Drugs, Yobbos and Lanes

Yesterday I’m sure the world was shocked about tales of doping in professional cycling. Who would have thought that such a traditionally clean sport would have finally succumbed to drug taking? Still, if he’s to believed, then Floyd Landis did, indeed, artificially enhance his performance around the time that he was found guilty of just that. More wide-reachingly he’s accusing other members of his teams of doing the same including the eternally suspected but so far always testing clean, Lance Armstrong.

While no-one will perhaps be all that surprised if Armstrong does turn out to have doped, simply due to the nature of the sport and the number of enhanced cyclists he has beaten in his career, I still hope that he is clean. I’m no big fan of him, but the thought that there can be magnificent clean athletes in cycling gives hope for the sport as a whole.

In the less stimulated world of commuting to work in London, where adrenaline form being nearly killed and perhaps the remnants of last night’s drinking are the aids most cyclists will test positive for (unless there’s been a growth in the underground clubbing and EPO scene that I’m unaware of) the Guardian has jumped onto the Superhighway bandwagon and come up with a survey. On the bike blog there you can answer a series of questions about your local bike lane and help to build a national picture of the best and worst. Someone’s put in a lot of work on Google Docs so make it worth their while by contributing here.

Also in London Boris Johnson has not lost an opportunity to mention the bike hire scheme that’s going to hit the roads in a month or so, as he also promotes a scheme to get blanket Wi-Fi across the capital. He was talking about a new iPhone App (it must be a week since we mentioned one) that will show you the location of the hire points, as well as the number of bikes at each one. Admittedly it doesn’t give a huge feeling of confidence when even the figurehead of the scheme is worried about how many will be stolen by “local yobbos”, but at least it might save you a wasted trip. Personally I’m more excited about the Wi-Fi which might open up all sorts of opportunities for watching streaming videos to brighten up your ride to work if you’re finding the steady roll of tarmac and the constant risk of other vehicles not entertaining enough.

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