Doubt

I should just stop reading so much. The more you read, the more cynical you become. Like quicksand. The harder you struggle to understand, the less hope you have of ever understanding. Dueling doping experts who can't even seem to agree on fundamental scientific issues. An endless parade of shifty-eyed riders whose denials range from teasingly plausible to absurdly fantastical. Illusory hopes of semi-certainty repeatedly crushed under new cascades of doubt. Rumors piled upon speculation built on a rotting foundation of betrayed trust. Half-formed, flimsy explanations glued together with arrogance and officious self-congratulation. Just trust us? Please. And that goes equally for both sides.

Cycling as a sport may not hold a monopoly on smooth-talking, suspicious enigmas whose prodigious charisma somehow is permitted to obscure their mercenary ways (see tennis), yet we do seem to reign sadly supreme when it comes to the sheer volume of confounding controversy and ambiguity over issues of doping and anti-doping. I need a magic decoder ring, because I possess no ability to make sense of the morass of contradictory rhetoric. Kohl might be right, or he might just be a self-serving liar who is making up a bunch of good stories to make himself feel better. Gripper might be telling the truth, or she might just prefer to be employed rather than unemployed. McQuaid might be right to praise the bio-passport, or he might just be trying to make himself appear so very virtuous in the eyes of the imperial IOC, whose recurring distaste for cycling's filth is well-known. I might be right to think catching 5 minnows in a sea of sharks is hardly worth crowing over, or I might just be another miserable whiner polluting the interwebs with my useless opinion.

Meanwhile a number of notably dark clouds loom on the horizon, perhaps awaiting the media frenzy of the Tour to begin pouring more rain upon any hopes for a semi-syringe-free past or future. Samples from the 2008 Giro are being retro-actively tested after they were seized by Italian police. That could be scary or great or just plain pathetic (I vote pathetic, especially for whatever shreds remain of the CSF Navigare desperadoes). CONI supposedly has other riders in the crosshairs beyond just poor persecuted Valv.Piti (CAS, here we come, again). Next in line may be Amigo de Birillo or Luigi. (Cue image of Bjarne Riis wearing his familiar tormented martyr expression and guzzling hard liquor.) Too bad that Amigo de Birillo is rather closely related to Riis's mother lode, the golden boy also known as Hermano de Amigo de Birillo. Wonder if Golden Boy ever was tempted to donate funds to an unknown, unnamed person for undelivered training plans? IQ, or lack there-of, does tend to run in families, does it not? Oh wait, is Golden Boy a favorite for the Tour? He is? I should quit asking such inconvenient questions. Damn miserable whiner. Then there is Luigi, whose actual identity is a sort of non-mystery mystery. Two illustrious riders are said to vie for the prize of bearing this coveted nickname, with the winner being granted two years to cry in their red wine (Italian or Swiss) and proclaim their innocence against unjust persecution. (Piti has taught them all well.)

In other happy news, results of your standard, run-of-the-mill dope tests from the Giro could arrive at any time, or not, who knows. Judging by the approximate quality of the final podium's doping skills, the doping doctors may just have won this round. Unofficial score: Santuccione/Humanplasma 1 - fans 0. CONI seemed strangely absent from the Giro this year, with a notable lack of any unexpected evening tests, which in the past found several adult riders to actually be toddlers in disguise, at least according to their steroid levels. No wonder they throw so many tantrums when someone eats the last of their muesli. Perhaps Ettore Torri has simply tired of being subjected to the eye-bleeding fashion disasters that Italian riders insist on wearing to doping hearings for some unfathomably Italian reason. "I may be a cheat and a fraud, but the important thing is that I dress well." Priorities are priorities. Because we all know that a stunningly expensive watch and the right sunglasses outweigh any misdeed.

In other news, latest issue of Procycling has an excerpt from Cocky Cav's rather premature life story Boy Racer, in which he relates a horror story about an incompetent ACE tester mangling his arm with a large needle while searching for a vein during the Tour last year. Boy Wonder was so angry and traumatized over the tester's painful flubbing that he refused to be tested by ACE ever again. That's right. No more tests for the remainder of the season. The vaunted ACE, subject of so many column inches of PR hype for the "clean teams", now seems to have left some rather conspicuously gaping holes in their testing procedures and protocols. If riders can just opt out, what is the point anyway? More doubt. Seems ACE's demise was hardly mourned by the Columbia crew, and why should they? If ACE couldn't even find qualified staff to handle their testing, then what does that say about the professionalism of their entire organization? Doubt.

I almost forgot to mention that World War III, the pro-cycling version of mutually assured destruction, is now set to explode sometime in 2010, as Trek (aka LA's puppets) takes on LeMond in a potentially no-holds-barred trial, which could in theory drag a huge amount of very dirty laundry out into the glare of the media spotlight. You think the SCA case brought about some serious revelations, just wait. Some people think this case will be settled long before trial to avoid damaging testimony that could hinder the Second Coming's political aspirations (gag), while others think that Trek and LeMond will fight to the bloody death, side-effects and lawyers' fees be damned. Regardless of who wins any eventual trial, the potential stakes for LA are huge.

Stay tuned for more semi-coherent rambling from the addled post-Twitter-withdrawal version of CFA, who has given up reading Cycling News and just reads Bike Radar instead, since they are the same damn thing anyway.