Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Tainted Beef Conclusion and Chopin...

Reports from Espana (Spain, for my monolingual 'Merican audience) indicate that Two or Three time Tour de France champion Alberto Contador will likely be banned for one year after months of deliberation and investigation. The Spanish newspaper Marca and others are reporting that the decision on Alberto Contador and the Case of the Tainted Spanish Beef will be announced Thursday, resulting in a single year ban that would keep him from racing in any events this season. Reports from the Contador Camp say that they do not believe these early bits of leaked information, not even that the announcement will come Thursday. This is, frankly, an ugly time for cycling. If Contador doped last year, he has been doping the whole time. That means Armstrong's seven Tour wins, Landis' one and Contador's three represent over a decade of Tours won by cheaters. That is amazing; imagine the NFL investigating the last ten Super Bowl winners at the same time, and one team already admitting they had cheated. (Oh, right, the Patriots admitted to spying, but at least not in the Super Bowl) So, for a sport already struggling for sponsors and attention, the realization that even its best are fake, drugged up men in Lycra could be extremely damaging, even crippling. More on this on Thursday...




In other news, we recall the great pianist Frederic Chopin, who was said by his contemporaries to be the most astounding artist of his day (the Bohunk tends to agree). Chopin had a strange habit of losing consciousness and going into a dream-like state, even while performing before a packed audience. The Bohunk uses Chopin's sonattas to fall asleep; I never found Chopin's slumber all that surprising when I read of it. Now, however, Spanish doctors, apparently less busy after trying to exonerate Contador, have found that Chopin probably suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, a condition that creates hallucinations that last from seconds to some minutes. Chopin claimed to be able to describe his dreams in very minute detail, another indication that these fits were in fact the result of epilepsy and not, as the novelist and very, very French person Aurore Dudevant claimed, "the manifestation of a genius full of sentiment and expression. Which would have been much cooler, but not scientifically viable.

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