Good news from Crankworx Colorado was that Seattle homey Jill Kintner took top honors in the Dual Slalom and the Downhill. At Whistler, however, Jill got off to an uncharacteristic start, taking “only” 3rd in the opening-day Dual Slalom. On her blog she complains of being “off my game,” but watch for her in the other Whistler events!

Intriguing story from Cyclelicious on military funding of blood doping research. Well worth a read.

Normally a time trial, where lots of riders are on the road at the same time and it’s obvious an event is under way, is the last place you’d expect a car to strike and kill a cyclist. But when it comes to cars and bike, expectations count for very little.

BikeJuju wants to know: Why are you here?

VeloNews interviews Johan Bruyneel on Team Radio Shack’s Tour de France and outllook. Two questions we wished they had asked: Does he think doping allegations had anything to do with being dis-invited from the Tour of Spain, and without Lance, what are his expectations for next year’s Tour?

A dope-free Giro would have been a laughable prospect just a couple of years ago. Italian racing legacy is full of substance abusers, most notoriously the sad case of Marco Pantani.

Yet a clean Giro is apparently (so far) what happened this May. And it was two former banned riders — eventual winner (and Italian) Ivan Basso and leading contender Alexander Vinokourov — who led the way (additional contender Cadel Evans has maintained a clean record and anti-doping stance all along) in saying they wanted a clean slate.

But the post-doping era is about to get its toughest test with the upcoming Tour de France. The Tour is where the biggest dollars get invested, and where the stakes are far and away so much higher that the temptations are irrevocably greater.

Still, there is reason to suspect that this will be the cleanest Tour in years as well.

Not only is the pressure on from within the ranks of the athletes themselves, the French anti-doping authorities are upping their administrative role. The French long have clashed with the official cycling governance body (and doping regulator), the UCI, whom they accuse of being intentionally lax and sloppy in testing and oversight. In this Tour the French have promised to conduct their own testing above and beyond the UCI’s.

Then there’s the issue of the doping cloud hanging over several Team Radio Shack competitors, notably Lance Armstrong, as well as team manager Johan Bruyneel. As charming as Bruyneel can be, he’s been a bit thin-skinned lately in responding not only to the doping allegations but in mishandling Team Radio Shack’s rejection by Tour of Spain officialdom. He and TRS will be even more in the glare during the Tour and need a bit more aplomb if they want to deflect scrutiny and curry fandom.

For his part, Armstrong already has embarked on his tried-and-true “I’m not worthy” strategy after finishing a surprising and impressive second in the Tour of Switzerland.

For Lance, who answers doping allegations by patiently pointing out he’s never tested positive, the Tour is a damned-if-you-do-and-don’t scenario.

The guy is closing in on 39. The oldest Tour winner in history was 36, and that was nearly a century ago. If Lance somehow were to win or even fiercely contend, he will face more brutal scrutiny and suspicion than ever in his storied career.

If he fails to contend, however, cynics will suggest it merely goes to show that in a post-doping environment, Lance cannot win.

We doubt Lance will be in the thick of this year’s race, but it may have nothing to do with doping. He has not done enough riding this spring to be competition-hardened. Other contenders, notably Contador and Andy Schleck, have the same problem. But the Giro headliners of Basso, Vinokourov, Evans and Vincenzo Nibali, this year’s surprise star, do not have that excuse, and there are enough other toned riders to challenge that Lance may find himself a victim of training and youth.

We also wonder if this isn’t Lance’s final Tour. The doping investigation is bound to take a toll eventually, and Team Radio Shack’s disinvites from the Giro and the Vuelta have sent a pretty clear message that something is awry with TRS’s reputation.

Even if Lance emerges from the drug scandals unscathed (or at least unindicted), he doesn’t strike us as a middle-of–the-pack guy.

We’re going to enjoy watching The King and that hunkered out-of-the-saddle style of his and his black socks and steely eyes on this Tour, figuring it may well be our last chance to do so in the world’s primo cycling event.

Bruyneel acted nonplussed after the Giro snub, saying the team hadn’t planned on riding anyway. The Vuelta rejection came out of the blue, though: “I am not only surprised, I am speechless,” Bruyneel was quoted as saying. No one who follows the effervescent and voluble TRS manager on Twitter finds “speechless” a credible adjective, but the point was well taken.

You have to wonder if there isn’t something else going on here. With Bruyneel and Lance implicated by Floyd Landis as a doping cabal, and with both under investigation in the U.S. and abroad, is a message being sent? Might the message be, put bluntly, to prove that you’re bringing a clean game to the event?

Bruyneel said he was told TRS was not asked to Spain because “other teams offered better options on a sporting level.” Bruyneel said he interpreted this to mean TRS was not considered competitive enough. That’s not how we read it. If the director had meant competitive, he would have said so. We interpret “sporting” as “fair,” “above reproach,” “ethical.”

In any case, Bruyneel’s defiant response may not have been the best advisable, given the current cloud over TRS. He and whatever PR handlers he answers to might want to look to the BP fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico for pointers. You’re not going to win any sympathy whining and sputtering under pressure. Nor are you going to endear yourself to event organizers with pointless threats that skirt the real issue.

We may have to live with speculation for awhile. But if there is anything to be read between the lines, it’s that Bruyneel and Lance — whether fairly or not — are considered untrustworthy by at least some influential segments of the cycling establishment.

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Landis has for the first time fully acknowledged using performance-enhancing substances, i.e. blood doping, and says he is naming names re others’ use. The biggest on the list of course would be the King himself, Lance Armstrong.

Armstrong has been implicated repeatedly over the years, in documents, books, court testimony and by association with physicians linked to doping. But he has managed to raise enough doubts to deflect suspicion. And for the record, he has never actually been caught — or at least if he was, it was never made public.

The list of names already disclosed in Landis’ accusations, which comprise a series of emails to cycling officials, is depressing, sad and unsettling: George Hincapie, another rider considered straight and narrow. Levi Leipheimer, currently favored to win the Amgen Tour of California (where Lance is riding in his support). Johan Bruyneel, Lance’s longtime team manager and confidante, currently head of Team Radio Shack in the Tour of California. David Zabriskie, the current leader of the Tour of California. All American riders, considered all-American riders as well.

If true, Landis’ accusations mark the potential passing of an era similar to what baseball went through a couple of years ago with congressional hearings and all-star confessions regarding use of steroids. No one knows if usage has really been stopped. But the aura of sportsmanship for the “roids era” of baseball has been forever tarnished.

If there’s been a pattern to doping in any sport, it’s that athletes need assistance to pull it off. And typically the cover gets blown when someone steps forward. In Lance’s case, his inner circle has been consistently tight over the years. We always guessed his former wife would be the one to finally state the case. But Landis beat her to it. [See Joe Papp's post on this point.]

Lance has been subdued in the Tour of California and uncharacteristically muted about his racing form and ambitions so far this season. If he had any inkling of Landis’ action, it might explain his low profile. Now the cycling world will be in an uproar — the equivalent of the BP Gulf oil spill — while news media continue to probe and investigate Landis’ allegations. It will hardly be a copacetic environment for pursuing racing glory this season.

Our stance on Lance has always been that his charisma, commercial drawing power and huge international following put doping authorities in an impossible bind. Even if they did manage to test him positive, what would it mean for them to disqualify him from an event like the Tour de France? It would cost the event and the sport millions in lost sponsorships, American disenchantment, TV and media coverage, advertising and general tainting of the grand and glorious sport of cycling.

Our theory has always been that mum was the word. Now, as details emerge from the Landis confessions, we may see if our suspicions were correct.

Our hope is that Lance will make a clean breast of it and move on, so that his foundation and his worthy work all over the globe for fighting cancer and bringing fans and attention to cycling can continue without a morbid cloud hanging over it. It takes a true champion to own up to his or her faults. People like to forgive and forget, and if Lance comports himself moving forward as well as he has in the past, he can put all this behind him with an “everybody did it” defense. In that sense he can rise above Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds “syndrome” — stars who were jerks before they were accused and remained jerks afterward.

One last thing: We can only hope that Lance was clean last August when he rode away from the field in the Leadville 100 to deprive local hero Dave Wiens of a 7th straight championship. To think that Wiens, a true sportsman and humanitarian, was deprived of a legitimate win on the basis of drug cheating would be one of the more depressing circumstances we’ve encountered in our lifetime of cycling obsession.