inrng

Alexandre Vinokourov will join the Grand Chapter of the Musketeers of Armagnac in a special ceremony on Saturday 1 September in the French town of Condom. The Olympic cycling champ will be the special guest for the prize ceremony.

As well as celebrating Armagnac, a form of brandy from the Gascon region of France, the Chapter promotes traditions and customs from the past in this area of South-West France.

And yes, Condom is the name of a town in South-West France.

Story spotted by Twitter’s @Biarnes72.

Fatima Yvelain is a regional-level distance runner in France. I suspect you had not heard of her until now but she enters history with one of the best ever excuses for a positive doping test.

Following a positive test for EPO after a half-marathon, she claimed heavy rainfall on the day of race had caused water to stream over hidden medical waste somewhere near the course. As she ran, the EPO-laced rainwater splashed onto her shorts, thus contaminating her urine when she later provided a sample at the doping control.

Needless athletics website VO2.fr reports the French Athletics Federation didn’t believe a word. She is banned for two years.

Update: this is no hoax story. You can read the official sanction from the French Athletics Federation here (PDF, in French).

In the post-stage press conference Wiggins was asked what he thinks about people who point fingers at Team Sky and hint that he is doping.

Here’s his response:

“I say they’re just fucking wankers. I cannot be doing with people like that.

It justifies their own bone-idleness because they can’t ever imagine applying themselves to do anything in their lives.

It’s easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of shit, rather than get off their arses in their own lives and apply themselves and work hard at something and achieve something. And that’s ultimately it. Cunts.”

Thanks to Twitter’s @richardmoore73

With 25km to go, Alessandro Petacchi took off his shoe covers and passed them to team mate Davide Vigano. Vigano was riding one-handed as he tried to put the shoe covers in his back pocket whilst riding downhill at around 70km/h when, unable to brake, he rode into the backwheel of the rider in front of him, prompting a wave of crashes at high speed.

That’s what L’Equipe says today. I’d add some more context. First, it seems to have come from Danilo Hondo of the same team, although this isn’t mentioned by the newspaper.

Petacchi presumably had the covers to keep his feet dry during the day but didn’t want the extra weight on his feet for the finish, a normal trick for the sprint.

We’d seen the breakaway up the road put on a tight leash, the bunch had closed in almost too quickly. But with the rolling roads and the wind, the bunch seemed nervous already. The wind had got up too, making the bunch nervous, adding even more pressure on the riders to be at the front.