The Last Roundup

Howdy, pardner!
Bing Crosby sings the theme song better than we can.



Quickrelease thinks there's something fishy.




















Rant gives us a nice send off.








The Boulder Report gives a fond farewell. If we were pedantic sorts, we might complain about being called Southern Californian, which is like calling someone in Gunnison a front-ranger. But that would be unnappreciative: Lindsay has kept his own counsel and not been tied into a fixed position.









Team Ouch has a web site, and a twitter feed.

Is the team motto going to be, "Putting the hurt on"?







Epic Carnival runs a year-ender by Gary Gaffney of Steroid Report, suggesting that the sport of cycling be euthanized, with Landis as but one example.








The Grauniad's Barnry Ronay makes Landis one of his Sports Villains of 2008, listing no other cyclist. That's staying power for someone who didn't even compete in the sport for the year.











Musings Blong Orrbésau thinks "TBV is a sorry excuse", but is talking about a different one.

Whew.




Finally, this tidbit from BobkeStrut, talking about the book Sneaker Wars.

Dick Pound is mentioned for his behind the scenes arm-twisting of National Olympic Committees (NOCs) in the early 1980s. Pound, tightly connected to IOC chair Juan Antonio Samaranch, made the rounds of the worlds NOCs in order to convince them to give up their marketing rights and sell them back to the IOC home office in Switzerland. The end result was that the Olympics could then have a single, global marketing campaign and the beneficiary of this was Adidass Horst Dassler. Surprise, surpriseDassler was a major force in getting Samaranch elected as IOC head, and as a payback Samaranch would contract Dasslers shadow sports marketing firm to handle the Olympic marketing campaign.

(We'll talk a little about the Sporting-Entertainment Complex before we check out later.)

Be seeing you. We're done.