ASO has uninvited Tom Boonen from the Tour de France because he tested positive for cocaine in an out-of-competition test. Thankfully, everyone including race director Christian Prudhomme agrees that this isn’t about doping, just a case of a guy doing some coke.

But that is some heavy-handed moralism and I doubt that it will even play well with the fans. Do they really care about Tom Boonen’s recreational drug use? He has a reputation as a partier, and people who party like to do coke. People seem to be able to live with that aspect of our society. Fortunately, Boonen’s team manager and sponsors aren’t taking the bait.

Maybe this is just my San Francisco values talking. After all, this is a city where the Mayor took less heat after admitting to an affair with his campaign manager’s wife and checking into alcohol rehab than did the Supervisor who accused him of cocaine use.

If ASO wanted to bar Tom Boonen for drunk driving, that would be different. But what’s this world coming to when a Lamborghini-driving superstar athlete can’t get away with bumping a little coke?

via Velonews

(edit, June 12: I forgot to mention that ASO also could have uninvited him for having a 16 year old girlfriend)

A lot of major teams are looking for new title sponsors for next season and Riis Cycling (aka Team CSC) is the first to provide some good news: Saxo Bank! Hopefully, the fact that Riis was able to replace CSC within 3 months is a good portend for High Road, Gerolsteiner, etc.

Saxo will come on board immediately as a co-title sponsor with CSC starting with the Tour de France, then become sole title sponsor for 2009-2010 or 2009-2011 (the team’s press release is unclear). According to Wikipedia, Saxo Bank’s revenue comes mostly from White Label Services, where Saxo quietly provides back-end infrastructure that Citibank and others re-brand and use to service their customers. Obviously, now that they’re sponsoring the world’s #1 cycling team, they’re trying to reach out and establish their own brand. I’m a big fan of Bjarne’s program and this seems like a great fit.

The bank also reportedly (i.e. it says it on Wikipedia without a citation) distributed 10,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged as a marketing initiative, which is a bit odd. The book’s Objectivist philosophy teaches that the highest purpose is to pursue one’s own self-interest, which isn’t exactly in line with Bjarne’s philosophy of being “the team that takes its staring [sic] position in the team rather than the individual.” We’ll see if Team Saxo Bank can provide as eloquent a rebuttal to Objectivism as did one of my favorite video games, Bioshock.

Ayn Rand aside, this is great news for all involved and for pro cycling generally.

After a year off, I spent this past weekend in Philly for the Commerce Bank Philadelphia International Championship testing hardware and web tools to produce content for my project with SRAM. I’ll post some of the results soon, but I came across this giant wooden track bike in the airport and it’s arguably the coolest thing I saw all weekend:

Looks like a 150cm frame with a Corima front and a Spinergy rear (yikes). I’m curious about the left-side drivetrain though.

I highly recommend that you download this PDF of Organizational Forms in Professional Cycling – Efficiency Issues of the UCI Pro Tour, a research paper on the economics of the sport by Luca Rebeggiani of the University of Hannover and Davide Tondani of the University of Parma.

ABSTRACT: This paper gives a first economic approach to pro cycling and analyses the changes induced by the newly introduced UCI Pro Tour on the racing teams’ behaviour. We develop an oligopolistic model starting from the well known Cournot framework to analyse if the actual setting of the UCI Pro Tour leads to a partially unmeant behaviour of the racing teams. In particular, we show that the blamed regional concentration of their race participation depends on a lack of incentives stemming from the licence assignation procedure. Our theoreticalresults are supported by empirical data concerning the performance of the racing teams in 2005 and 2006. As a recommendation for future improvements, we derive from the model the need for a relegation system for racing teams

By “relegation system”, they’re talking about something like in European football leagues, where the worst teams in the first division are replaced by the best teams from the second division at the end of the season. They also use some pretty sweet equations:

Anyways, just read the paper!

I caught the final Giro d’Italia broadcast on Versus today. Liggett and Sherwin tried their best to add some drama to the race for the pink jersey but there was really no chance of Alberto Contador losing time to Ricardo Ricco in a flat time trial. It was great to see SRAM going 1-2 overall!

Whenever I watch cycling on TV, I keep a running list of who’s advertising. A lot of the spots go to advertisers that make broader buys on Versus, but Cyclysm Sundays is clearly a target for a few brands. Hampton Hotels, whose USOC push also includes a sponsorship of USA Cycling, was a sponsor of the broadcast and had plenty of spots. Because grass is green, Scotts sponsored a “Green Jersey Update” covering the Giro’s KOM jersey. Specialized was the only Versus advertiser from the bike industry, with spots featuring Tom Boonen and Paolo Bettini. I noticed that Garmin sponsored the Giro itself, with good signage around the time trial start house. Then there was Captain Morgan as a broadcast sponsor.

Cycling makes sense for the first four brands. Hampton and Scotts presumably like the demographics. Specialized and Garmin make applicable products. But Captain Morgan? I understand why they’d sponsor a contest to party at the Playboy Mansion on Halloween, but I’d love to hear the rationale for their interest in cycling. If anyone from Diageo is reading this, hit me up!