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The Italian team of defending champion Danilo Di Luca, LPR, won the opening team time trial in Tuesday’s first stage of the Settimana Lombarda.   The team covered the 18.7km course in 20 minutes, 54 seconds, nipping Katusha by six seconds with the Rabobank continental team, featuring Tejay Van Garderen, stopping the clock for third at 23 seconds back.   LPR sprinter Alessandro Petacchi was first across the line to snag the leader’s jersey.

Austrian cyclist Bernhard Kohl, stripped of third in last year's Tour de France for drugs, faces a maximum five-year prison sentence after admitting Tuesday to blood-doping and other offences. Kohl told a press conference that he had gone to the Viennese laboratory Humanplasma for transfusions with blood supplied by his former manager Stefan Matschiner. "He (Matschiner) supplied me doping products. I did blood-doping three or four times," Kohl said.

Reigning Olympic time trial champion Fabian Cancellara is expected to start Sunday’s Tour of Flanders despite coming off an injury-plagued spring that forced him to forfeit a defense of his title at Milan-San Remo.   Cancellara has suffered a string of illnesses, including an early exit from the Tour of California, and then a shoulder injury that forced him to miss nearly two weeks of training in early March.   Earlier this year, Cancellara said winning the Tour of Flanders was one of his top goals of the season.  

Filippo Pozzato continues on his strong pre-Flanders form, notching victory in the opening stage of the Three Days of De Panne in Belgium.   Pozzato, who won the Prijs Harelbeke on Saturday, out-kicked fellow escapee Frédérick Willems (Liquigas) to win the stage and take the first leader’s jersey in the four-stage, three-day race.   Greg Van Avermaet (Silence-Lotto) won the bunch sprint, some 57 seconds back to take third place.  

It’s crunch time for George Hincapie and his quest to win a northern classic. The 35-year-old enters the most important week of his racing calendar more confident than ever that an elusive trophy from Flanders or Roubaix will soon be his. The Columbia-Highroad rider says he’s feeling “stronger than ever” and has enjoyed one of the best winter preparations of his career, racing in the Tour Down Under for the first time and spending most of January training in California.

Dear Lennard,
I always wondered about hanging my mountain bikes vertically too but not really worried about the shocks but about the hydraulic brakes and what that might do to the lines. Is it fine?
Paul Dear Paul,
That’s a good question. If the bike is hanging vertically with the front wheel up, there would be no problem, because any air bubbles would gravitate toward the lever, which would be where you’d want them. But how about with the rear wheel up?

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Eric Hawkins’ custom motorcycle has a Schwinn Stingray gear shifter and dual Schwinn stems holding its ape hanger bars. The banana seat and the fender are both hollow gas tanks so that the top tube above the engine is free to hold the shifter and look like a Stingray.

Park Tool started in 1956 as Hazel Park Cycle Center, a bike shop on the northern edge of of the Twin Cities, adjacent a park of the same name. Owners Art Engstrom and Howard Hawkins fed themselves through the cold Minnesota winters by sharpening ice skates, and they built their own bike tools. They made the original Park Repair Stand out of old parts, and they patented the clamp’s design. The base that held it steady was a huge artillery shell casing filled with concrete attached to metal clawed chair feet. The “Hazel Park Bicycle Repair Stand Company” was born.

Geoff Kabush (Rocky Mountain-Maxxis) and Georgia Gould (Luna) took home impressive wins at the opening round of USA Cycling’s Pro Cross-country tour (ProXCT), held at Southridge Park in Fontana, California. The race was also the second round of the Kenda Cup West, the West Coast half of the ShoAir-Specialized U.S. Cup series.

It’s another busy week of racing in Europe, with stage races in Belgium, Portugal and Italy, the second round of the women’s World Cup and a smattering of one-day races in France and Spain. Without question, the main feature is the Tour of Flanders on Sunday. In cycling-crazed Belgium, this is their Super Bowl. The entire nation seems to come to a standstill to watch the 258.9km battle from Brugge to Meerbeke (with plenty of beer-drinking along the way). This year’s route features 16 of the infamous cobble-stoned climb where most of the major attacks go down.

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BMC's Jeff Louder and Columbia Highroad's Ina Yoko Teutenberg won the 2009 Redlands Bicycle Classic's overall titles Sunday, as Kyle Wamsley (Colavita) and Alison Powers (Team Type 1) grabbed the stage wins. Apparently every second does count. The overall wins came down to just 1 second for Teutenberg, and to just 5 seconds for Louder. Teutenberg accumulated enough time bonuses in the final stage to take the jersey away from Amber Neben (Nurnberger Shoair) who fell to second place, while Alison Powers (Team Type 1) took third, 27 seconds down.

Frenchman Gregory Bauge overcame a tough test against Malaysia's Azizulhasni Awang to win the world sprint crown at the world track cycling championships in Pruszkow, Poland. on Sunday. Awang took the silver medal with another Frenchman, Kevin Sireau, beating Australian Shane Perkins to take the bronze. The men's sprint tournament is traditionally the most coveted of all track cycling events, and it lived up to that billing thanks to the unexpected rise of Awang to the final.