Wednesday update

Frank Schleck aka Evel Knievel miraculously cheats death, coming away mostly unhurt if perhaps mentally scarred for life, after a sudden trip over a guardrail and into the treetops below. All I can say is don't wet your pants watching that. Mamma mia indeed....hope that he is really OK.

Rasmussen becomes the butt of the joke in a sad/funny, and too true, TdF ad.

The list of important riders who are not taking part in the Tour is growing by the day: No Zabriskie, Rogers, or Gerdemann. Very frustrating for Garmin/Columbia fans in the short term, but the more important thing is for the riders to take care of their health first and foremost.

Reading between the headlines...

Transcript of chat with Bobby Julich.

How about a quick doping ban round-up? Hey, fabulous idea, always does cheer me up. It never ends, does it. O'Neill gets 15 months for trying be extra thin. Marzoli gets 6 months for trying to be pals with Ali the Chemist. Mayo and Landis get sentenced to seemingly eternal purgatory, just because CAS apparently feels like letting them swing in the wind for a while longer. Missing another Tour, no big deal. Especially seeing as how they both might be declared innocent in the end. Guess CAS can't bother caring about that.

Cedric Vasseur might not be your ordinary do-nothing, useless CPA president...time will tell, but he at least talks tough once in a while.

Is Tom Danielson sick? Or not? Riding really fast up hills, despite DNFing his last race? Who knows, but whoever has been going ape on the TD voodoo doll needs to stop already. Either that or maybe he needs an exorcism. Did Hincapie give the contagious bad luck curse to TD or something? Too bad...

First Lance says that Cunego will never win the Tour in the latest issue of Procycling. Then today Vaughters says that Cunego is a guy to watch out for at the Tour. Funny. And I bet a few of those clueless reporters who got stuck into today's conference call for the Garmin/Slipstream announcement were silently wondering who is this Cunego person, never heard of him?? Oh well, it was a happy occasion for sure. The Garmin guy sounded pretty gung-ho, and Ellis came across well I thought. Must be a nice reward for him, to see his team getting a serious title sponsor. Everyone is wondering who Garmin-Chipotle (that is weird to type) will sign for next season as their "prolific winner." Maybe if Credit Agricole and Gerolsteiner leave us, it will be someone from those teams? Hushovd? Problem is that it has to be a clean rider with little to no baggage, and there are very few prolific winners who meet that criteria. Hushovd would meet the clean criteria, as far as I know.

Interesting critique of the UCI bio-passports over at the CSC forums by the always-informed poster known as KD Teammate:

"The recommendation from Damsgaard to UCI was to conduct minimum 4 blood and 4 urine tests during the off season, in order to create the passports. Instead UCI is now measuring the values mainly during the season (from March-June), in order to draw the basis line. But can we be sure, that all riders are submitting undoped values in June? If the answer is no, then it's obviously a bad idea to draw the basis line upon doped values, isn't it? Earlier Damsgaard recommended to UCI to conduct 90% of the tests out of competition, and here UCI has after all improved a bit, since they so far have done 67% of the tests out of competition. Still not good enough, but after all its better than last year."

Raises a good question, doesn't it. How do we know if the passport baselines are being set with doped blood values?