I'm still holding out hope that enough people will be suspended long enough that I will eventually get a place in a Tour de France team.

Selle's performance in the Giro was remarkable in a way that was not the case in the tour. Nobody won two mountain stages one after the other in the way that Selle did.
I know it's easy to say it now, but his ride did raise my eyebrows at the time.

Selle has reportedly admitted his doping and is "naming names" to the CONI investigators. It will be interesting to see if those names differ from the ones they are supposed to have gotten from Ricco.

Any optimists left in the peloton could be encouraged to think that Italian cycling may be in the process of cleaning up its act.

So, it appears that the Spaniards are equal opportunity dopers.

The "anxiety attack" that brought Maribel Moreno back from Beijing turns out to have been triggered by her testing positive for EPO (the first positive test of the Olympics).

Marca article.

There was a teeny 2cm piece in the freebie paper on the bus this morning saying that the judge in charge of the Operation Puerto case was going to close the file and no charges would arise.
wtf?
Will see if l'Equipe has anything about this. My Italian colleague made the remark that the big fish in the net were Real Madrid football players not the cyclists... (unproven conspiracy stuff but this is too fishy)

L'equipe has a small piece explaining that the case was suspended as the level of EPO found in the samples was not high enough to represent a health hazard.
Move along, nothing to see here.

The football connection to Puerto has been a major part of the subtext since Day One.

Though I would love it to be the case, I don't think his football clients were restricted to Merengues.

Has there been a RFEF investigation alongside the legal one? Or have they just tried to stay as far away from it as possible?

Welcome Ricky.

No, the RFEF has stayed away from the entire issue like the plague.

I can't imagine why . . . .

Piepoli and (perhaps unsurprisingly) Schumacher have been announced as testing positive for CERA. Story here

QUOTE:
QUOTE:
What does this mean? That he hasn't been caught yet?

Remind me what was the name of the nice Mennonite boy who couldn't possibly have been cheating?



<...sigh...>

No. Schumacher races for a team with an extremely good anti-doping ethos (by insistence of their sponsors, who being a Mineral Water company are rather more hands on in this than most), and is himself generally one of the riders who others in the peloton point to as probably clean. This in fact came out rather clearly following the thing at the Worlds - it was fairly widely accepted that the speed was almost certainly recreational, simply because most of the peloton reckoned he was not a cheat.

Guess who said that?

Yep. Me.

Yeah, for the reasons I gave back then, the Schumacher revelation is pretty shocking. Nonetheless, everything I said there stands. Indeed, the contrast between super-high-undetectable CERA and just bunging back a load of speed for a one-day race is so high as to lend yet more credence to the assumption that the positive last year after worlds was recreational.

Gerolsteiner were noteworthy as a consciously clean and ethical team, Hans-Michael Holczer as one of the good guys. Schumacher had an extremely good reputation, in a way Landis did not. Believing a rider to be clean, fallible as that belief may be, does not reduce to believing that he is dirty but simply hasn't been caught yet.

I stand by everything I wrote. And add to it - Fuck you Schuey, you lying cunt. You may just have finally buried German cycling...

Ah yes, I remember that brief exchange. I suggested that just possibly Schumacher was on drugs and was met with withering contempt for my naive and ignorant opinions. And now guess what? Turns out Schumacher was on drugs.

I don't suppose I can expect an apology can I?

You clearly either don't remember it very well, or weren't paying much attention to what was being said to you at the time. What is it that you feel you are owed an apology for?

More on the Gerolsteiner team (from cyclingnews.com);

QUOTE:
Lang's Schumacher suspicions
Sebastian Lang of Team Gerolsteiner said that the team had its suspicions of Stefan Schumacher during the Tour de France when they observed his reaction to news of the new CERA test.

"When it was announced that there was a new test for CERA, we were all happy. We sat on the bus and really celebrated," Lang told the Thueringer Allgemeine. "The whole team... except Stefan. He was suddenly very quiet and withdrawn."

Schumacher was "suddenly totally changed. So we other riders got together and discussed it. Finally we and the team management openly asked him whether there was something we should worry about." The response? "He just openly lied in our faces and said that everything was OK."

Lang was glad that his teammate was caught. "Cheats must be caught and punished. All of them. Even when it is another heavy blow for cycling." (SW)

Thought not.

Still it is strangely compelling watching your sinuous efforts to attempt to preserve the doctrine of Torol Infallibility.

What is it you think you deserve an apology for?