Friday Roundup

News
The NY Times reports that Roger Clemens has hired high profile lawyer Rusty Hardin to defend him against allegations in the Mitchell Report that he used PEDs. Hardin promises to pay "hard ball" and has hired private investigators to substantiate Clemen's assertions that he is innocent.

The New York Daily News' Mike Lupica mocks Floyd Landis in a major way and compares Roger Clemens' denials of steroid use to those of Landis:

You remember how Landis tried to do it after he tested positive. First he said he had been drinking Jack Daniel's. After he ran that up the flagpole and nobody saluted, he blamed the tests and the testers and the testing system and the French lab that analyzed his samples and the World Anti-Doping Agency and everybody except Marion Jones.

Landis went on the Internet with nifty PowerPoint presentations and held town hall meetings like he was trying to win the Iowa caucus. Eventually he wrote a book, trying to refute a testosterone level in his urine that seemed big enough to fuel an Acela Express. In the end, they stripped him of his Tour de France title anyway.

What Lupica, like most "stick and ball" sports writers, doesn't know about the Landis case could fill Giants Stadium.

Protrade, in a similar column to Lupica's, is disgusted that Roger Clemens thinks the public is so gullible that it would buy his story as he hires a PI to investigate how he got into the Mitchell Report. The piece goes on to snark that at least Roger is not as stupid as poor old Floyd Landis, nice.

The CyclingNews says that the fallout from OP has been devastating to cycling, and it may not be over with yet. Bjorn Leukemans, commenting on his recent firing from Predictor-Lotto, laments the surprising loss of friends and supporters due to his doping scandal.

The VeloNews Friday Mailbag is full of acrimony today as many still argue about the "dead horse" of doping in cycling, even though one note urges us all to move on. The majority of the letters concern the disparities between the Millar and Hamilton doping cases.

The IndiaTimes posts a story on the biggest doping scandals/frauds of 2007 and the Floyd Landis case is reviewed without a mention of his CAS appeal.

Blogs
Ramblings says that today's athletes have run amok, and we should be depressed about it.

Dr. Slammy proves that it's never to late to still get it wrong in discussing the Landis case:

Stripped of his Tour de France title after a lengthy court battle. The test results said he had more testosterone in his system than a bull moose in mating season, but a lot of Americans watched French media and sporting authorities trying for so long to catch Lance Armstrong that we can’t help being suspicious. In any case, the official verdict is guilty and it’s likely to stay that way. We’re looking forward to this year’s Tour, where we expect there to be no winner because everybody got caught juicing

Dear Doc, that's not what the lab's alleged results actually indicated. For the past year and a half, thanks in part to Mr. Pound, this hasn't stopped anyone from taking the easy route to the cheap shot.

Journey, not Destination thinks that the UCI biopassport system sounds like a logistical nightmare full of chances for tampering. By the way, she still thinks Floyd Landis is innocent.

Ignoring the logistics, who is going to pay for the biopassport system?