Sunday Roundup

News
The Guardian Unlimited reports this morning that suspended Olympic athlete Justin Gatlin has hired Maurice Suh, of the Landis defense team, to help him in his quest to reduce the length of his suspension:

"We plan on moving very quickly because speed is of the essence," Maurice Suh said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles.

The CyclingNews says that Andrey Kashechkin is ready to sign with any team that will have him and will negate the contract should he fail in his appeal against a positive doping control found last summer. His attorney still hopes to prove that the "B" sample testing was done outside the time allotted, maybe Rock Racing would be interested.

The NY Times posts an article about the Roger Clemens PR blitz which has been fashioned to attempt the restoration his reputation in light of steroid accusations against him found in the Mitchell Report. Reminds us a little bit of a similar campaign launched just about a year ago.

Blogs
Racejunkie finds all sort of "angels in chains" and even Marco's poor Mom makes his blog today. But he saves a few special observations for USAC CEO Steve Johnson who recently held a "conversation" of sorts with Floyd Landis, who awaits his "frying":

...and Landis (is) counting down to his March 19 frying, I mean appeal, at CAS on the heels of his strange and clearly pissed-off email chat with a resolutely ignorant and defensive USA Cycling's Steve Johnson (do you actively *want* to set CAS into a rage before they even have the chance to dope-smack your legal team in person, Floyd?).

Pommi says it feels like spring in his part of the world which sets him to thinking of training camps etc., and he wonders what happened to Floyd Landis' Power camp. He's also hoping not to get trounced today by another well known "Diabloite." Maybe we can see hem later on the Mt. Diablo web cam.

Update: The tale of the (power) tap is ugly, small children look away. Landis-- don't let this happen to you! At the Diablo Challenge in October, TBV was 1:28 @ 197 average watts. Today was depressingly close to 1:55 @ 150w, a 25% drop. TBV is maybe 1/2 the cyclist as Landis meaning he's twice as powerful for any time and distance. So he'd have done Diablo around the record 44:00 at about 400w. If he's eating Krispy Kremes and moves a mouse like TBV instead of riding over the holidays, he'd be nearing the one hour don't-get-a-T-shirt time.

Pommi was nice and waited up, too many times. I expect he'll post some gloating pictures too. [ Yup. That's one porky looking TBV.]

Missing Saddle passes on news from CaliRado Cyclist that Rock Racing has signed Jose Canseco, Michael Vick, and Osama Bin-Laden. The MSM seems to have missed this, but our readers don't let anything slip by. Thanks for the tip!

Eight-Zero points us to a paper by one of his students in a law class -- abstract:

This paper looks at the question “guilty and never proven innocent?” for athletes who are accused of ‘doping’ violations under the international anti-doping rules. It shows that the current system finds the athlete is always guilty due to the ‘strict liability’ clause in the World Anti-Doping Code. It also shows that, practically, there are no protections in the system for the rights of the athlete. Finally, it shows that the anti-doping system is indicted for its priority in protecting the sporting organizations and providing no balance of protections for the athlete.

It's a good summary of the system for those who don't have the obsessive qualities it takes to build context by reading, oh, 1003 previous posts here. It's got a good list of references to boot. We hope he got a good grade on it.