Saturday, July 29, 2006

Blogging for the sake of Blogging

It’s been a short, unbelievable, summer. I can’t begin to explain…and am not going to, but in between 60 hour work weeks, 100 degree weather, a sober Jimmy Buffet concert, and constant exhaustion, I have been smiling. Now I’ve decided to Blog a little more, very often I’ve had something to say and did not not post it because I wanted to use this space for stories, well, no more. So I’ll keep prattle to a minimum, but beware…some blogging is on the Horizon.

Tour de Floyd Landis has another bad stage.

I am a bicycling fan, not hard-core, but I follow enough of it to know who wins the Tour De France, and how they did it. Not just Lance Armstrong, before him it was that french(?) guy, and before that with Greg Lemond, the Tour De France has(had) a purity to it that many other sports can only hope to approach. What is better than a bunch of guys dueling up and down the hills of France on bicycles?
Nothing.

Behold, Europe has it’s own bureacracies and International biking as well, and none of it has escaped the stench of steroids. Sooooo, a whole bunch of cyclists were kicked out of the race before it even began, including most of the ones I knew of, Hamilton, Ullrich…, but they had a good field and after those first awkward days, I began following it as I always have, online and on OLN. It was fun, and Floyd Landis pulled some heroics that had me looking forward and not back to the Armstrong years. Seriously, it didn’t hurt my interest level that he was American, but I believe I could have latched on to anyone that pulled the kind of comeback he did.

Now, he’s tested positive for high testosterone levels. I’m not a chemist, or informed about any of it, but my gut instinct is this guy didn’t cheat. Look at him! Okay, they have enhancing drugs that won’t bulk him up, but nothing of what I’ve seen about this guy tells me he’s done anything but have more guts than the rest of the field to win bicycling’s premier event.

Of course it has already been tarnished, irreparably, but no matter if I spend the next year hearing updates on ESPN about Floyd’s blood levels, I will let myself enjoy what he did. It was pure guts, and that’s what it should be about.