When your alma mater doesn’t play football ...
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You start Saturday morning looking to see what’s happening in sports you’re interested in.
Since I won’t find any Marquette basketball scores until next month, I’ve been checking out cycling publications and my e-mail box this morning and found two interesting bits, interesting for completely different reasons.
From www.usacycling.org came the news that young star Taylor Phinney, who spent most of the last year making a ferocious and successful run at qualifying for the Olympics in track cycling (10 months, 100,000 miles traveled around the world).
The 18-year-old son of two former Olympic cycling stars -- Davis Phinney and Connie Carpenter -- won his third national title of the week Friday at the Home Depot Center in Carson and set a new track record in the men’s 4,000-meter individual pursuit.
Phinney hasn’t slowed down since the Olympics. He has made appearances with Lance Armstrong, who is, besides making his own cycling comeback, starting an under-23 team that will feature Phinney. Armstrong’s comeback is partly fueled by wanting to raise more money for his cancer foundation, Livestrong, and Phinney’s successes also mean more publicity for his dad’s foundation to help research a cure for Parkinson’s. Davis Phinney underwent brain surgery last spring at Stanford to try to help control his Parkinson’s symptoms.
In a Saturday VeloNews article, charismatic road racer Alexander Vinokourov says he wants to return to the peloton.
The 35-year-old has finished serving a one-year doping suspension after being kicked out of the 2007 Tour de France, which he had been a favorite to win. Vinokourov was riding for the Astana team he had helped put together when he failed his doping tests, and it is to Astana that Vinokourov wants to return.
If that happened, Astana might be the single most dysfunctional team in sports history. It is directed by Johan Bruyneel, who nurtured Armstrong’s career. It is led by the world’s top cyclist, Alberto Contador, and American Olympic time trial bronze medalist Levi Leipheimer. It is now Armstrong’s team as well and already there has been a juicy battle over who will be the leader, the guy the rest of the team rides in support of: Spain’s Contador, winner of the 2007 Tour de France and this year’s Giro d’Italia and Spanish Vuelta, or Armstrong.
Contador couldn’t defend his Tour de France title because Astana was barred from the 2008 Tour de France after organizers deemed its Vinokourov-led doping scandals more egregious than those of any other team.
If Vinokourov returns, Bruyneel might be both the most envied and unenvied man in cycling. He’ll have four racers who have proven capable of winning big tours and he’ll need to convince three of them to act as domestiques -- the helper bees who set tempo, fetch water bottles and eventually peel away to the back of the pack when their work is done.
Watching someone tell Armstrong to get lunch, set a killer pace up a mountain then make way for Contador? That would be must-see TV this summer.
-- Diane Pucin