I received the newsflash this morning via Twitter from @mudandcowbells that Bend, Oregon resident Steve Larsen died while doing a running workout. The first thing that struck me was “is this real?” I did a quick search on Google, Velo News and cyclingnews.com to verify the story. Amazing that all the news right now about Google revolves around their public statements that they need to evolve to become more realtime, and here is a concrete example of how Twitter delivered the news in a flash. Then the sad reality hit home as I received more Twitter posts from cyclists like @slctbird that it has been confirmed that Larsen passed away. I met Steve a few times when he was making his transition from pro road racing (rode on Motorola and was team mates with Lance) to his cross-country mountain bike days. When he rode for Scott, my wife spent a few weeks traveling with him when she was competing on the European World Cup circuit. My wife has great memories of Steve showing her and her friend Tammy Jacques Grewal around Italy, particularly a place called Zi Martino in Castegneto Carducci, a popular country inn that was a popular training outpost for pro cycling teams. Here is the article on velonews.com, and I am sure there will be more to come on Steve’s passing.

The Juicer of the Week award goes to Christian Pfannberger, from Team Katusha. No stranger to the Juice files, the UCI confirmed that Pfannberger was running a little extra help for the Ardennes Classics, in the form of Recombinant Erythropoietin (EPO). Read the story here on Velo News. Did I mention he is Austrian? Austria must now have the highest per capita cases of atletes using EPO. That’s a lot of Juice for such a small country. This is Pfannberger’s second time on the dirty squad, having tested positive for EPO and serving a suspension in the past. I guess he can’t use the age old cyclist excuse: I only did it this one time, all my results in the past were clean. He issued a statement to cyclingnews.com saying “I definitely didn’t take anything forbidden.” Are we supposed to believe this crap?