why Garmin have been forced to release Bradley’s cake and beer intake levels for this year’s Tour:

Bradley Wiggins releases beer/cake values taken during and immediately after the 2009 Tour

At first glance, you might think that this is simply a pathetic attempt at humour, very badly done in Microsoft Paint – you’d be wrong, though. It was actually done using Adobe Photoshop.

As you can see, during the whole of the Tour both his beer and cake intake were very low. There’s only a slight blip plotted on the cake line when Bradley accidentally ate half a croissant. No-one is quite sure how this happened, although it’s currently believed that a member of Saxo-Bank may have spiked his porridge with it. His consumption levels stayed constant until he hit Paris and, as clearly shown above, beer imbibment rose markedly and he Katona’d it on the cake front before returning to a more normal level.

There we have it, categoric proof to support Wiggins’ weight loss based performance increases. We can only hope this will be enough to satisfy the doubters or, at the very least, stop them moaning on and on and on for a couple of weeks.

Do my thighs look extremely powerful in this?

That’s right, your clothes:

Nicole Cooke, the Olympic and world road race champion, is likely to spend the rest of the season racing in GB colours after the collapse of her Vision 1 team.

Come on, give her a break. Just because she’s a woman surely there was something you could have written about other than the clothes she’s wearing!

And this year brings the returns of two particularly heinous  drug cheats – Floyd Landis and Alexander Vinokourov. Boo! Hiss!

Interestingly both of these riders could have been back sooner. Vino was caught blood doping in 2007 and only received a one year ban. And Landis was caught “Spunk doping” at the 2006 TdF whined “I didn’t do it” like a child all the way to the CAS so his 2 year ban didn’t start until September 2007.

Anyway, with their return to the sport, they bring the dark cloud, or at the very least the purple haze, of doping back to a sport that’s trying desperately to clean up it’s image.

Fortunately, it seems cycling can rest easy and not worry that these two’s will further sully the reputation of the sport they helped to all but destroy as both Landis and Vino’s comebacks have been nothing short of ridiculous.

Utah Sinners

Landis has hit the headlines again as he tries to promote the Tour of Utah. He’s done this by having a double-header (fnar, fnar) with the Utah Jazz’s Deron Williams – a handicapped bike race and then a basketball penalty shootout thingy.

Here they are pretending to literally duke it out before metaphorically duke it out. Do you see? Do you?

Commentators are still baffled as to why cycling fails to attract ethnic minorities

Brilliant stuff really.

Landis now riders for a US based outfit called OUCH – apparently named after the noise you make ripping a testosterone patch off of your nutsack. For the cycling leg of the challenge he was to school Williams in the finer points of time-trialling – which he foolishly did a little too well as Williams beat him, albeit with a 60 second head start.

Maybe Landis agreed to take part in this challenge because he’s a benevolent soul who genuinely wanted to promote the Tour of Utah. Maybe he did it to keep up with the Armstrongs. Or maybe he did it to remind us that he’s not just the Tour’s highest profile drugs cheat, but a bit of a loon as well.

What ever the reason, it’s made him look like a fool.

Maybe I’ll Just Slip In Through the Back Door So’s Not to Be Noticed

If Landis’ return made him look like a fool – Vino’s has made him look like a complete nutcase.

Taking delusional self-belief to the next level, he wore the most amazingly awful jersey I think I’ve ever seen. In the Kazak national colours it was adorned with a photo of himself – himself! – and the slogan “Vino 4 Ever”:

Wracked with the self-loathing of a convicted drugs cheat, Vino gives himself the old up-yours

Even if he’s turned up completely naked after OD’ing on viagra he’d have come across as less cocky. Truly astonishing.

Although this custom jersey may be the clue as to why it’s taken him a year after his ban finished to get back on the bike – it’s clearly taken Vino’s mum a very long time to make.

What’s even more amazing is Vino beleif that Astana will not only want him back but actually need him back.

What I think is clear from both Landis’ and Vino’s comebacks is just what a long time 2 years is in sport and just how much cycling has moved on since they were banned. And regardless of what each of these riders might think, I don’t think the world of cycling will be a better place with them back.

Alberto and Lance in Happier Times

OK, so I realise that this is possibly one of the worst Photoshop efforts every to see the light of day, and it’s based on one of Armstrongs facial expression captured on the podium but, unlike the old man in the Alps, I think it’s got legs.

Both Harold and Albert and Alberto and Lance were trapped by circumstance both desperately wishing that they could escape from the other but equally both secretly knowing that they needed the other.

Of course, now he’s formed team RadioShack Lance is finally be rid of the ungrateful Alberto but, mark my words, he’ll miss him soon enough.

The pain of an injection in the buttock never lessens

Mikel Astarloza is reported in the Guardian as saying:

“…he had no idea how he tested positive for the endurance-booster EPO in a sample taken before the race.”

Obviously, just as performance enhancing drugs have no place in pro-cycling, so casual racism made popular by 1970′s comic creations have no place in cycle blogging but am I the only one who thinks that Astarloza is trying to channel Fawlty Towers’ Manuel by essentially claiming “I know nothing” possibly in the hope that we’ll see him as a hard done by idiot ignorant of his crimes rather than a filthy drugs cheat. Initial reports that Astraloza also claimed the rat he’s keeping as a pet was in fact a hamster were later revealed as nonesense.

I didn’t do it!

Just like a child with chocolate round his mouth denying he ate the last biscuit, the motto of the doper is “I didn’t do it”. In the most high profile of recent cases, Floyd Landis, took his “I didn’t do it” as far as the CAS. In claiming he’d no idea how he’d become “super spunky” over night, he rather disturbingly added that his high testosterone levels were “produced by my own organism” despite those levels being more than twice those of the 1980 East German Women’s Olympic Shot Put team combined.

So despite his denial, it’s not looking good for Astraloza.

He is, of course, innocent until proven guilty so the anti-doping vultures circling above the ailing Astraloza will have to wait for the results from his B sample before the can descend and peck his eyes out. Even if his B test does come back negative to clear him of these charges there’s still a 50:50 chance he doped. And let’s not forget that when the US sprinter Marion Jones was cleared of EPO use thanks to a negative B sample back in 2006, it turned out to be the dope smoke from the fire that eventually ended her career.

And it seems that Astraloza has been around enough to realise this:

“The damage has been done, I’m innocent and I’m being accused of something I haven’t done. This is a very serious situation.”

I bloody well knew it!

Most worryingly for me, the Astarloza affair has revealed a side effect of the witch hunt against the dopers that’s far worse than doping itself: it’s turned me into a cynic of near Kimmage proportions. When I heard a rider had been suspended for doping my first thought was “I knew it was too good to be true” and on reading Astarloza’s denial all I could think was “Well, you would say that.”

Having said that, I’m not quite at the bitter, forgotten, old Lemond level of showering Contador’s parade with “VO2 Max” flavoured piss – we should celebrate the class of his win with out putting our hands over our mouths and muttering to ourselves “unless you’re a drugs cheat”.

Becuase if we suspect everyone who achieves anything in cycling of cheating, what future will there be in the sport at all?