Tuesday Roundup

News
Reuters finds that TdF director Christian Prudhomme cannot guarantee that the Tour will be clean this year. Prudhomme also proclaims that last year's 48 hour hero Floyd Landis will be replaced by a new hero this year.

The TmesOnline UK writes about the Tour de France starting in London this year despite all of the doping confessions, allegations, the Landis hearings, and the uncertainty that the TdF will be a clean race:

In the past month, the stature of professional cycling has been sullied by a spate of doping confessions from former riders such as Bjarne Riis, Rolf Aldag and Erik Zabel and the bizarre events at the Floyd Landis doping hearing in Malibu, California...

Yahoo Sports has a short piece on systematic doping in cycling featuring former Telekom general manager Walter Godefroot who comments on recent PED use confessions of former team members. Floyd Landis is spoken of only briefly but at this point still erroneously. He is referred to as having abnormally hight levels of testosterone found during testing in the TdF last summer.

BYU NewsNet writes an op-ed piece about cheating in general. And it wonders where people accused of cheating, like Floyd Landis, learn it from. Could it come from other athletes, parents, or society?

Blogs
Rant gives us a little more detail on the "Positively False" book tour stops, plus he also reminds us that Dr. Arnie Baker's "Wiki Defense" ebook will come out on June 26th as well.

Val's Bien finds the lessons for reporters cited in the CJR article on Floyd Landis' Wiki Defense to be elucidating. Just stick to the facts,forget about the sensationalism, and that should be enough.

Cipher Dreamer has concluded that perhaps pro cycling is broken almost beyond repair and he cites the unfair treatment given to Floyd Landis by USADA. In order to even the playing fields cyclists should, therefore, be given the sanctioned option to use PEDs, and it should be the athletes themselves who make this decision:

Some will say that if doping is allowed, all riders will dope, and it's not fair to make doping a job requirement. Not fair by whose standards? Which moral compass are we using to make these judgments regarding the fairness of doping? Different people have different views so who gets to decide? North Americans? Europeans? Rabid fans? Casual Viewers? Sports pundits? Low-level bloggers? Team owners? Riders? WADA? USADA? UCI? The Olympic Committee? You? Me?


I don't really have an answer but I will say that it makes sense to me that the group who it affects the most should get to make the decision. I think that the riders should get the final say as to the legality of doping. It's their body, let them decide.

40 Minute 10K posts some pictures from last weekend's Teva Mountain Games, some show Floyd Landis in the mountain biking and road bike time trial portions of the event.

Law Biz Blog refers to justice as "gone amok" in the Landis hearings held last month in California, and it laments the use of US tax dollars in supporting USADA which does not adhere to some basic US legal rights. TBV contributor The Honorable Justice Bill Hue is cited in the piece:

"...Floyd Landis's case is built upon the premise of bad science, conflicts of interest, poor quality control, and bad testing procedures..." After reading Judge Hue's commentary about the negligent procedures and almost total lack of due process, I am ready to tell my Washington representatives that my tax dollars should be spent elsewhere, and not funding a criminally negligent process.

Team Rio Grande's Taylor Shelden showed Floyd Landis some mercy and only beat him once this weekend at the Teva Mountain Games. Floyd fell after an attempted 180 during the mountain bike race Saturday and was promptly passed.

Lucasjudge over at Myspace is just now leaving the Alps where he observed that assisted or not Floyd Landis' accomplishment last summer on Stage 17 of the TdF was something.

Bitch Kittie catches our comments about Ned Overend and draws a conclusion we didn't -- that's a little, well, catty.

The New Common Sense lives up to it's name, and makes some points that out to be obvious: teams and sponsors are into cycling for money, and they should take responsibility for doping problems along with riders; a "truth commission" won't work; and the LNDD should be closed.

Drunk Cyclist thinks Landis may have been on HGH too. It looks like some of our ex-commenters have turned up there too.

P2P Foundation talks about the Wiki Defense.

Forums
Things are very quiet over at the DPF.


Couldn't Be Us Dept.
Reuters posts a story about a new book which suggests:

"Millions and millions of exuberant monkeys ... are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity," Keen writes in a book published Tuesday.

[...]

The villains in Keen's narrative are a "pajama army" of mostly anonymous writers who spread gossip and scandal, "intellectual kleptomaniacs," who search Google to copy others' work and the "digital thieves" of media content in the post-Napster era.

[...]

The title of his polemic, "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture," attacks what he calls the "cut and paste" ethic of Web users, who he says are robbing professionals of their livelihoods.

The Web allows anyone to post their most intimate thoughts, views or even outright lies, without any editing, under the assumption that the crowd will correct any mistakes. Keen calls for efforts to balance out the Web's powers of instant publishing against society's need for accountability.

This is a problem obviously unique to blogs. Governments, Agencies or "professional" media never promulgate "outright lies"; Officials don't shoot their mouths off without thinking, and should they do so, are held accountable. Move along, nothing to see.


Thought for the Day

The most difficult thing in life is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure , the process is its own reward.

-Amelia Earhart-

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