Horses (and Baseball Players) More Important Than Cyclists?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/sports/othersports/12brown.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

where were the congressional hearings about cycling in the 80's and 90's, or even today?

The Clemens and Bonds thing was interesting... Now, horses have the limelight in the USA?

Wow. I'm under-impressed -> further confirmation that cycling is a fringe deal here in the states. I won't complain about the fringe thing, cuz, in general, I like that, but man, I thought cycling was at least a quarter notch above horse racing. y'know, cuz the athletes are homo sapiens and all!!! ;-)

Then again, homo-sapiens have a choice about what they do to themselves, whereas, horses don't, I reckon. Now that I think about it, crap, yeah, congress, give those horse trainer doodz hell!

Then, when you are done with that, go after the crappy bike guys.

The LANCE effect or the DOPING effect?

or both of them combined?

Velonews ran a story about how great things were going for the media players and their website this year during "tour time":

velonews article

BTW, I was pointed to this article after reading the "shut up and drink the kool-aid" blog a few days ago...

kool-aid blog post

Here's a stat from my blog that is similar to the ones quoted in the blog above:

increase in unique views during the tour compared to similar period during last month(which was June - my best blog views month ever):

218%

I can't really make any other comparisons for my blog, though, since my webstats skillz aren't as good as they should be, I reckon (or my host provider's stats package isn't servicing me to the same level as other blog providers appear to be).

However, being the passionately curious person I am, I tried to see if I couldn't get some independent confirmation on just how rosy things were for the big dawgs of the online cycling media (like velonews.com, cyclingnews.com, pezcyclingnews.com - any others out there???) by typing a few words in over at alexa.com - and wound up being able to generate this plot for the past five years (you'll have to click on the link):

image link at alexa.com

I reckon Alexa's info more closely matches what BTR's overall web statistics reflects year over year in terms of expected growth - in other words, my BTR data suggests (BTR's overall positive growth this year during the tour wasn't as big as last year's growth around "tour time") that velonews is possibly doing a bit of cherry picking of their website data - otherwise known as "spin".

BTR is still growing at a pretty consistent rate, but I reckon the LANCE/Doping effect is real (i.e, LANCE's absence and the increased awareness around cycling and doping is having a negative impact on the cycling industry in general on the web) - at least that's what the data I have access to supports.

The industry spin might be different though.

What are everyone else's thoughts on this one?