Monday Roundup

News
STLToday's Dave Leucking gives his own perspective on the ASO/UCI fight and what might await those who started Paris-Nice yesterday. He sees rival cycling leagues, a Tour of America, and all sorts of chaos:

I then see this whole thing evolving into rival cycling leagues, with the ASO and the Tour deFrance and the other grand tours off on one side and the UCI on the other. The teams … they’ll go where their sponsors want them to go, and I’m not sure that’s automatically the grand tours. Of course, the grand tours have cachet out the ying-yang, but the UCI Pro Tour has a larger global footprint and might be more appealing to sponsors who want to reach a global market. (CSC, for instance, is an American company sponsoring a Danish team. QuickStep, too, is an American company sponsoring a Belgian team.)

The ASO and the grand tours cover four countries — France, Belgium, Spain and Italy, a limited market compared to the UCI. Maybe this will be a chance for the U.S. to get a grand tour, under the UCI auspices. There’s already talk of the Tour of California becoming a three-week event, and the elite riders and teams do seem to like competing in the three big U.S. races — Tour of California, Tour de Georgia and Tour of Missouri.

The CyclingNews posts an interview with Slipstream's David Millar, and the most surprising aspect of the piece is how little doping is mentioned.

The Independant (IE) gives an amusing Q/A about refusing competition to athletes who have finished their bans, concluding:

Q: [...] how can we reasonably trust him to be clean now?

A: We can't. But, then, we can't trust anyone.

Q: So how the hell do we weed out cheats?

A: Polygraph booths maybe?

Which is obviously a joke, because polygraphs aren't reliable either.


Blogs
Fatty names himself as the winner of the 2008 Bloggie for sports. Can you do that? And has his "victory" led to the problems encountered by the Bloggies? Had we only known.

Barry says it's politics on wheels, it's always been politics on wheel we just see it for what it truly is now.

LJ Abram has a post with a bunch of aphorisms, including:

There’s only one rule: the guy who trains the hardest wins. - Floyd Landis (except, for him, sadly, it seems there are two rules...)