If you're new here or if you like this post, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or get your blog updates by email . You can also find out what I'm doing right now by following me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

Ricardo Ricco busted

Today they’ve announced that Saunier Duval’s rider Ricardo Ricco tested positive on the use of EPO.
Ricco who’ve already won 2 stages this Tour de France was immediately suspended by his team. The team Saunier Duval itself is also leaving this year’s tour after this revelation.

From nature Ricco who’s 24 years old, is ‘blessed’ with a high hematocrit value and has the approval from the UCI for this. But from the start of this year’s tour he was already being watched closely by the French anti-doping agency.
The 2 victories he achieved where of an phenomenal value and thus rising questions.
After the time trial he tested positive for EPO of the 3rd generation (CERA).
Now we can only hope that all the others are riding clean, but my opinion is that at least 50% of the one’s that are left are also using in some kind of way.

Euro 2008 started, will Portugal win the trophy?

A few minutes back the first game of Euro 2008 ended. Too bad for the one of the hosts Switzerland that they’ve lost to Czech Republic with 0-1 but in my opinion, the Czech deserved the win.

They had more ball possession, some of the best chances, and a bit of luck the Swiss didn’t had.

For me the next few weeks will consist out of sleep, work, run a bit and watch as much soccer as I can. So I’m going to excuse myself for not going to update the site as much as before.
Whenever I have some time free I’ll make sure to write something interesting for you all.
And if I run into something interesting, I’m going to make sure I’ll make some free time.

Now a question to you guys and girls.
Are there any soccer fans between my readers?
Who do you think will win the European Championship title?

I think Portugal with a brilliant Christiano Ronaldo and Ricardo Quaresma will have a great chance of winning the title. For Ronaldo it will be the crown on a fabulous season where he has won everything he could win.

Also the Netherlands with a very strong team will be one of the big contenders for the title, but I think they’ll come a bit too short at the deciding moments.

The biggest surprise of the tournament will be Romania in my eyes. They have a team that will work for each other like no other team, making it hard to beat. And if you can’t beat them, they’ll score against you and take away the win. If they survive the group of dead (Italy, France and The Netherlands), anything can happen for them.

Biggest disappointments of this tournament will be:

France: Without Zidane, France isn’t the same anymore and I don’t feel that Ribery is filling the gap Zidane left behind.

Spain: They’re always very strong in the qualifying rounds, but on every tournament, they tend to play bad. Almost like they can’t handle the pressure. I surely hope this year it will be different for them as they do deserve a price for once.

Italy: The World Champions will be lucky if they survive the group stage I feel. With the loss of Cannavaro they lose the hearth of their defense and if you look at the scoring capabilities of the other teams in the group, they have to make sure they’ll score some goals.

So far my opinion, now I’m going to watch the future European Champion (Portugal) play against Turkey. My prediction for this game: 3-1 for Portugal, two goals from Christiano Ronaldo and one from Deco.

Stats for the soccer fans

Well If you’re a big soccer fan like me, you’re surely going to love the site I found browsing the web.

This Saturday, the European Soccer Championship will start in Austria and Switzerland.
And the cool guys from Castrol Performance Index made a little site where you can follow every game live.

Now I’ll hear you thinking, there are lots of other sites where you can follow it or even better you could watch it live on TV. But wait, they show something pretty nice instead.
If you followed some Champions League matches this year, you’ll probably noticed that whenever there’s a player being replaced, they show some info about how many meters this particular player had run during his time on the pitch.

Well this is what they’re showing on this site, not for one player, but for all the players of the game. And also the maximum speed a player had during his game.

True, this isn’t as exciting as the game itself, but it gives you some nice info about what the player has done on the pitch, was he lazy or did he ran after every ball?

But not running much doesn’t mean your lazy, it also can mean that the player just knows where the ball is going to end up, so he doesn’t have to run much.

At the moment they’re displaying some statistics from a few friendly games that were played last week.

Here you can see that Sweden’s Kim Källström ran 12566 meters, the most of all the players and friendly matches right now.
And Philippe Senderos was the fastest one of the bunch, he did a sprint with a maximum speed of 35.9km/h. If he could keep this speed over a 100m distance, he would run it in 10.03 seconds.
A bit far from the new 100m record from Usain Bolt last Saturday, but very fast for a soccer player.

I’m definitely going to take a look at this site next Saturday.

Lightning Bolt breaks 100m World Record

Yesterday Evening, Jamaican Usain Bolt beat Tyson Gay on the 100m at the Reebok Grand Prix Athletics meeting.

Being only 21 years old, he broke the previous record by 0.02 hundreds of a second, to set the new fastest time to 9.72 seconds.
He was a bit lucky with the tailwind (1.7m/sec) being just under the maximum allowed wind (2.0 meters/sec), but you still have to be very very fast.

The previous record holder was his compatriot Asafa Powell.

I can’t wait to see him, Asafa Powell and Tyson Gay competing against each other at the Olympics in China in about 2 months. Probably they won’t break the record again there, because of the hot weather, but it will give Usain Bolt some satisfaction if he wins.

He said himself, this record doesn’t mean a thing if I don’t win at the Olympics. The record can be broken every day, the Gold at the Olympics, only every 4 years.

Is this Top Gear’s Stig?

A few minutes back I saw the local news here. As most of you now I’m living in the nicest part of Belgium, Limburg. And the race circuit of Zolder is almost in my backyard. Now it happens to be that the people of Top Gear rented this particular race track for a couple of days to make some shoots.

One of the things they did was drive around the track, or part of the track with some customized cars. They made a double-decker car to race in. The one that sits below controls the speed and brakes and the one on top steers. From the few things I’ve seen on the news it must be lots of fun to drive this way.

But at the end of the short video, they showed the Stig without a helmet!

Here’s the link to the video I’m talking about, thx to www.TVL.be

Now the only thing we have to work out is it really the Stig or are they just messing with us.
I did a little research and compared a few pictures of known race drivers, but till now I can’t seem to recognize him.

Anyone of you recognizes him? Shout your names here, and we’ll investigate it further.

Update!!!!

Thx to some friends of me, we think we found out who this bloke is. It’s German’s, yes that’s right a German driver, Tim Schrick. The resemblance is hard to miss.

Stig without a helmet on the original footage from TVL.be and Tim Schrick next to it.