Monday update

Steegmans has refused to sign Katusha's new contract clause that requires the rider to pay five times their salary if caught doping. (No link to article at CN, because I refuse to link to CN since they have ruined their site.) I agree with his refusal, which may sound odd, but Katusha is an absolutely classic example of a totally hypocritical team where the shady old-school management demand results and place enormous pressure on the riders to deliver, while at the same time pretending to be strictly anti-doping by announcing with much trumped-up PR drama this useless contract clause, which does nothing to actually support riders staying clean, and which likely no rider would ever actually pay anyway. (Just like no one has paid the UCI's anti-doping charter's one year salary penalty.) For evidence of how badly this team is run, just look at the sad situation of Kenny Dehaes who hated it so much he just left the team.

The Katusha management is giving out two totally contradictory messages. One says that the riders must deliver results according to expectation (and salary level) or they are publicly berated and openly threatened with being fired. Basically, win or else. (Colom and Pfannberger show exactly what you get with this backwards dark ages attitude.) At the same time they pretend to be anti-doping by putting forward this supposedly tough contract clause, where all the punishment falls very heavily only on the rider. Because, of course, the dictatorial and iron-fisted demands of the directors and the huge pressure of unrealistic sponsors never has anything at all to do with desperate riders giving in to temptation to dope, right? Please, Katusha, spare us the false proclamations of righteousness and just admit it, your contract clause is nothing but a big fat reminder to your riders that they sure as hell better be smart enough not to get caught while they are churning out all those great results required not to be tossed on the trash heap.

The other aspect of Steegmans' refusal that makes his actions understandable to me is that he has already found himself publicly criticized by his team for his lack of results this season. So you have a rider already very at odds with his team management. (Maybe he won't sign because he actually wants to get fired?) He is likely being paid a fairly hefty salary, which now Katusha may no longer want to keep paying. The team may want an excuse to get rid of him. If he did sign, how easy would it be for them to claim he failed an internal control or had strange blood values? Does the contract clause only apply to positive tests from a regular UCI or national doping test, or could they demand the salary penalty for an internal test or blood profile abnormality? Good excuse to get rid of him, while also theoretically making themselves look good by firing a presumed doper and earning themselves a large sum of money as well. Indeed, there are some who think that this is pretty much what happened to Vladimir Gusev. (Without the specifics of the CAS ruling, which is missing from the CAS website, this is impossible to verify.) Plus, it would hardly be the first time that a team had used doping as a way to get rid of an expensive rider who they no longer wanted on the team. The story has long circulated of a well-known Belgian team boss who told one of his riders in no uncertain terms to go home and "prepare" himself for a certain upcoming race. The rider, not being a fool, knew what that meant and did as he was told. The team boss then promptly sent an anonymous tip to the local police to raid the rider's house, where the police naturally found the rider's dope. End of contract. Perhaps when judging Steegmans, we should remember that anti-doping clauses can be used in rare cases by unscrupulous teams as under-handed ways to get their way in rider disputes. (Rumors also exist that few rides dare to publicly cross the UCI due to the strange tendency for critics to suddenly find UCI testers knocking on their door with an odd frequency.) Of course, some people probably think that Steegmans refused to sign the clause because he is a doper and knows he might get caught, which is also certainly entirely possible. However, be that as it may, I doubt it is that simple, and regardless it does not excuse the blatantly two-faced hypocrisy of Katusha's management, which epitomizes the worst ways in which teams actually foment doping within their ranks while pretending to want to prevent it.

In other news, do you regularly view the videos posted via the Second Coming's twitter? Did you notice that all these videos are posted at Livestrong.COM? This means that every time you go watch that video you are directly contributing to pageviews and ad revenue which is fattening LA's wallet. Livestrong.com is a for-profit website run by Demand Media and features plenty of ads. Livestrong.ORG is a separate site, yet few people seem to realize this. Whenever you see LA riding around in his Livestrong kit, people assume that he is using this to raise awareness for his anti-cancer campaign. Yet Livestrong is also the name of his for-profit website. So that kit is also one big advertisement driving people to Livestrong.com where they are earning revenue for LA. So next time you see the Livestrong logo plastered everywhere, ask yourself, does this really have everything to do with cancer, or is he advertising for his for-profit website and earning ad revenue under the banner of fighting cancer? You might also reconsider the whole point of all those videos. Each time he posts one, the traffic to that page of Livestrong.com must go through the roof. Pageviews equal money. He just refuses to speak to the media, creates his own videos, drives traffic to his site to earn money. But the comeback is all about preventing cancer.

On another topic, Cyclingnews, in all their wisdom, recently managed to enrage almost their entire reading audience by redesigning their site into a sort of clunky, slow clone of Bike Radar. Just read the feedback in their forum, where there is a veritable virtual riot going on, complete with flip-outs by their own staff who are clearly fed up with being subjected to severe reader criticism. Despite the critics, it seems that CN is refusing to alter the redesign for the most part, so here are a few alternative ideas for the fed up (besides the very obvious ones like Velonews and Pez):

Cycling Weekly: British site with news, analysis, and commentary. (They also recently redesigned their site but it is rather less egregious than CN, although a bit buggy at times.)

Cycling Quotient: for complete race results, detailed rider and team info. (According to their twitter, their traffic numbers have already increased a lot since the CN redesign.)

Cycling Fever: great for rider & DS interviews

SBS Cycling Central: Australian TV cycling page with news RSS feed and videos, lots on Aussie riders.

Eurosport Cycling: cycling news with RSS feed

Feltet.dk: Absolutely stellar cycling news site from Denmark with RSS feed. OK, it is in Danish which is a challenge, but for ease of use, utilize the built-in Google auto-translation in Google Reader.

Tuttobiciweb: Italian site with great news feed. Covers all the Italian polemica.

L'Equipe Cycling: Well it is in French but this is essential.

Le Monde: Read any articles their journalist Stéphane Mandard writes on cycling.

I could go on all night as I have way too many such sites listed in my RSS reader. Suffice to say that there are tons of alternative to CN, so no one should feel required to wade through their new design if they don't like it.