It was weekend devoted to road racing at the USA Cycling Collegiate Road National Championships in Perry, Kansas, Saturday and Sunday. In addition to hundreds of riders, our guy, Casey Gibson, was there to record it all for posterity.
Robbie McEwen doesn’t speak much Italian, but he knows enough to tell TV reporters at the finish line in a hot and challenging 205km second stage along the west coast of Sardinia that was he was tickled pink with his 12th career Giro d’Italia stage victory. The Australian pocket rocket bolted past a wilting Alessandro Petacchi (Milram) and held off a late burst by Paolo Bettini (QuickStep) to notch his 153rd career victory.
More than nine months after Floyd Landis was crowned 2006 Tour de France champion — and subsequently charged with illegal doping — the American will attempt to clear his name when his arbitration hearing begins Monday at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. The stakes are simple — and very high. If Landis and his attorneys can convince at least two members of the three-person arbitration panel that he did not use synthetic testosterone to win the ’06 Tour, he’ll retain his title and could re-commence his racing career. But if the U.S. Anti Doping Agency successfully prosecutes its
British cyclist Chris Hoy broke the high-altitude 500-meter world record at the outdoor velodrome in La Paz, Bolivia, on Sunday. Clocking a time of 24.758sec, Hoy's time knocked a massive 1.092 seconds off the previous record set by Frenchman Arnaud Duble at the same Alto Irpavi velodrome venue in 2001. Hoy had earlier failed for the second day in succession to beat the high altitude one kilometer record set by another Frenchman, Arnaud Tournant, seven years ago. Hoy, the Olympic and world kilometer champion, clocked 0:58.880, missing out on that record by just 0.005 of a second. It
Stanford University claimed the Division I road racing national championship this weekend in Lawrence, Kansas, while Western Washington University took the Division II crown at the 2007 USA Cycling Collegiate Road National Championships. After three days of racing, May 11-13, Stanford didn’t win any of the individual events – the team time trial, road race nor criterium – but instead won the Division I championship by the virtue of the consistency of its finishes. “We finally had the depth in both men and women to do it,” Stanford’s Devin Flaherty said. “Usually it’s one or the other, but
Mara Abbott, truly the hitman of Whitman.
Abbott scored her third-straight stars-and-stripes jersey, winning the women's Div. II road race
Boyd nails the men's Div. I title...
... and Dad's there to share the moment.
The view from the back of the D1 race
The dirt road, 1.5 miles of crushed limestone, certainly made it interesting. Over 100 flats, by some counts.
That's got to hurt. The chase group in the D2 men's race piles it up on the gravel.
Larson wins the Division I women's race,
Marzot wins the sprint for D2 Men's Road champ.
...and celebrates the moment in style.
Why so many flats? Crushed limestone and light tires don't mix.
Three of the best and McEwen emerges on top
McEwen phones home with the news
Di Luca takes the jersey
Spectacular scenery
Early escape, lots of work... and the inevitable catch.
Popovych is a bit sore, but 'okay,' says Discovery
First, the Villanova Monterleone trimmed the group to three...
... then Brutt tried his luck.
The peloton starts to pick up the pace...
Rebellin, Bettini and Gasparotto.
McEwen tears it up.
The Landis case enters a new phase on Monday
Landis hearing begins Monday
Antonio Gallegos
CSU's Mann adds points to his school's tally
Mara Abbott takes a corner in the D2 crit.
Mara Abbott leads the field through a corner, after being involved in the earlier crash.
Natalie Klemko of Midwestern State taking a corner...
... and winning
Jennifer Bodine picks her wheel to ride with one lap to go.
Bodine celebrates her win in the D2 crit.
D1 men's omnium winner Mark Hardman of Virginia repeats.
Charles Gallegher of Virginia Tech shows the signs of an earlier dust up.
Phil Mann of CSU
D1 Men's winner Phil Mann of CSU.
The Giro d’Italia just wouldn’t be the same without a good dose of polemica, the favored pastime of this passionate nation of 60 million souls, and there was plenty of it in Saturday’s opening stage of the 90th corsa rosa. [nid:38529]UCI president Pat McQuaid got things off to a good start when he showed up an hour before the team time trial between the Caprera and La Maddalena islands to tell Italian journalists there would be no deal-making for scandal-marred Ivan Basso (see "McQuaid:No breaks for Basso").
UCI president Pat McQuaid rejected calls that Ivan Basso should be shown clemency or portrayed as a hero for his recent admissions that he was a key figure in the Operación Puerto doping scandal. McQuaid lashed into the disgraced Italian champion despite calls from some within the Italian cycling establishment that Basso should be dealt with a softer hand when it comes dishing out disciplinary bans for his recent confessions that he worked with controversial Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes. “He has admitted his guilt, when he lied to everyone for 10 months,” McQuaid said. “He lied to the
British cyclist Chris Hoy failed in a high-altitude bid in La Paz, Bolivia, on Saturday to beat Frenchman Arnaud Tournant's seven-year world record for the one kilometer time-trial. Hoy, the Olympic and world kilometre champion, set the sea-level record of 1:00.711 when winning gold in Athens Games in 2004. On Saturday, Hoy timed 0:59.103, 0.228 seconds off Tournant's record, which was also set at the Alto Irpavi velodrome in La Paz, the world's highest track at 3417 meters above sea level. The Briton, who hit speeds of 61 kilometers per hour (37.9mph), will launch another
Now that Saturday’s team time trial has sorted out the field, the peloton in the 2007 Giro d’Italia hits the road with a 205-kilometer stage from Tempio Pausania to Bosa on the island of Sardinia. The stage offers a prime opportunity for renowned sprinters like Alessandro Petacchi, Robbie McEwen and Paolo Bettini, but the outcome is by no means a forgone conclusion. The favorites are joined in the field-sprint stakes by several impressive talents, including Thor Hushovd, Danilo Napolitano and Giro newcomer J.J. Haedo. These and others are likely to be the names we'll see contesting
Managing the heat and an aggressive peloton, Midwestern State University’s Alex Boyd captured the men’s Division I road race national title Saturday in Perry, Kansas. Racing a rolling, 28-mile circuit for three laps (84 miles), Boyd remained dormant through most of the race, the second race of the 2007 USA Cycling Collegiate Road National Championships, which began on Friday and wraps up Sunday. An eager peloton unleashed attack after attack on the country roads of east Kansas, but no riders could open up any significant gaps early on. Under an unforgiving sun, fatigue set in, and the
Enrico Gasparotto gets the first leader's jersey of the Giro.
Hoy came close in La Paz
Liquigas rode an impressive race on a difficult course.
T-Mobile opted for spoked wheels. It may have cost the team.
Astana look poised to win it all... until Liquigas lit it up.
How much time did Disco' lose because of Popo's crash?
An unusual route to the day's start.
After the fall: No worse for wear, Popovych looks ahead for the next three weeks.
Haedo, who has already scored some impressive wins this season, is an unknown quantity at this year's Giro.
Boyd scores the first win of his career in style.
The stretch of gravel road played a decisive role on Saturday...
... especially here.
Marzot takes the Div. II title
Larson played her cards right.
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A Milan court announced Friday that it expects to issue a ruling on Unibet's legal challenge of its exclusion from the Giro d'Italia on May 21... nine days after the race starts. The delay effectively ends any hope the team had to contest the Italian national tour, which is slated to begin on Saturday. The Belgian-Swedish team is one of 20 ProTour squads recognized by the UCI, but it has served as focal point of an ongoing dispute between the international governing body and the "big three" race organizers who promote the Giro, the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España.
Tour de France champion Floyd Landis, who is fighting to keep his Tour de France title after a positive doping test, charged Thursday that U.S. anti-doping officials offered to go easy on him if he provided evidence incriminating seven-time champ Lance Armstrong. Landis said that Travis Tygart, general counsel for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, approached his attorney, Howard Jacobs, with a deal shortly after learning of the American's positive doping test during the 2006 Tour. "That took place in the first conversation between USADA and my lawyer," Landis said at a press conference in
For the two years four-cross racer Jill Kintner has been America’s best hope to bring home a medal from the mountain-bike championships. She has delivered wonderfully, collecting the rainbow stripes in 2005 and 2006. In 2006, her gold at the world’s was America’s only medal in the sport it created back in the late 1970s. Over the last two years, Kintner has seen few women racing four-cross. Some have traded in their mountain bikes for BMX rigs to chase after the 2008 Olympics. Others have been scared away by the World Cup’s monstrous four-cross courses. Kintner, a former world champion BMX
It seems no one was happy 24 hours before the start of the 2007 Giro d’Italia. As if this week's startling admissions by defending champion Ivan Basso weren’t enough to cast a pall over the season’s first grand tour, riders were complaining first about the narrow and dangerous roads for Saturday’s team time trial, and then about being ferried out to an aircraft carrier for an opening ceremony in front of about 200 sailors and VIPs. “I expected more from the Giro d’Italia,” said Argentine sprinter J.J. Haedo, who’s making his grand-tour debut with Team CSC. “We’ve been waiting for hours
Our man Andrew Hood found himself with a little extra time on his hands Friday (okay, a lot of extra time), and so he shot a few snaps of what he called the "unique" opening ceremonies of the 2007 Giro d'Italia, which entailed ferrying the riders, support staff, organizers, officials and press to the deck of Italy's only aircraft carrier — to say nothing of a fair amount of just sitting around, waiting for something to happen. Finally, it did, and Andy sent us the pix to prove it.
The 2007 Giro d’Italia starts Saturday without its defending champion and without any clear candidate to fill the void left by the scandalous fall of Ivan Basso. Riders polled during Friday’s opening ceremony pointed to two-time Giro champion Gilberto Simoni (Saunier Duval-Prodir) as the point man in a peloton reeling from doping scandals and uncertainty ahead of the season’s first grand tour. That seems fine for Simoni, who’s finished no worse than third in seven of the eight preceding Giros and is the best-placed returning rider from last year’s Giro in the 198-rider peloton. “I feel
Olympic champion Chris Hoy will attempt to set a world record for the kilometer time trial on Saturday at the Alto Irpavo Velodrome in La Paz, Bolivia. The 31-year-old Scot, a multiple world champion over the distance and the world record holder at sea level, is attempting to beat Frenchman Arnaud Tournant's mark of 58.875 seconds, set at the same venue in 2001. The concrete track sits some 3407 meters above sea level. Hoy set the sea-level world record of 1:00.711 in taking the gold medal at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, meaning he will have to ride almost two seconds quicker on
The state of Colorado swept the men’s podium and the Mara Abbott-led Whitman women made their first step to an overall repeat on Friday at the 2007 USA Cycling Collegiate Road National Championships. Friday’s race, a team time trial and the first race of the three-day championship, saw teams navigating a banking, gradually sloping, 12-mile stretch on the grassy outskirts of the muggy college town. In the Division I men’s race, the upper-80 temperatures and humid weather seemed to favor the riders from Colorado. Colorado State finished third on the course, which was sandwiched between a
With Operación Puerto eliminating defending champion Ivan Basso and potential contenders Michele Scarponi and Tyler Hamilton, the list of potential winners is much shorter. This will lead to a more uncertain Giro, but the podium is almost sure to be contested by the big four: Cunego, Simoni, Savoldelli and Di Luca. TOP FAVORITES Damiano Cunego (I), Lampre-Fondital Age:25 Giro highlights: Overall winner, four stage wins and 11 days in the maglia rosa in 2004, 4th overall in 2006 (but almost 20 minutes back), 18th in 2005, 34th in 2003. The skinny: After being zapped by mononucleosis in
UCI PROTOUR TEAMSAg2r (F)Race numbers: 51-59GC contender: New team leader Rinaldo Nocentini (I) is most interested in winning a stage.Best sprinter: Alexandre Usov (Blr) had a top-three stage finish in the 2004 Giro. Other rider to watch: Carl Naibo (F), a late replacement, is a useful climber.Giro will be a success if: Nocentini wins a stage.Astana (Swi)Race numbers: 11-19GC contender: Paolo Savoldelli (I) is looking for his third Giro title after contending and then falling sick in 2006Other rider to watch: Eddy Mazzoleni (I) is a strong climber riding support for Savoldelli.Giro will be a
Ivan Dominguez (Toyota-United) and Katherine Carroll (Aaron’s) took their respective openers as the 30th Joe Martin Stage Race kicked off Friday in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The 110-mile pro men’s race started in 80-degree heat and gradually grew hotter, but rains late in the stage dropped the temperature to a more comfortable 70 degrees. Dominguez, who took the sprint finish ahead of teammate Ivan Stevic and Alex Candelario (Jelly Belly), said the rains were a welcome relief. “The beginning was a little bit hot, but it was great when the rains came. It really cooled down,” Dominguez said.
Unibet manager Koen Terryn (L) and director Jacques Hanegraaf (R) have spent most of the season plotting legal strategies as opposed to putting a team on the road.
Jill Kintner
The varsity boys race
The Discovery team rides what is proving to be a very unpopular TTT course