Tweets of the Week: Zabelgate, Zumba and hot pink Phinney

Funny, cruel, odd, personal … you get it all on Twitter. Each week, we’ll have a rundown of some of our favourite tweets. Here are the tweets for the week ending 22nd April 2012.

Confessions, Katusha and Zabelgate

The UCI announced on Monday that Katusha’s Denis Galimzyanov failed a doping test and admitted EPO use. He also wrote an open letter, saying that he acted alone and absolving others at Katusha from any involvement. That didn’t convince many people – to set the scene, we have a tranche of Inner Ring tweets when the news broke:

Not only did cycling fans’ hearts fall – another doping case – but there were some strange reactions from Katusha management, namely one Erik Zabel. Inner Ring responded with some hard-hitting questions:

Zabel’s apparent ‘dont Comeback!’ remark set Twitter alight. What was he talking about? Zabel himself admitted to using EPO (“but I didn’t like it so I stopped” which reminded me a bit of Bill Clinton’s “I didn’t inhale” remark) and now he’s casting stones – or was it a weird typo? Zabel tweets very rarely and when he does, it’s in Zabelese so most people thought he’d said something he didn’t mean. And then of course there were wider questions being asked:

As far as I can tell from Zabel’s twitter stream, he has not responded to these questions. David Millar, meanwhile, had some questions of his own. If you remember, Katusha’s team manager Hans-Michael Holczer was also in charge of Gerolsteiner when David Rebellin, Stefan Schumacher and Bernhard Kohl all were banned for EPO.

Again, no Katusha response. I reckon we’ve not heard the last of this.

Fan DIY

I love a little ‘do it yourself-ness’ from fans – there should be more of it. I had been planning on making myself a beer-mat skirt this week (à la Amstel Gold podium girls) but never got around to it. Accidento bizarro, on the other hand, had a bad day and went right for the scissors and cardboard to sprinkle sunshine on their day…

Anybody out there making cool stuff like this, send in your pictures. We can do a little ‘show and tell’! The best ones will get candy from Kitty!

Speaking of Tom and his magnificent Boonens, here’s a little advert that caught Cedric Vasseur‘s eye. Okay, is this one of the strangest adverts you’ve seen (next to Tom being on a package of meat … look on VeloVoices’ Facebook page, it’s there …)?

Professional journalist or gym teacher?

Have you ever wondered what it must be like to be a professional cycling journalist? Going to the races, hobnobbing with the cyclists, having all the power-bars you can eat, washed down with as many energy drinks as you can stuff into your backpack? Well, cycling journalists Daniel Benson and Gregor Brown, tweeted about their posh surroundings in the press room of Liege-Bastogne-Liege. Just how you imagined it, no?

Hot Pink Phinney

BMC’s young hotshot Taylor Phinney had a storming first Paris-Roubaix and he kept up the good performance by taking the first pink jersey of Giro del Trentino last week. He made a lovely little collage for us – instagram-a-go-go. ‘Podium birds’ beware (hey, didn’t his teammate George Hincapie marry a podium girl? I think you’ll find he did …)