Dauphine Ends, Tour de Suisse Begins

By Jessica | Permalink |

No Comments | June 17th, 2007 | Trackback

I’m not generally a huge Christophe Moreau fan, but he certainly deserves this Dauphine win - he was absolutely dominant this past week, and I’m glad to see him take the overall victory. I’m also glad to have seen Dave Z race so well in the mountains; I think that his time-trialling may have actually suffered a bit as he’s tried to become a more all-around rider, but it’s cool to see how talented he really is. And no matter what I think of Levi Leipheimer, it sucks to see anyone go down hard on the run-in to what could have been a really cool sprint finish today. No word yet on his condition, but it looked like he hit the curb pretty hard around his tailbone or lower back. I hope he’s okay. (Race report from today’s final stage here.)

And the Tour de Suisse 2nd stage was today as well (the prologue, which I didn’t see anything of, was yesterday). It’s hard for me to decide how I feel about Zabel winning today. It all comes down to whether or not you believe him when he says he only tried EPO once, in 1996, and never used it again; and whether you think there should be some form of amnesty for riders from before a certain year who admit to doping. I think I do believe him, and I think I believe in some amnesty - it’s just tough to reconcile the fact that if there is amnesty, some guys will have served suspensions for being caught in the act back then (Festina team) and others will never have any kind of punishment. Most of the guys who are admitting to doping in the 90s are no longer riders, so Zabel is really a unique case. I’ve liked Zabel for a long time, he’s always seemed like a classy guy in the peloton, so I’m inclined to want to cheer him on. If he’s allowed to continue to race (and clearly so far neither his team nor the UCI seems to have a problem with him racing) then perhaps more ex-riders will come forward and we can really get a definitive picture of what happened back then and then we can learn from it. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see. (Race report from today’s stage 2 here.)