Rumors of his demise were greatly exaggerated. Today's stage win by Landis, which vaults him just 30 seconds off the lead, is one of the legendary rides in cycling history. A solo attack 125km from the finish, taking back almost 7:30 in the overall.
This Tour has to be about the best bike race I've ever seen. Make sure to watch the time trial on Saturday! I'll be the one rooting for Floyd.
And not in the hip-hop positive way. After a terrific ride yesterday up Alpe d'Huez, Floyd Landis, America's new cycling hope, was looking like a pretty good bet to win the Tour de France.
Unfortunately, on today's ridiculously hard stage (over 17,000 feet of climbing!), Floyd completely cracked on the final climb. He dropped 10 minutes and 4 seconds to the winner of the stage, and over eight minutes to his top rivals for the overall title.
Since revealing that he's facing a hip replacement at the end of the Tour, I've been pulling hard for Floyd -- this could be his only shot to win the biggest bike race in the world. Simply put, no one has any idea if he can compete at the highest level after a hip replacement, so this might be it. So, I'm sad for him today.
But it points out one thing -- love him or hate him, Lance Armstrong had the most important characteristic of a great Tour rider: he never seemed to have a bad day. This first post-Lance tour has shown, especially for the Americans like Floyd and Levi Leipheimer, that one bad day can end your dream of yellow.
You've probably heard by now, if you're the sort who cares about this kind of thing, that Conde Nast has purchased Wired News. Here's what our editor in chief, Chris Anderson, has to say about it.
As a current employee of Wired magazine, and a former employee of Wired News, I'm just over the moon about this. Hooray!
Sorry for the silence -- was out on the East Coast for a lovely, and much needed, vacation with the wife and kiddo. We enjoyed Kate's first Bristol 4th of July parade (my seventh, already) and spending some time on Cape Cod at Kristen's sister's place. Many, many pictures to come.
Meanwhile, what's been going on. Oh, Jan Ulrich and Ivan Basso were thrown out of the Tour? Jimminy Christmas, this is a horrible story. On one hand, you've got the UCI finally seeming serious about cleaning up the sport, which they didn't do in '98 after the Festina affair blew up.
On the other hand, you've got cyclists thrown out of the premier event in the sport without a positive test, simply because they're under investigation. I know that all ProTour riders agree to this, but there's something about the lack of a presumption of innocence that rankles.
In fact, that's at the root of what's bothered me with the entire WADA regime, and the climate around athletics today. When an athlete is implicated, the instant assumption is that they're guilty, from the top of the sport to the fans on the street. I'm not sure why that's the case -- maybe innocent until proven guilty is a uniquely American view of the world.
But the event continues, as do the whispers.
On the Internet, everyone knows you're throwing a match:
An Internet bookmaking firm has contacted tennis authorities about unusual betting patterns after hefty sums were bet on a first round match atWimbledon won by Britain's Richard Bloomfield.
The alert was raised by the online betting exchange Betfair after up to 340,000 pounds ($619,300) were traded on world number 89, Argentina's Carlos Berlocq, to lose just hours before he went down 6-1 6-2 6-2 to Bloomfield, ranked 259, in Tuesday's match.
It's actually surprising that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often, as these sites allow more and more betting on more and more obscure things. If Roger Federer had lost in the first round with a lot of money on him, that's one thing, but when #259 in the world pulls and upset, there's usually less riding on it.
Just a week before the Tour de France starts, there's more drug news:
The Tour de France has asked the Astana-Wurth team to pull out of this year's race because of a doping scandal in Spain.
Tour organizers were also considering whether to urge contender Jan Ullrich to withdraw after reports suggested he was involved in Spain's doping scandal, according to his T-Mobile team.
The Ullrich thing is a big development -- he's been implicated in the ongoing Spanish doping investigation that also precipitated the Astana-Wurth situation. Stay tuned, because this one could get really bad really fast.
Update: Ullrich will be allowed to compete. "For the Tour de France, for now, there is no problem with Ullrich," Tour spokesman Philippe Soudres said.
I had coveted a Boos Blocks cutting board for quite some time -- they seemed incredibly well made, heavy and strong. So I was very excited when we got one as a wedding gift, especially since I really enjoy the sort of maintenance that Boos suggests for their boards. I'm the sort of sick bastard who really does like oiling and scraping down a cutting board. So, imagine my dismay when I noticed that our board, list price of $83, is starting to split along one of the seams between pieces of the board, 16 months after we got it. Figuring that a premium product like this would come with premium service, I contacted Boos:
Hello:
I was very excited to get a Boos cutting board as a wedding present about 16 months ago -- I'd been wanting one for ages.
Sadly, the board has begun to split apart at one of the seams between two pieces of wood. I've been religious about oiling it and taking care of it per your instructions online -- it's disappointing that it's breaking.
Is there any warranty for the product, or any thing else you can do to help me out?
Unfortunately, the response was really disappointing:
Mark,
Sorry to hear that you are having problems with your cutting board. We do have a 1 year warranty against workmanship and defect. Unfortunately you are out of warranty so I cannot replace the board. I know you said you have been oiling it religiously, but it sounds like maybe it needed oiled more often. What you can do is oil the board really well about 4 nights in a row and allow the oil to even out and hopefully the cracks with close up within a couple weeks. You do need to oil the board at least every 3-4 weeks. The only other thing I can suggest is to see what the dealer that sold the board has as far as extended warranty. Sorry I couldn't be of more help to you.
Danielle Blain
Customer Service
217.347.7701 ext. 237
danielle@johnboos.com
The suggestion to contact the dealer does me no good, since it was a gift. And, as I had noted in my mail to them, I'd followed their care instructions to a T.
I don't know why I was surprised that they didn't come up with a solution; maybe I had some sort of romance in my mind about them, given the lovely rhetoric on their site. But I'm bummed out that they didn't make good, and didn't respond to my follow-up email telling them just that.
Anyone have any suggestions for other good cutting boards?
Somehow I had missed that the St. Louis Cardinals had left KMOX, where they had been broadcast since the dawn of time. The Wall Street Journal examines the growing trend:
Few stations have ever been more closely identified with a team than KMOX was with the Cardinals. For more than half a century, "the mighty MOX" beamed Cardinal baseball throughout the Midwest, the Great Plains, and the Bible Belt, creating deep and long-lasting loyalties. Before the major leagues expanded into Texas, Colorado, Georgia and California, the Cardinals were the "home" team in those states -- and it was KMOX that made them so.
But after losing money on a five-year deal that expired in 2005, KMOX offered a lower guarantee in renewal negotiations. KTRS, seeking to boost ratings in a market dominated by KMOX, wowed the Cardinals by offering the team a 50% ownership stake in the station.
The Journal points out that the rise of satellite radio offering out of market games and the MLB.com packages of radio broadcasts are causing teams to rethink their radio deals. It's logical, of course, but sad.
My grandfather was a Cardinals fan growing up in Ohio, and KMOX was why. Those old clear-channel AM stations carrying ballgames seem to be withering away, although we still have the Giants on KNBR out here in San Francisco.
At least, that's what the Chicago Tribune says, in their annual list of the country's best publications:
3. Wired. Meaty reporting and flawless case studies of techie arrogance and cluelessness keep us coming back to this revered bible, though the product guides and even the music and book reviews remain unfailingly useful. The cheeky attitude toward everything sacred in geek culture is also a plus, but our wish going forward is that we get fewer movie tie-in issues and more provocative cover stories.
Hey, "unfailingly useful" product guides! As the editor in charge of those, I'm gonna take that compliment and feel pretty good about it. Plus, they rank us ahead of the New Yorker, Esquire, the Atlantic, and Harper's, which is awfully high praise.
This just in, from the AP:
ST. PAUL, Minn. - The Minnesota Wild hired a 24-year-old sports writer on Wednesday as director of hockey operations.
Chris Snow, who covers the Red Sox for the Boston Globe, covered the Wild for the Star Tribune of Minneapolis during the 2003-04 season.
This is a pretty stunning thing. There have been some broadcasters who have gone over to working for a team (Larry Dierker comes to mind), but I can't think of another case where a sportswriter has been hired to a key role running a pro sports franchise.
It will be interesting to see the reaction of the old hockey hands out there. If this were to happen in baseball -- for instance, if I had been hired as Director of Operations for the Yankees in 1997 -- the establishment would lose its mind.
Here's a little news item for my Rhode Island native wife: Dunkin' Donuts has come up with a redesigned store and new branding, in anticipation of a big national expansion push.
Look at that swirly new thing in the coffee cup! Look at the toned down version of the classic pink and orange color scheme! Somehow, it seems just plain wrong.
One other big change -- customers will be able to get their own coffee, and doctor it up how they like it, instead of relying on regional differences in what constitutes "coffee, regular."
For you non-New Englanders out there, Dunkin' Donuts has achieved the sort of market penetration in the region that makes it seem like there's one on nearly every corner. In fact, just about every set of directions I've received in Rhode Island uses at least one Dunkin' Donuts as a waypoint.
I linked to Dylan's post about the Nintendo DS and the PSP, and the huge lead that the DS has built in the market despite it's inferior technology.
Well, this morning's FedEx delivery contained the new DS Lite, and I'm here to tell you, any hardware gap between the two units has just been wiped out. This little guy is pretty damn sexy. Screens are significantly brighter and crisper, the case is a third of the size of the old unit, and its iPod-influenced styling is really sharp.
They're gonna sell a ton of these, especially since the games rock.
Jeff Pearlman, writing over at Slate, takes sportswriters to task for not asking harder questions of baseball players, especially as it concerns ongoing steroid use:
Is Pujols abusing steroids or human growth hormones? I don't know. But what's alarming in this era of deceit is that nobody seems interested in finding out. A little more than one year removed from congressional hearings that produced the most humiliating images in the game's history, baseball writers have a duty to second-guess everything. Instead, everyone is taking Pujols' test results at face value. Have we forgotten that Barry Bonds has never failed one of Major League Baseball's drug tests?
In Sports Illustrated's baseball preview issue, Tom Verducci, who has done great work exposing the proliferation of steroids in baseball, credulously praised the likes of Pujols and Twins catcher Joe Mauer. Verducci exclaimed that baseball is now "a young man's game, belonging to new stars who, certified by the sport's tougher drug policy, have replaced their juiced-up, broken-down elders who aged so ungracefully. It's baseball as it ought to be. A fresh start." In other words: Masking agents? What masking agents?
I worked with Jeff at Sports Illustrated back in the day, he's a guy who busts his ass for a story. But there's something about the scolding tone of this Slate piece that strikes me as the worst kind of sanctimony, especially given the fact that Jeff failed, just like all our colleagues, to do this tough reporting in the past.
The situation in baseball now as it pertains to steroids has reached the level of the classic "When did you stop beating your wife?" question. Pearlman slams sportswriters for not asking players if they're juicing; I'd prefer that there be some reason to ask the question beyond a general suspicion of all players before you ask it.
I agree with Jeff that over the course of years, sportswriters ignored many, many signs that some of the game's biggest stars were using performance-enhancing drugs. But I don't know that going on a witch hunt now is really the remedy for that shortcoming.
While we were down in Santa Cruz over Memorial Day, Kristen took these photos of Kate, enjoying her first visit to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Many more photos at Flickr.
Back in September, I wrote at Wired.com about allegations of drug use that Lance Armstrong faced, based on a report in L'Equipe, a French sports newspaper. That report accused Armstrong of using EPO, which increases the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood, in 1999, the year he won his first Tour de France.
The testing references in the story was done for research; it's supposed to be anonymous. But L'Equipe was able to find tracking numbers that seemed to link the samples to Armstrong, who denied the report.
Well, today, a Dutch investigator who was appointed by the International Cycling Union issued a report that exonerated Armstrong, and was sharply critical of the international groups who enforce anti-doping rules.
Samples may be used in a research program only if all information tracing them to an individual is removed, Emile Vrijman [the investigator] said, but this was not the case.
Discussing some of his criticism of the laboratory's practices, he added, "Sometimes with doping cases you can say it was a technicality. These are not technicalities, these are fundamental issues which should have been done completely differently."
The World Anti-Doping Agency, the laboratory and the French ministry in charge of it all failed to provide documents and fully cooperate in his investigation, he added.
This is really damning stuff, couched in the polite phrasing of the career bureaucrat. There's been an alarming trend of athletes who have had their careers ruined without the sort of process that you'd like to see (Tyler Hamilton, for one). Dick Pound, the director of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) seems increasingly like a tyrant, and not someone who's policing sports while also respecting athlete's rights.
Just look how Pound reacts to the report today.
"It's clearly everything we feared," Pound told The Associated Press from Montreal. "There was no interest in determining whether the samples Armstrong provided were positive or not. We were afraid of that from the very beginning.
"Whether the samples were positive or not, I don't know how a Dutch lawyer with no expertise came to a conclusion that one of the leading laboratories in the world messed up on the analysis. To say Armstrong is totally exonerated seems strange," Pound said.
That "Dutch lawyer with no expertise" actually ran the Dutch anti-doping agency for 10 years.
This is classic rhetorical smokescreening. Notice that Pound doesn't address any of the issues that the report raises about WADA, but instead sets up strawmen to rail against. He doesn't respond to the allegation that WADA didn't cooperate with the investigation, instead he comes up with an inaccurate insult about the investigator.
In an official statement, WADA then complained that "elementary courtesy and professionalism would have dictated that WADA should have been provided with a copy of the report before interviews were given to the media." Because that's the real issue for Pound here -- appearances, and not fairness.
Update: Velonews has a good story, an augmented version of the AP write-up, and also a PDF of the full report. Also, official statements from the UCI, Armstrong, and WADA.
I've been doing a little maintenance and upgrade work behind the scenes here at mcclusky.com, and today, it's ready to roll out.
First of all, I've taken the linklog that I had been maintaining in Movable Type, and moved it to del.icio.us. Then, those links are pulled back into the blog pages via a javascript. It's just too easy to use the tools that are out there for del.icio.us, rather than doing a manual linklog. Hopefully, removing some of the friction from the process will mean more interesting links, and more of them, too. If you're interested in subscribing to a feed of just my linklog, you can do that at http://del.icio.us/rss/mmcclusky.
To integrate those links into my full-text RSS feed, I've switched to Feedburner. The new url for my feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/mcclusky. But if you're using the old links, they should automatically be redirected to the Feedburner version using a handy mod_rewrite rule on the Apache server. Thanks to Doug for the tips.
Please drop a comment or an email if you have any problems with these changes. And enjoy!
One little girl turns eight months old today.
This whole journey of being a new parent has been, on the balance, so amazing. There's just no preparing for it -- no one ever could have convinced me that I'd love this little creature this much. And not only do I love her, I like her, too, which in some way seems even more remarkable.
After all, you expect parents to love their kids (or at least you hope they do). But Kate's just so much fun to be around right now, as she starts to learn about herself and how the world works. It seems like every day she discovers something new, or learns a new trick. I feel like we're just about on the verge of her starting to crawl, which one co-worker tells me will doom us to chasing her around forever. I guess that means we'll have to start baby-proofing the house, which will take some serious effort, due to our packratish natures.
That said, I can't wait for what's next. Happy two-thirds-day, Kate.
The other story I had in the May issue of Wired was an examination of the digital comics market, and a plea for companies like Marvel and DC to take their archives into the digital realm.
Most piracy doesn't spring from the desire to get free content. It comes from a desire to get it in a specific way. Successes like Apple's music business have shown that consumers will pay for content if it's offered at a fair price without unreasonable restrictions. Right now, comics publishers could enjoy a win-win situation - they could reach out to new fans and increase revenue - if they would just decide to take advantage of it. And if they don't? Worst. Decision. Ever.
It's not that comics are that different than other media that have faced these issues, except for one key difference -- there's a huge disconnect between the financial value of the object, and the value of the content. The fact that Action Comics #1 is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars doesn't stem from the story in it. It's because it's Superman's first appearance.
Digital would let comics separate the two, to the benefit of both publishers and readers. Time will tell if the companies will come to that conclusion.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm lucky enough to have a really wonderful job that I'm enjoying the hell out of. But the next time someone is talking about how cool it must be, I think I'll point them to this photograph, taken out the window of my hotel in Los Angeles at E3 this past week. Apparently, this was the best lodging option available. I don't have a photo of the police that one of my co-workers saw riding up in an elevator before I got there, presumably to bust someone.
The show was a typical E3, with too much noise and too many people, although it did seem slightly less-horrific than last year. Of everything I saw and played, I was most impressed with Nintendo's new console, the Wii. It's motion-sensitive remote-like control was really easy to use, and there were several games that highlighted just how much fun it's going to be to play with this thing.
Please join me in wishing my darling wife Kristen the happiest of all birthdays. She's made my life so much better in every way I could imagine, and every day I just feel so lucky to have found her. Plus, she's my new favorite blogger!
So happy birthday, darlin'. I love you.