Saturday update

Bravo to Vande Velde for a great ride at the Giro today! He was right up there amongst the favorites after getting in the early break, and is now in 15th place on GC only 2:54 back. He finished 16th on the stage, between Contador in 15th and Kloden in 17th!! Wow. Other than that, I am afraid to say much about this Giro as I could quickly begin to rant uncontrollably. And no bad jokes about little blue pills are allowed.

Don't forget to keep up with the hilarity of Toto....lately inspired by a funny interview with none other than Dave Z.

LeMond says that he only told the truth, and how can that be wrong? Well, let us count the ways.....pro cycling is a world long based on strict adherence to the mafia code of silence and lying. The truth is a concept that hardly exists in this world, much less is accepted. Surely LeMond knows this full well, but still after all these years, he refuses to accept it. That says something admirable about his character, and something even bigger about his degree of stubbornness.

The results of Mayo's CAS case will likely be announced in 2 or 3 months, maybe. Probably by sometime in the next decade when he finally finds out whether he is actually getting a 2 year ban or not, he will have already long since served a de-facto 2 year ban plus have retired. The way this system works is insane. Oh, and has WADA ever done anything about the screw-up Belgian lab that was supposedly incompetent enough to be unable to get an acceptable result in Mayo's EPO test? No? Well, that's OK, they can always get LNDD to redo all the tests for them and just give them the results they want, no problem.

This Myspace fan site in honor of Astana's Jani Brajkovic has some interesting articles and interviews translated from Slovenian media sources.

The Paceline forum may be dead, but the Astana fan forum is alive and well. Also the CSC forum has recently returned from the dead with all previous posts intact, which is lucky as this forum is among the best and most detailed sources of English-language info on doping cases that I have seen anywhere.

The Outside Magazine article about Joe Papp is generating some controversy, to be sure. Papp himself has condemned the article as a "hatchet job." BMC's Mike Sayers read the article and was pissed off enough that he posted a long diatribe at his blog condemning Papp. Then various people whose names you might recognize commented on Sayers' post. And so it goes in the wonderful happy friendly family of American cycling. Keeping track of who hates who and why is a pointless task....the list is way too long.

The doping case of the Portuguese team LA-MSS is getting uglier and uglier. Now there are reports that blood bags were found in the searches of the riders' homes. Let's hope this doesn't mean that the riders were stashing their vampire supplies in the kitchen frig along with the milk and eggs, although it probably would hardly be the first time that sort of thing has happened. Meanwhile the team's doctor Marcos Maynar (a Spaniard, naturally), who is a professor at the Universidad de Extremadura, has protested that he was merely a consultant to the team who was in charge of checking the rider's blood levels and providing nutritional advice. He says that he knew nothing about any doping and that the riders' blood levels were always within normal levels (but of course!), so he has no reason to be suspicious. The good doctor neglects to mention that he was previously investigated as part of a different case involving doping products sold illegally over the internet, and that when his home was searched doping products were found. Maynar and his brother were also involved as experts for the defense in the doping cases of cyclist Aitor Gonzalez and the soccer player Gurpegui, where they attempted to help the athletes escape conviction of doping. Spanish investigators of Operacion Puerto also reportedly had some suspicions about Maynar previously, related to riders such as David Bernabéu and Angel Edo. Could this perhaps indicate a one-time collaboration between Fuentes and Maynar? Meanwhile to confuse the issue even further, Maynar was strangely enough very outspoken in his outrage about the death of cyclist Alessio Galletti, advocating for tougher protections to safeguard the overall health of athletes. OK...so where is his similar outrage for Bruno Neves, whose health he himself should in theory have been protecting?? The Spanish angle of the LA-MSS doping case is also being played up by Marca.

Meanwhile, the morass of Operacion Puerto grows even murkier.

As if the idea of cyclists possibly taking Viagra isn't enough, they may also be taking Ritalin.

If you can handle long articles in German, this might be interesting.