Back From The Holiday - Into The Holiday

The Jewish holiday of Shavuot has ended and Memorial Day Weekend has begun. It was very quiet already on the trail this morning. We started with a temperature of 62 degrees. It is going to be hot for the first time this year today. We rode our 13 miles as the sun rose and loved it. Annie is back on the Fuji, having found the Trek impossible on her knee. A few more adjustments and the Fuji is treating her much better, though still not perfect. But we are working on it and are almost there.

Meanwhile, I awoke to a scurrilous column in today's Philadelphia Inquirer about Floyd Landis by Phil Sheridan. Here's how it begins:


Only one thing was proven beyond a reasonable doubt during Floyd Landis' appeal hearing over the last two weeks. Professional bicycle racing is a filthy sport and, in a perfect world, the Tour de France would go away and never come back. Certainly there is no reason for anyone to watch cycling's premier event with any faith that it is clean.

Read the rest at the above link on your own.

I have written the Inquirer before to complain of their lack of cycling coverage and about the fact that they only cover the doping news but never the racing or anything else connected with the sport. Sheridan's blanket condemnation of the entire sport is just incredible. While he suggests that the Tour de France be canceled or ignored, his paper reports all of today's other sporting news, including a special box watching the chase for Hank Aaron's home run record by Barry Bonds, highly suspected of doping himself. No one would like to see all of sports cleaned up more than I, and in fact I look upon the present troubles in cycling as the death throes of doping in that sport, a hard process of changing the culture in which many will be implicated. Rather than using this as an opportunity to pan the sport, he should have pointed to its advance over other sports, not to mention highlighting the hundreds of pro racers not implicated. He should be ashamed.