Sunday, May 04, 2008

Sunday Roundup

News
The VeloNews says that Astana may be invited, at the last minute, to the Giro after all. A report in the Gazetta della Sport claims that Astana may be asked to participate, but there are conditions:

The report claimed Astana’s participation would depend on the inclusion of (Alberto) Contador, American Levi Leipheimer and German ace Andreas Klöden, all three of whom have finished on the Tour de France podium.



ESPN posts a Reuters piece, which makes Astana's Giro participation sound like a done deal, and the three riders at the center of the invitation have been included in the team's supposed Giro lineup.

Blogs
Rant writes about the various reports that came out yesterday that the UCI's "bio passport" program snagged a prominent road cyclist, among a few others. Rant questions the volume of data collected thus far on each cyclist, and wonders if a reliable pattern could have already been established thus allowing something anomalous to be considered truly suspicious. The number of suspicious results is very small, has cycling learned its lesson and has become suddenly clean? And what about the "doping audit" the UCI says will be made public soon? Lots and lots of questions.

17rideson was training for a triathlon yesterday in Boulder, CO and thought he saw Floyd Landis, or maybe it was Floyd's double. This might explain a lot.

2 comments:

wschart said...

Well, I can't imagine why Astana woudn't want Contador, Levi, and Kloden to ride the Giro.

DBrower said...

It could be that their training schedules have really not prepared them for the Giro -- showing up might be a bad reflection on them individually, being "an appearance" rather than a "came to win" situation.

This is really a "screw-em" invite, in my opinion. Without having targeted the Giro, their training will really be off-cycle, so the results are likely to be predictable. Look for attempts at stage wins, not contention for the overall.

-dB