Thanks to my official news correspondent in Belgium, we now know that Johan Bruyneel signed the “golden book” in Izegem, Belgium. Johan is now an honorary citizen of Izegem, the town where he was born... The photo is from the 2005 Tour, with Johan, Elvio (soigneur) and Paolo warming up for the stage....

And a big thanks to Cosmo (http://cyclocosm.com) for his post in this blog yesterday. It totally puts this Amgen crap into perspective and I will repeat it here: “Here's a logical breakdown of EPO usage world-wide: Let's say there's 600 cyclists in the Pro Tour (20 teams of 30 riders), and 600 riders in each continental tour. That makes 3,600 male pro cyclists. In the name of fairness, let's double that to add women. Now let's assume that each of the other major sports affected by EPO (Nordic skiing, mountain biking, cyclocross, triathalon, distance running) have equally large numbers of participants (which they don't). That's 43,200 people.

According to the American Cancer Society, there were 1,372,910 cancer cases in the United States alone. Even if every single endurance athlete on earth were doping, it still wouldn't amount to a drop in the bucket against the number of people who use EPO to get through their cancer treatments.”

Here we go again: now we have lab tests showing Roberto Heras as positive for EPO in his A test at Stage 20 of the Vuelta. As usual, the results were “leaked” to the press long before any chance of having results for the B part of the testing. So now Roberto’s reputation is tainted, if not ruined - now there will always be doubts. This list of athletes grows and grows.... The integrity and confidentiality of the doping control results diminishes just as fast. When people associated with the testing are in bed with the Media, the credibility of all testing is nil... This whole thing is, indeed, a witch hunt, catering to the news media....

WADA has serious problems, flaws and incompetencies with their testing procedures, and worse. The problem is that Dick Pound and his crew will never admit it. How many athletes are going to have their reputations ruined before somebody does something?

One thing that I’m pretty sure of, is that Roberto is not stupid. Does anyone really think that Roberto would do EPO right at the end of the Vuelta, when he knows full well that he will be tested? He won something like four stages, and then came right down to the wire with the last couple of stages. So does anyone really think he would do EPO before that TT? When he knows that he will be tested for sure? This all does not make any kind of logical sense at all...

People, what more does it take? There are serious, reputation-ruining problems that the UCI and WADA need to address, but to do so will expose so much incompetence and corruption within their organizations that will never happen.... The bureaucracy is too large for cyclists to have a voice or a choice in this big CYA bureaucracy called Doping Control....