Friday Roundup

News
The NY Times posts a piece about the announcement that Bijarne Riis would be stripped of his Tour de France title and his name would be expunged from the official Tour de France guide. In relation to this, and the ever increasing littany of doping allegations and confessions, WADA chairman Dick Pound has stated that perhaps some form of amnesty for riders who confess to doping should be instituted:

“If I were king of the world, I would be encouraging anyone who knows anything about doping to come forward and only then decide what sanctions to apply,” he said. “If you take the half-empty view of this, it could be seen as an effort to shut everyone up. On the half-full side, I’m sure they’re going to say, ‘We don’t condone doping." Cycling’s drug problem has become so messy, Pound added, that it might be time to grant riders and team officials, both past and present, an amnesty in exchange for their complete testimony about doping.

In the meantime Floyd Landis languishes in the twilight zone waiting for the arbitration panel which heard his case last month to render its decision.


The NY Sun posts an op-ed piece in which the author states that yes he can believe wholeheartedly that Floyd Landis cheated to win the Tour de France last summer, and that college students take the same chances and knowingly cheat every day:

What goes through these kids' minds when they send plagiarized papers to plagiarism detectors? This is like Landis handing cups of his own steroid-laced urine to anti-doping officials. In light of my student-plagiarizers, what is incredible is not how a good kid could do something bad under pressure.

Landis' story is shocking for what it tells us about us: that humans are stunningly good at undermining ourselves through self-deception, especially when placed under stress

CyclingNews Letters has one from Bill Kinkead in which he proposes amnesty for cyclists but also thinks that USDA stooped to new lows in its pursuit last month of Floyd Landis due to the strong case the Landis defense presented against USADA:

Landis's experts absolutely demolished the work done by LADD, (the French lab) and were rock solid in cross examination, in spite of the USADA lawyers using tactics better suited for a defense attorney representing organized crime figures

The evidence presented by Landis's team was so good that the USADA lawyers changed their tactics and spent the rest of their time and nearly all of their closing arguments attacking Landis's character because of the stupid phone call made by his former business manager to Greg Lemond. It is absolutely infuriating to see the American taxpayer funding McCarthyite tactics of guilt by association.

The Olympian publishes an AP piece in which the author states that doping has pushed cycling to its knees as this year's Tour de France quickly approaches.

Blogs
Rant hops into the "way back machine" and gives us the sad tale of 1972 Olympic swimmer Rick DeMont who, even though HE followed all of the IOC rules, was still stripped of his swimming gold after he tested positive for a banned substance. Whose fault was it? The USOC team Drs. never reviewed his medical forms. Rant draws scary parallels to the Landis case.

Spinnin' Wheel wants us to remember that even though the French press thought Floyd Landis had no panache in the Tour de France last year, stage 17 for a few brief shinning moments proved them very wrong:

With all the science and the rhetoric and the legal tactics and the easy jokes at Floyd's expense, it seems many have lost sight of just what went on over there in France last July. And that is, Floyd took a dead hip and a less-than-ideal team and endured a grueling three weeks of racing in a steady, workman-like fashion with great skill and great humility. I don't know if that's panache, but I'd put him on my Wheaties box any day

2per goes all Dickensian on us today and writes that for cycling it IS the best of times and the worst of times.

Introspection Section is just not buying that Floyd Landis could simply recover from his disaster on Stage 16 last summer in the TdF to go onto the fantastic ride he had in Stage 17, while drinking the night before no less.

Bicycle.Net inexplicably uses Paris Hilton and Floyd Landis in the same sentence.

Podium Cafe takes a look at the "one hit wonders" of the Tour de France.