Saturday Early Roundup
News
The Vail Daily News reports that Floyd Landis is in Vail, CO and will ride in tomorrow's Eagle River-Colorado Ride. Floyd has been in Aspen this week training for the Leadville 100 and was invited to participate in tomorrow's event, a 100 mile ride with all levels of riders taking part:Landis said he’s excited about getting a chance to ride with some top local cyclists on Sunday.
“It’s good to be with other guys who force you to ride harder than you would otherwise ride,” he said. “Especially when you are just getting into shape. Once you’re in shape, you can stay motivated. But lately, I haven’t ridden enough, so it’s better if I have people around to motivate me.
About the current situation in the Tour de France Landis said:“There are a lot of rumors and accusations,” Landis said. “It’s not going to end the sport. The Tour (de France) is the biggest race and it’s most likely going to stay that way. It’s unfortunate for the guys who are legitimate. At this point, it’s hard for anyone to sort out who that is. There seems to be a culture where as soon as somebody is accused they are immediately convicted by the press. It’s confusing right now.”
Oregon Live.com talks about the ugly side of sports.
The Guardian thinks bad drugs great sport, what happened to the good old days, and will leave any comment about Floyd Landis to the courts.
The Sunday Times posts a self congratulatory piece on two anti doping crusaders on its' staff which consists largely of links to old stories one of which is about Floyd Landis. David Walsh and Paul Kimmage will clean up a "diseased Tour".
ESPN cites a Reuters piece in which Patrice Clerc of the ASO states that all UCI officials should resign including Pat McQuaid.
BikeBiz expands, with the headline, "ASO declares war on UCI."
Blogs
Suethsayings thinks that The New England Journal of Medicine "photoshopped" its' recent data that fat friends make you fat, and also thinks that sports commentators "photoshopped" the Floyd Landis ride on Stage 17 last year in the TdF as one of the greatest in Tour history.
Alexandra at MySpace wants to ride her bike, and fell in love with Floyd Landis last summer during the Tour de France. After the doping allegations came to light she tore down all the pictures of Floyd from her wall, but she now just says let them cheat, either that or test them obsessively and keep cameras on them every minute.
Triple Crankset says that since we can't really know, we can't really believe. Sad.
Rant wonders what we have learned in the wake of the last year of the Landis Saga, it would seem the majority of the media have learned very little.
Peloton Fodder says "to hell with them all!"
4 comments:
Good that Floyd is preparing for Leadville which may be "The" race of the year with two TDF champions. I think I booked the last room in Leadville for August 11.
Good for you Glendora, you'll have to send reports.
str
From Wikipedia:
The term [Theater of the Absurd] was coined by the critic Martin Esslin, who made it the title of a 1962 book on the subject. Esslin saw the work of these playwrights as giving artistic articulation to Albert Camus' philosophy that life is inherently without meaning, and so one must find one's own meaning as illustrated in his work The Myth of Sisyphus.
A wave washed over me and left me feeling that this years TdF was part of the above genre. So it is I find more meaning and pleasure riding my bicycle than watching those actors riding theirs.
Another Wikipedia article on Moral Panic seems to apply too, IMO:
"moral panic is a reaction by a group of people based on the false or exaggerated perception that some cultural behavior or group, frequently a minority group or a subculture, is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society. It has also been more broadly defined as an "episode, condition, person or group of persons" that has in recent times been "defined as a threat to societal values and interests."
We have various people, both within and without the sport of cycling, denouncing the sport as being riddled with dopers, based on relatively few cases. Even if we assume that all the riders so far accused from the Tour are guilty of doping, this is only 4 out of some 180 who started. Maybe the sport is riddled with dopers, but nobody, repeat, nobody knows. Certainly not reporters and others who have little or no contact with the sport. I dare say that even the riders has no true idea of the extent of the problem. There may be a lot of rumors about who dopes in the peloton, but these has about as much validity as college students speculations about the state of coeds virginity or lack thereof.
This is where the moral panic idea comes in. A few riders are busted in spectacular fashion. Everyone else is assumed guilty by association. People say noone could put up the times riders do w/o doping, or noone could have best the known/'confessed dopers w/o having doped themselves. True is, we know little about the effects that various performance enhancing substances have on cycling performance. Most of what we have is anecdotal, a la Joe Papp.
So let's try to keep things under perspective here.
While we can certainly questions methods and procedures, is seems to me that cycling is making an attempt to weed out the dopers.
Post a Comment