Sunday Roundup
News
The CyclingNews says that the city of Stuttgart refuses to pay the UCI the rest of the money owed it, righteous indignation abounds:"We will not hand over taxpayers' money to any organisation that is not fighting seriously against doping," Mayor Wolfgang Schuster told the Stuttgarter Nachrichten newspaper according to Eurosport. On the line are 600,000 Euros due to the UCI and 75,000 Euros due to the German Cycling Federation.
The VeloNews provides another doping item, this one has Paolo Bettini suing the German TV station ZDF for accusing him of supplying PEDs to Patrik Sinkewitz. It sadly seems that more action currently takes place in courtrooms than on the roads:
Bettini had slammed what he termed "a campaign of denigration of which the town of Stuttgart, the organising committee and channel ZDF are responsible." "We've decided to take legal action regarding this campaign of denigration," the cyclist's lawyer Guido Marangoni said. "We're not yet in a position to evaluate the totality of the damage cause to Paolo Bettini."
The Miami Herald writes about the "dark side of the sports circus" and includes Floyd Landis along with McLaren racing, Michael Vik, and Bill Belichick. It speaks about the rather institutionalized cheating that takes place in a win at all costs time in our history saying that perhaps the current spate of cheater stories is cyclic. The bottom line is that all of the cheating that takes place undermines the integrity of sports.
Blogs
Blindside posts an entry dedicated to a discussion of what can be good and bad about using the internet. One good thing cited is that vigilant users can expose fraud, and the bad is that unscrupulous people can illegally distribute PEDs. Inevitably it seems Floyd Landis is blamed for making cheating look appealing in some way in that winners take drugs or something. Huh?
3 comments:
What does Stuttgart expect UCI to do? UCI tried to ban Valverde, got taking to CAS and lost. I don't know what means CAS has to enforce their decision if UCI attempted to ignore it, but at the very least, UCI could be in a bad position if they took a case to CAS.
Paolo Bettini wins the World title again.
The City of Stuttgart, UCI, and WADA got a result they didn't want.
Every once in a while, the alphabet soup, and now the City of Stuttgart, are not able to rig the result and deterimine the winner, at least not on the road.
It will be interesting to see what the next steps will be that UCI, WADA, and Stuttgart take to nullify Bettini's win.
He seems like a strong character and one that would continue the fight to keep what he has earned.
In you eye alphabet soup!
How long until someone, somehow, figures out how to tag Bettini with a positive dope test? At this point, I wouldn't put it past the antidoping folks.
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