Cycling: Astarloza - A Star Loser !

Mikel Astarloza, the Spanish cyclist who won stage 16 of this year's Tour De France and finished 11th overall has tested positive for EPO. It is not yet known what type of EPO (presumably CERA) but SBS has reported that it was during an out of competition test. A disciplinary hearing will be held next month by the UCI to determine his punishment (probably a 2 year suspension) after he tested positive on the 26th of June. The UCI needs to act faster on these cases, the sample was taken before the TDF and yet Astarloza was still able to compete. But at least thats another cheat forcibly removed from the peloton. Astarloza's stage win in the TDF this year was his first professional stage win (he won the 2003 Tour Down Under around South Australia) but he had consistantly finished highly overall in major stage races such as the Dauphine Libre and Le Tour. There was no obvious upspike in his form this year, indicating that he had been doping for several years before this. I have added him and Danilo Di Luca to the shit list for being cheating gits.

In other news, after the flurry of recent postings, I've decided to finally get a related address. So this blog is now at rushedbehind.blogspot.com. Neat hey. If you are reading this, you are on the new site. The whole blog has been moved, so all the archives are still here. Call me a traditionalist, but I reckon a blog should have an address related to its name. So if you still have the old site bookmarked, change it now. And if you don't have this site bookmarked, what a great opportunity to do so. I don't know if the rss feeds were affected, so if you use these, you might want to check it out. But if you are getting this, then you will get all future posts. I do seem to have somehow lost my blogroll, so this will be refilled gradually, as I remember which blogs were worth reading.

Go rain, go! You are Australia's only hope at staving off defeat (and poor fantasy cricket scores from Brad Haddin given his late withdrawal after my kiss of death)!