Month: October 2012

The USADA Report on Lance Armstrong

The USADA Reasoned Decision

USADA have published their report on the decision to impose a lifetime ban on Lance Armstrong for doping and drug trafficking. The report is extensive and damning, complete with testimony from unimpeachable sources like George Hincapie and Levi Leipheimer. Indeed every American cyclist who rode the Tour de France with US Postal and Discovery for the seven year period between 1999 and 2005 has now confessed. Except for Lance Armstrong and Kevin Livingstone.

Yet the report isn’t just about Armstrong. It contains references to his old teams, to senior officials in the sport, from US Cycling across to the UCI and beyond. Over one million dollars in payments to Michele Ferrari are detailed for example.

The report goes into extensive detail, offering a chronology of the US Postal team and Lance Armstrong’s role based on sworn affidavits from 26 people as well as extra information from others, whether media reports or more.

The full report is so damning in its entirety that picking the key points is immaterial, it is the weight of evidence rather than any particular selections that matters. Nevertheless here are some summary points:

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Cycling Calendar Statistics

I have a mental picture of the cycling calendar where April is packed with racing and August is a sleepy month, the post-Tour de France blues set in and there’s not much going on. But after publishing the calendar of races on Tuesday I toyed with the numbers and the chart above shows the distribution of men’s pro racing throughout the year. It turns out April is a quiet month with just 51 days of racing and August has more days of racing than any other month of the year.

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2013 Calendar and iCal

Pro cycling’s off season is arriving but if the racing stops, the planning doesn’t. Whether you’re plotting a victorious classics campaign or a trip to Europe you need to know when the pro races are.

Here’s the 2013 pro cycling calendar. It is blank for October but skip into 2013 and you’ll find the races appear. In addition below you’ll find a link to download an iCal file to import the same calendar into your organiser, phone and computer diary.

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Beijing’s Bad Air Day

If the government says healthy people should avoid outdoor activity should a bike race go ahead?

That’s the question facing the organisers of the Tour of Beijing which starts tomorrow as air pollution levels in Beijing today reaching a red-alert score of 397, a level declared as hazardous for all. Is it safe to race?

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The Moment The Race Was Won: Paris – Tours

Avenue de Grammont

Marco Marcato wins Paris-Tours from a three man sprint. The trio held off a surprise attack by John Degenkolb, the German sprinter went rogue with 10km to go and almost caught the leaders in the final straight.

Dutch champion Niki Terpstra launched the sprint and Marcato has swept across the road, forcing Laurens De Vreese to change direction. This briefly robbed the Belgian of momentum and gave Marcato time to sit up and celebrate as he won the fastest ever one day classic, averaging 48.629km/h. This was the moment the race was won.

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The Spin: Paris-Tours

Labelled “the sprinters’ classic”, this Sunday’s race might have a flat route and a long finishing straight but in fact most of the winners since 2000 have come from breakaways and attacks. Since the majority of bike races end in a bunch sprint, it means the race is far from the foregone conclusion its title suggests and it can offer an action-packed final half-hour.

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Job Opportunities

The wrong side of thirty? Not as fast as you once were? Felt strong in some big races this year? But you’ve not been offered a new contract. It’s got to hurt, you were always in the service of the team, carrying bottles, punching a hole in the wind for someone else and often there when the team got a result. So what do you do?

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The UCI Are Not Terrorists

The UCI won its case against Floyd Landis but as victories go, this is a weak one. What ever Landis might have said in the past a Swiss court has ruled he is forbidden to state that the UCI, Hein Verbruggen and Pat McQuaid:

  • have concealed cases of doping
  • received money for doing so
  • have accepted money from Lance Armstrong to conceal a doping case
  • have protected certain racing cyclists
  • concealed cases of doping
  • have engaged in manipulation, particularly of tests and races
  • have hesitated and delayed publishing the results of a positive test on Alberto Contador
  • have accepted bribes
  • are corrupt
  • are terrorists
  • have no regard for the rules
  • load the dice
  • are fools
  • do not have a genuine desire to restore discipline to cycling
  • are full of shit
  • are clowns
  • their words are worthless
  • are liars
  • are no different to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi

Yes, those are the exact words of the court translated into English, complete with clowns, shit and Gadaffi. If you want to stop reading now and just laugh, go ahead. The extra text below is a bit more serious.

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End of Season Prizes

Tom Boonen won the Flandrien prize for Belgian cyclist of the year, collecting the trophy from the Belgian Prime Minister. The annual award has been split in recent times give domestic prize and an international one, this time scooped by Bradley Wiggins.

If you want to understand how big cycling is in Belgium then note Boonen collected the award from bow-tie toting Elio di Rupo. There are not many awards dinners in the world where the head of government dishes out the prizes. Nor awards where a country’s top politician finds it worthwhile to be seen handing out the prize.

These awards are subjective but for me, often illustrate the best riders of the season better than the arithmetic of a points-based ranking system.

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Donate To Win

Cyclocross book

In an ideal world the mention of dirty cycling should remind us the cyclo-cross season is underway and the Superprestige series starts this weekend. We should conjure up images of fields, dunes, drunken spectators, frites and, above all, mud. But we’re not there yet.

If you want those images here’s a chance to win a copy of Balint Hamvas’s excellent review of the cyclocross season. This is a big photobook printed on high-quality paper that captures the mud, frost and frites. For a chance to win a copy just donate money to the Paul Kimmage fund, which as well as helping a specific legal case, looks set to force the UCI to confront a few uncomfortable truths about the kind of dirt that soap doesn’t shift.

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