Wannabe Bike Girl

Well, Jan Ullrich has announced his retirement, effective immediately or something like that.

I emailed my mother about this when I saw the news this morning, and she basically said what I feel: that she’s sad Ullrich won’t be racing anymore, but you have to wonder. I don’t know if I believe he did anything, but now that he’s retired I think we should just leave it well alone. It’s time to move forward with cycling and not backward.

Which is why watching the Tour of California was such an interesting experience because I wasn’t rooting for a single ProTour team (though I was quietly cheering for Liquigas to do moderately well) to win overall. The team I was rooting for (and will continute to root for as the season progresses) is Team Slipstream. They are basically amazing.

Welcoming Testing, Team Battles Cycling’s Image

JULIAN, Calif. — On these mild, clear winter days in the mountains east of San Diego, one professional cycling team is trying to set itself apart from the doping scandals that have shaken its sport.

Like most teams, Team Slipstream is training on roller-coaster roads, sometimes more than 120 miles a day for more than six hours at a time.

But there is a visible difference between this team and others: at the crook of the riders’ arms are a series of dark needle marks. They are the results of repeated blood tests, part of a drastic and innovative anti-doping program the team began here last month in an attempt to prove its riders are clean.

Les Misérables: Armstrong and Pound

Lance Armstrong and Dick Pound have never socialized, never hoisted a glass of merlot in each other’s company, and probably never will, given the intense amount of nasty verbiage going back and forth between them.

Lance Armstrong said Dick Pound, the chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, needed to cool his rhetoric.

“They’ve got a guillotine,” Armstrong said the other night, making Pound, the chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, sound like a leader of the Reign of Terror. “They need an ethics committee.”

“He’s gone bananas,” Pound has said of Armstrong.

No Unibet for Tirreno, Giro, Milan-Sanremo

The Italian organisers of the Giro D’Italia have escalated the feud between the Grand Tours and the UCI ProTour by declining to invite pro team Unibet.com to the Tirreno-Adriatico.

I do not, in any way, support this. I can understand not allowing Astana (based on what happened with LS last season), though I don’t support it, but I think the Unibet thing has gotten out of control. This is a sign that cycling has problems — a lot of them. I get that it’s like the promotion/relegation system in football (the European kind), but it’s not based on points and maybe it should be. Maybe the PT system needs to only have 18 teams and they need to fight for points like they do in English football. There has got to be a better solution than race organizers being able to restrict which teams they invite to so-called ProTour races.

All of this takes the fun out of cycling. In fact, it’s actually rather tiring to try to sort out if riders I like will be allowed to race or not. Currently, for me it’s much, much more fun to follow European football. While it might be depressing (see: Italian football), at least they’re not resorting to strange and ridiculous tactics to try and keep teams from racing. Honestly, this is all rather annoying.

The ProTour and race organizers need to sort themselves out before people get tired of all of this shit and stop paying attention.