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Stu, Matt and Lance
DeCanio gets aggressive, the next Lance Chronicles and the Stupor Bowl
Welcome to a brief respite from Stupor Bowl week and the Jacko trial. This week we've got monumental gaffes by Yours Truly, an interview with cycling's craziest truth-teller, and more, more, more on that media maven, the king of OLN and Discovery, Mr. Lance hizzownself Armstrong. Without further mucking around...
Last Week's Error
No one has taken offense to it, but last week's little jab at ESPN anchor Stuart Scott was unfair. What I wrote was that he looks half asleep most of the time, but what I didn't know (and found out thanks to reader Dan Friedell) is that the reason Scott's left eye droops is that he was hit in the face with a football a few years ago at a New York Jets practice and nearly lost sight in the eye. He suffered a split lens and cornea, all the more devastating because he already had a detached retina in his right eye (Scott is a former semi-pro football player). Although the comment was lighthearted, had I known about Scott's injuries I never would have made it. To him, and to anyone who thought it was callous, I apologize. Stu, keep the boo-yahs coming and don't let T.O. grab the mike away from you.
Down With the Ship
Despite his fierce avowals for justice and getting involved with family friends who have lines straight to the White House, Matt DeCanio is in danger of ostracizing himself into obscurity. DeCanio, a former national road champion, made waves in the insular domestic road racing scene last year with a by-turns confessional and accusatory set of postings on the core www.racelistings.com web site.
The postings began with a mea culpa of brief EPO use and a long and revealing journal about the incidents and motivations and people who had led him to use drugs, as well as the revulsion he felt at having cheated. The writing then turned angry, lashing out at everyone from the people who'd enabled his short stint as a doper, to other riders who he said were cheaters, and the coaches, who he claimed, enabled them and at the same time engaged in a cruel theft--an exchange of innocence for tarnished dreams.
The postings from there took on a life of their own, leading to DeCanio's affiliation with an underground anti-doping web site, www.stolenunderground.com. The site, which is run jointly by DeCanio and a few anonymous associates, takes DeCanio's accusations a step further, with a Doper of the Month page and assorted rambling manifestos about doping. It is, for lack of a better term, punk rock in the rawest and realest sense.
DeCanio, meanwhile, had signed a contract for 2005 with Ofoto-Sierra Nevada and was set to return to pro racing when team officials fired him for breaking the terms of his contract. The contract, Sierra Nevada says, included stipulations about the tone and content of DeCanio's own web site and what kind of conduct was permissible. When the team asked DeCanio to back off from some of his stronger statements, DeCanio refused and his contract was terminated. The nuts and bolts of all of this can be found in Neal Rogers' excellent story on VeloNews' web site. DeCanio's case has become an odd microcosm of cycling's fight with doping, a fight increasingly revealed as a war with itself.
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Professional cyclist Matt Decanio was fired in January from the Ofoto/Sierra Nevada cycling team for breaking what the team spokesman Josh Kadis called "ground rules" about what materials Decanio would be permitted to post on his anti-doping website, according to a report by VeloNews. The websites at issue are  Stolen Underground and  Mattdecanio.com. Decanio's anti-doping stance started with his  admission to the use of EPO in the summer of 2003 in preparation for the Housatonic Valley Classic in Connecticut, USA.