The Mailbag is a regular department on VeloNews.com. If you have a comment, an opinion or observation regarding anything you have read in VeloNews magazine or on VeloNews.com, write to webletters@insideinc.com. Please include your full name, hometown and state or nation. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. Writers are encouraged to limit their submissions to one letter per month. The letters published here contain the opinions of the submitting authors and should not be viewed as reflecting the opinions, policies or positions of VeloNews.com, VeloNews magazine or our parent company, Inside Communications, Inc.

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One good slam deserves another
Editor:
While I agree with Alexander Vinokourov that cycling is probably no dirtier than any other pro sport - seriously, half the NFL and 90 percent of MLB would be banned if they tested like cycling – I do have a problem with him slamming the door on cycling. But only because cycling has already slammed the door on him!

Make no mistake, Vino’, you cheated, you were caught, and they dropped you, not the other way around. But I’m sure you’ll still sleep just fine in your mansion bought with prize money stolen from clean riders. Just like all of the other cheats.

Adam Switzer
Richmond, Virginia

Dope: It’s not just for pros
Editor:
I'd like to be one of the many to reply to Mr. Keating's suggestion (see Wednesday's Mailbag: You can have fun on the road, too) that one can avoid doping concerns by entering local races with amateur fields.

See, I live and grew up racing in the upper Midwest, and if memory serves me well, I recall at least three Minneapolis-area riders over the years who were busted for doping and whose reigns of terror over our innocent little "local races" certainly grew a healthy crop of cynicism around these otherwise healthy, fertile lands.

I always looked forward to lining up with those hopped-up boys from the Twin cities, knowing that their performances surely would be grand.

Kim West
Des Moines, Iowa

Picking a nit
Editor:
The recent feature about next year's Tour de Georgia route brings up a question I have every year with this race: Why is it the Tour de Georgia? Last time I checked, there's not a large French-speaking contingent in Georgia, so the only thing I can figure is that they're trying to signal that it's a bike race by "foreignizing" the name.

It seems to me that American cyclists are holding their own against the rest of the competition in Europe and have been for a while, and that we're developing several top-caliber races here that draw the big-name teams. We even have a number of major U.S. companies that have sponsored Protour teams (CSC, Discovery, Liberty Mutual, Prodir). So why do we continue to think that to be a serious bike race, the Tour of Georgia must be more "Euro?"

This may seem trivial at a time when cycling is undergoing much more important changes, and maybe it's simply because I need a distraction that this has gotten under my skin. But I think it's high time that American cyclists drop the inferiority complex that tells us that serious cycling = foreign.

Yes, cycling has a long history in Europe, and I'm not arguing that we must call it a "pack" instead of a "peloton." But at the same time, we don't need to speak Italian to ride with the Cinzanos of the world. So please, no more American bike races named the "Tour de Something."

Though that "Tour Du Pont" name was kind of clever.

Stefan Wawersik
Boston, Massachusetts

While we're at it, we might as well pull the plug on "tour," too, It's derived from the Old French tourner, "to turn." So how about "Race of Georgia?" No, wait a minute, "race" has its roots in the Old Norse ras . . . jeez, now our head hurts.— Editor

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The Mailbag is a regular department on VeloNews.com. If you have a comment, an opinion or observation regarding anything you have read in VeloNews magazine or on VeloNews.com, write to webletters@insideinc.com. Please include your full name, hometown and state or nation. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. Writers are encouraged to limit their submissions to one letter per month. The letters published here contain the opinions of the submitting authors and should not be viewed as reflecting the opinions, policies or positions of VeloNews.com, VeloNews magazine or our parent company, Inside Communications, Inc.