The husband and I finally got to see Milano-Sanremo yesterday on the Versus coverage, and all I can say is Andrea Moletta’s crash looked brutal. The Gerolsteiner rider pretty much straddled a lamppost right next to a short stone wall on the descent of the Cipressa. The husband seems to think that if the post hadn’t been there, he’d have been better off - even if it meant falling over the other side of the wall (we couldn’t see how far the drop was, it didn’t look too bad). And of course they kept showing it over and over again - in slo-mo - so we kept shielding our eyes. The worst part of it was afterwards, when Moletta was lying on his back on the pavement and his right leg from the thigh down kind of looked like rubber every time it moved. Eww. There are some post-race comments here, along with an injury report.

And now for more news!

• Vladimir Karpets won today’s opening ITT at the Vuelta Ciclista a Castilla y León, beating Egoi Martinez and Florent Brard who came 2nd and 3rd on the day respectively. Discovery’s Ivan Basso, racing the for the first time since injuring his wrist in Tirreno-Adriatico, took 7th place, nine seconds behind Karpets.
• A television program in Belgium says that Bjarne Riis was using EPO when he won the Tour de France in 1996 - and that Erik Zabel refused the drug.
• Discovery’s Alberto Contador is still sitting on top of the ProTour standings, three points ahead of Tirreno-Adriatico winner Andreas Klöden and Milano-Sanremo winner Oscar Freire.
• Tom Boonen and Alessandro Petacchi both acknowledged after the race on Saturday that they just didn’t have what it took to win this year.
• Team Slipstream will race in this weekend’s Criterium International, though they’ll have to watch Paris-Roubaix from the sidelines.