This year’s Tour de France is developing into a bit of a split race, being both exciting by stage and predictable by General Classification (GC). This was most clearly demonstrated by the blistering performance of yesterday’s stage winner Steve Cummings of MTN-Qhubeka (the African team’s first stage win, on Mandela Day, no less), followed by Chris Froome hoovering up all attacks against him. It was an eventful ride for Team Sky, with fists, saliva and urine apparently being thrown at them. They are currently the sport’s bad guys, for no reason other than dominance. The last team to dominate like Sky did was one of the liveries led by Lance Armstrong, and Sky’s tactics and public relations stance continue to draw uncomfortable parallels with the Armstrong era. This suspicion has led to calls for Sky (and others) to be more transparent about their power data in particular, since the view…
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I said this earlier today on Twitter: the CIRC folk could have saved themselves a lot of time if they’d just read crankpunk.com in the first place. It was a bit of a glib comment but, a little amazingly, it seems that the CIRC folk did indeed do just that when doing research for the report, as an excellent article by Cillian Kelly of Irish Peloton on here last year makes the footnotes on page 150.
A moment for celebration?
No, not really. The real fact of the matter is that this report should never have been necessary and it wouldn’t have been had the authorities, the teams, the riders, race organisers and journalists (I’m getting deja vu here) not been such a motley crew of cretins and cowards.
CIRC has said very very little that people close to pro cycling did not know already – if there is a…
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Sometimes I get a comment to an article and begin to write a reply but as I am in the middle of the process, I realise that the thing is becoming an article in itself. I’m not putting this up to have a pop at the commentator but I believe that this all concerns a very important topic in light of the reporting on the recent CIRC report and the Knaven issue. In fact, it’s important in relation to the whole sorry history of doping in our beloved sport.
The comment read:
“I have to say that I really do find your articles to be quite good and I appreciate that you keep on tilting at windmills.I do, however, object to the idea that news should be ever delivered with anything other then objectivity. Your site is not a news site, it’s an op-ed site. There is absolutely nothing wrong…
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