Saturday, May 05, 2007

Saturday Roundup

News
Eurosport carries the "sacred union" piece noting yesterday's meeting of cycling's power cabal : UCI head Pat McQuaid, Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme, and team' representative Patrick Lefevere. Cycling is in safe hands with these guys making policy.

The Fort Worth Star Telegram
writes a short piece about Floyd Landis' scheduled FFF Town Hall meeting tomorrow night, May 6, at the Dallas-Fort Worth Marriott North. Just the basics ... and gets Landis' age wrong,

Cycling News Letters prints two more,this time on the positive side, about Floyd Landis' fund raising tactic of charging $25 to have a photo taken with him at certain FFF events. As both letters point out, he is fighting for his livelihood. One mentions getting a free photo taken with Floyd at the Tour of Georgia, while the other,written by Gary Lee, notes something which seems to have escaped the critics:

These days $25 is a small amount to pay for a big time celeb, or any celeb's signature. Ask a collector how much Jordan, Magic Johnson, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Derek Jeter, Wayne Gretzky, or even Pete Rose, etc., charge for their autographs! A lot more than Landis and they do it for profit, not to fund a legal battle who's outcome will make or break his career!

Read on and you'll find a reader is disenchanted and disillusioned with Landis, Basso and Ullrich. Further down, Kyle McClain notes that, guilty or innocent, Landis and the rest of the cycling world can't trust the LNDD.


Blogs
12 String Musings is appalled by the amount of US tax dollars that are wasted by USADA in the Landis case. He also gives TbV a plug that we'll shamelessly quote in "what they say"

Pommi will be out training hard for the next little while. Though there were plenty of sparks early this week in the Landis case, it's the same ol' rhetoric now from the usual cast of characters over on the DPF. He compares the repetitive charade to the German classic film"Dinner for One". He does credit Travis Tygart for one good statement, and shares an appreciation of some bits of the current Bicycling Magazine.

DopingBlog is all for transparency in the Landis, case, and is hoping to actually see the hearings on line, or somewhere.

shughesx thinks that maybe the whole peloton is juicing, he doesn't really care, so why pick on Floyd Landis? He does thinks that Paris Hilton should be accountable for her misdeeds.

Pudgy Cyclist that Loves Climbing just got around this week to talking about the experience of riding in the Tour of Ephrata, and riding past the Landis parents' PA home. It's near the "Center of the Universe", being the intersection of North, East, South, and West Farmersville Rd.

Bike Training DVD thinks that Floyd Landis and Lance Armstrong should be appointed the task of developing the new "Tour de France" which should be moved to the USA, immediately.

Discount Motorcycle Tires writes about the confusion surrounding the Landis case, and that confusion is evident in some of what the poster writes, especially that Landis has already been stripped of his 2006 Tour de France title, he has not.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is little more than a week left before the Landis hearing, and I have been searching my home for about 6 months for an old B.C. comic strip I had saved. The strip is about 10 years old, and I still cannot find it. So I did a last ditch effort last night searching the Web in hopes of finding an archive, only to learn that Mr. Hart had passed away on April 8, 2007.

In his memory, I feel compelled to describe as best I can the strip I wanted to share.

The opening panel had Wiley, the one legged character with a pegged leg (this is important for the pun) on his soapbox declaring “I speak the Truth”.

Others gather around, huddle, then declare “by consensus, what you say is NOT the truth”. They all walk away leaving Wiley alone.

The last panel had Wiley thinking (to the readers something along the lines of), “Truth is knowing what IS the truth, even when you haven’t got a leg to stand on”.

Although there are religious connotations, the strip describes Landis. And so, my thoughts are with Landis, that he will soon be on his soapbox, declaring to everyone the truth.

Thank-you TBV, for letting me share this. DPF scares me sometimes.