The Cycliste Moderne, December 5, 2005

I have suffered through bad lawyer writer’s block tonight as well as a computer crash that took two paragraphs of the best stuff I have written in a long time. I guess that is some type of message to me: save frequently. So hopefully the blog will loosen my fingers up for tomorrow so I can overcome my writer’s block and get my antitrust brief written so I am not up until 4AM on Wednesday pounding it out.

Not much significant bike news this week but here is a brief recap:

David Millar, the disgraced Scottish/Maltese former Cofidis rider, has begun to rehabilitate his image, starting with the cover of January’s Procyling magazine. As would be expected, Millar is advocating more and more frequent drug tests to fight drugs. It is a little late, David, as you were tested after you won the World Time Trial Title in 2003 in Hamilton, Ontario while on EPO and you managed to pass the test. Doping is serious and riders who get busted and claim that we need more and better testing irritate me.

Milram, the new sponsor of the former Domina Vacanze team that has signed both Alessandro Petacchi and Erik Zabel, exhibited its new team kit this week with Italian models showing off the light blue jerseys. Not a big fan of robin egg blue but the team should get a lot of wins with its line up if Petacchi and Zabel actually work together.

WADA chief Dick Pound, evidently bored with cycling, targeted the NHL for his latest unsubstantiated broadside on doping claiming that 1/3rd of players in the league were doped. When pressed on it, AP reported that Pound replied that he had conclusive proof but that he did not “want to say more right now.”

In other doping news, the IOC finds itself at odds with Italian doping officials in the run up to the Winter Olympics in Turin in February due to the prospect of the types of police raids that the Giro d’Italia has been subjected to in recent years in the search for drugs. The IOC really does not want Italian police conducting early morning raids on the Olympic Village but Italian lawmakers are insisting that all athletes should be treated the same, i.e. presumed guilty of doping until otherwise proven innocent.

The Giro d’Italia responded this week to objections raised by the UCI, the rider’s organization, and the ProTour to its proposed split stage on the final day of the Giro with an early morning uphill time trial followed by an afternoon race around Milan by pointing out that it was not violating ProTour regulations because it has to date refused to obtain a ProTour license and is therefore not subject to ProTour regulations.

In news covered in detail by VeloNews.com, as police are want to do, the Colorado State Patrol announced this week that it was imposing a unilateral cap on all cycling events to limit them to no more than 2,500 riders per event. That immediately caused the Lance Armstrong Foundation to announce that it was postponing its intention of starting a Ride for the Roses in Colorado and caused other event promoters to object based upon the negative impact such limits would have on some of the largest cycling events in the region. Colorado State Patrol officials claimed they had “consulted” with event organizers and that they had statutory authority to do what they did. After bad press and pressure from both Republican and Democrats in the state legislature the cap has been withdrawn to be “studied.” It is unclear what precipitated the Colorado State Patrol’s action but if they can do it there, they can do it to you in your state.

On a final note that is only tangentially cycling oriented, on the Christmas front, you absolutely, positively have to buy your cycling significant other an iPod. Make sure you buy the Shuffle or the Nano as they have flash memory and thus do not skip when you hit pot holes, if they choose to ride outside and listen to their iPod in possible contravention of local ordinances and statutes. With the announcement of Micron’s joint venture with Intel to manufacture flash memory, you have to support your local industry. Then once you buy your cycling significant other an iPod, be sure to fill it with Audioslave and turn it all the way up. I think a strong argument can be made that Audioslave is significantly better than its predecessor bands Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine. Soundgarden and Rage were great bands. They had sounds and messages that put them far above others emerging out of their respective scenes. However, Audioslave takes the political message and driving rhythms of Rage, adds the melody and performance of Chris Cornell, an eminently more approachable front man and certainly better song writer than Zack de La Rocha ever was, and takes the best of both of the former bands to an even higher musical level. For the cycling tangent, check out the video for “Your Time Has Come” where Audioslave’s bass player Tim Commerford shows off his cycling skills.