Yesterday another great day. There was a certain amount of kicking back in the morning, prioritizing what we need to spend the money on, new offices one floor down to double our space, equipment for the new hires, and upgrades of our other computers, though we kept coming back to just jetting off and renting an entire island in the Bahamas for a few weeks as a much more fun alternative.

More meetings and calls in the afternoon, some good, some pointless and dodged a bullet with a potential client who really could have been a smoking gun politically and press wise for us. Some customers you just don't want :-)

This morning brings a deal of frustration and anger, Le Tour de France, an event I look forward to all year, and was particularly relishing this year with it being wide open due to the retirement of Lance. There were so many contenders..Basso and Ullrich being the favorites, but also Vinikourov, Salvodelli, Simoni, Cunego, Floyd Landis (US), George Hincapie (US), Sevilla, Mancebo all with a shot, a great day in the mountains or a stellar time trial and the race was going to be wide open.

Then this morning, a major drug bust a month or so ago in Spain of a sports doctor which immediately got the Liberty Segurios team thrown out of cycling and launched a full scale investigation into the good Doctor's clients. The report was presented by the Spanish authorities to the Spanish Cycling Federation and thus to UCI, cycling's governing body..and Ullrich, Basso and Mancebo are out due to being implicated and enough evidence to justify their teams suspending and withdrawing them - somewher between 15-20 riders are expected to be out by the end of the day..this on the eve of the race itself.

Just so very disappointing.

If he's not implicated..Forza Floyd, he's been racing like a certain Texan of late, e.g. at Paris-Nice while in the overall lead a group of 19 riders got away, and none of the other teams wanted to chase on the mountain, and he couldn't get any other team to share the load. So he sent his whole team to the front and had them light it up, for 3, 5 and then 10 minutes. When all the other riders were blowing up and dying on their bikes he looked back and shouted at the peloton.."You want more of that ? Because if you do we've got plenty !"...the other teams suddenly helped out chasing down the break rather than subject themselves to more pain. So very Lance like. And yes he won the race...a 9 day stage race, in addition to the Tour of Georgia, and the Tour of California.

George Hincapie would be a sentimental wish, the only rider to have ridden as a key lieutenant to Armstrong on all 7 victories, originally a sprinter, turned spring classics rider who then proceeded to win a mountain stage at last year's Tour, and he's not a bad time trialler either. But he destroyed his shoulder at Paris-Roubaix in April and has not been seen racing much. From the Discovery team Paolo Salvodelli looks a better candidate, winner of the Giro in 2005 and then one of Armstrong's high mountain sidemen, but had a bad Giro this year suffering from some kind of allergy.

Now I think and have written this I'm less angry, the sport and race have ejected and punished a bunch of cheats. Leaving the field open for what I hope (trust) will produce a clean winner.