After poor Calif. Tour, more bad news for Rock Racing

Rock Racing owner Michael Ball said he plans to adopt "an aggressive internal team anti-doping program." Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

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From Rock Racing, the only U.S. Pro Continental team that travels with its own stable of podium girls, comes this breaking news: team owner Michael Ball has had an epiphany! On Tuesday, Rock announced plans to adopt "an aggressive internal team anti-doping program," such as those employed by Slipstream, High Road, CSC, Astana and others.

This initiative, declaims the press release, underscores Ball's "willingness to take every measure to ensure that its members race clean and fair." It also underscores his unwllingness to keep getting his head handed to him, PR-wise, on the issue of doping.

Before turning our gaze to Rock Racing's recent, turbulent past, let's get a post-mortem on the Tour of California, which ended Sunday in Pasadena.

Never did riders suffer so acutely as in Stage 4, the 135-mile slog down the coast to San Luis Obispo. Lashed by rain, taunted by headwinds, hypothermic riders took seven-plus hours to finish. Chapeau (hats off) to Toyota-United's Dominique Rollin for a truly epic stage win.

Congrats, also, to Astana's Levi Leipheimer, for successfully defending his Tour of California title, after seizing the lead with a dominating time trial last Friday in Solvang. Leipheimer won despite the disappointment of his team's stunning exclusion from this year's Tour de France, whose grandees remain unmoved by the fact that Astana, under new management, has purged itself of the drug cheats who embarrassed the Tour for two years running. In hopes that those eminences might change their minds, Leipheimer & friends set up LetLeviRide.com. Of course, if he doesn't get to the Champs-Elysees this July, Levi can always treasure the memory of those six soggy laps around Pasadena. That stage was snatched, incidentally, by Team High Road's George Hincapie, the redoubtable war horse who has long enlisted foul weather as his ally.

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