A squirrel. Darting from nowhere. BRAKES! I stay upright. Squirrel jets up a tree. I’d say we both fared better than Sandy Casar and the dog from Stage 18 of the TDF.

One guy mowing a lawn.

Four riders going my speed in the opposite direction.

Slight route change added a teeny but to the usual mileage.

High note: Maxing out over 30 mph for the first time this year. I was heading downhill at a good clip and realized that with a little extra push I could make it. Fun!

• Distance: 12.1 miles
• Average speed: 14.6
• Max. speed: 31.4
• Time: 49.29 minutes
• Total miles for the year: 31.51

. . . but not such a surprise, really. Given the state of cycling in recent memory, who didn’t watch Alexandre Vinokourov crush the field at the Albi time trial and have just the slightest of a thought as to whether or not he had a little bit of help along the way? Add to that the yo-yo effect of the next couple of days and you were just wondering anyway.

And now the test results are back. Someone else’s blood in his system. So says the lab. Vino says no, even cracks a joke about the rumors that it was his father’s blood.

Reactions? Can’t get any better than David Millar, who has himself been down the dark road of doping. Not only is he now riding clean, but he is passionate about stopping doping practices and seems truly concerned about the pressure that doping in the pro peleton is putting on a new generation of riders. I guess he should know. He’s been there and felt the pressure. Listen to what he said on the BikeRadar.com - though I warn you, it is not entirely family-friendly fare. Let’s just say there had to be a few beeps added here and there. He waxed a bit more eloquent in his diary on Bicycling.com, writing:

“I think he [Jeremy Whittle from The Times] was the only one there who recognized there was still a young boy who loved cycling underneath it all who had just lost one of his heroes. So I’m very sorry to whomever I hurt when you found out I doped, I now know what it must have felt like.”

Perhaps, though, the great Eddy Merckx’s comments to Eurosport summed up what a lot of fans thought when the news came down when he said, “But, for me, that’s the end of cycling.”

Me, I’m kind of taking a stance similar to Tom Boonen’s, quoted below …

“Everybody is saying, ‘this is bad, this is not good for cycling,’ it is good for cycling. If he didn’t caught him, that would be bad for cycling. Now I’m sure that 95 to 99 percent of the riders are doing a good and a clean job. There’s always guys who are trying to cheat, but it’s not because if you take a school class and one guy’s cheating, you don’t get the entire class out of the school, you get the one guy and that’s what we’re trying to do in cycling right now. They want it to change in one minute, but it’s hard because you’re working with guys like this. Last night when they told me, I didn’t speak for 50 minutes, because I couldn’t believe it that they’re still so stupid like this. It was a beautiful Tour until now. We’re trying to keep the atmosphere up and keep it a good Tour, but it’s not that easy.”

When it comes right down to it, cycling knows it has a problem and it is doing something about it. Sure, the system has its kinks and flaws and still desperately needs to be fixed, as Millar pointed out. Broken as it is, cycling is doing something (unlike some other sports who have heavily suspected dopers on the verge of breaking one of the sport’s most hallowed records, if y’all know what I mean).

That doesn’t mean it isn’t going to be a tremendous letdown when we hear about guys like Vino. On one of the message boards (I think it was at Bicycling, but don’t quote me on that), someone said to pick the riders you enjoy watching and just accept the fact they might come up positive one of these times. It seems like a tough way to be a fan of the sport, but if you like watching the clock in the time trials or attacks on the mountains or the chaos of a spring finish or a jaw-rattling ride over the cobblestones, that’s just what we have to do.

UPDATE: Somewhere between the time I wrote most of this on my work computer (after hours!) and the time I walked in the front door at home, Michael Rasmussen was booted from the tour and fired from his team for lying about his whereabout prior to the tour. The significance in the action is that he had not turned in the paperwork required by the authorities as part of the out of competition doping controls … hence, the appearance of trying to avoid the controls. On one hand, I’m glad they did it now rather than let it go and have a mess after the fact, but on the other hand, you have to wonder how things might have gone if this action had been taken back when the rumors surfaced. I guess we’ll never know. I have been pulling for Contador and the whole Disco gang, but I didn’t want them to podium this way.