Friday Roundup

News
Lancaster Online.com (FL's hometown newspaper site) revisits 2006 in all its complexity with a short note about Landis on the "tumultuous" side of things:

And who can forget Floyd Landis? The Farmersville native won the Tour de France, the most storied and demanding bicycling race in the world, after a heroic comeback — only to fail a drug test and become the butt of late-night TV jokes.

Cyclingpost.com leads with Lance Armstrong's withdrawl from the Leadville 100 next summer. They note that Landis still "plans" on participating.

CyclingNews gets Lance's back-down too, still thinks Landis might have problem entering, despite what they wrote themselves last week.

VeloNews mailbag runs dead even on Landis' selection as North American cyclist of the year.

Blogs
Mark McClusky follows up the Wired story of yesterday with a blog entry with some other thoughts and comments on the reaction here and elsewhere. First, he apologizes for the error about the "elevated testosterone", saying it should have said ratio, so unbunch your undies about that. He's surprised to hear folks thought of it as a puff piece on Mr. Pound, and in general thinks TBV, Spinopsys and Rant "got it". He was particularly amazed at Pounds ability to insert his foot into his mouth.

Go Clipless writes an open letter to Floyd, accusing him of "scaring Lance":

Dear Floyd, Now you've gone and done it. Why did you have to go and choose to race in the very same mountain bike race as Lance Armstrong? Don't you have an original bone in your body...

There's a companion letter to Lance along the lines of, "cluck, cluck."

MacKay's Random Thots reprises a controversial FL cartoon that illustrates the most "creative use of socks" during the TdF this year!

Racejunkie, "Truth or Dare" discusses the "Three Faces of Floyd", multiple personalities would explain a lot:

The Three Faces of Floyd: speaking of legal teams, the alternately depressed, determined, and optimistic Landis (lately bouyed by Inigo Landaluze's CAS overthrow of a legit 2-year doping ban on purely technical errors by the endlessly incompetent Landis lab monkeys) is apparently accepting contributions for his legal defense in a new fund for which he hopes to raise $2 mil, so if any unheralded cyclist who'd have to sell his or her firstborn child for new SRAM components would like to contribute to his lawyers' ongoing inability to clear him, and as an added incentive their Tiffany cufflink budgets, by all means, pony up! Whatever happened to the pocket-change $500k we were talking, Floyd? Anyhow, for $2 mil, these guys *better* not choke.

Triple Crankset takes notice of "now you see him now you don't" Armstrong's turnaround on Leadville and also notes that Landis may not be able to take part as well.

Gene Bisbee at BikingBis remarks that the Lance vs Landis showdown at Leadville was a good idea, while it lasted!

Powertap geek talks about Landis's training camp, and is both skeptical and willing to think it's a good deal. He volunteers to go. His site also points to Hunter Allen's Threshold Power, whose camp in February is less expensive, but has no Floyd.

Rant takes an aside we made yesterday about his article on the Aitor Gonzales ruling and turns it into a whole piece about the "strict liability" policy. So that's how columnists generate material!

Forums
DPF is back up, for now anyway. There's discussion of the Wired article.

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