I don’t buy the “fog” story for a second. Here’s what went down at OLN headquarters about 10:30am eastern time Sunday morning. Some OLN executive put this formula into the resident Deep Blue super computer:

OLN Amstel Gold Race programming calculus: [(No Lance Armstrong) * (Top Discovery Channel finisher was Ukrainian Volodymyr Bileka, 47th place and more than 2 minutes off the winning time) * (Discovery Channel’s George Hincapie was sole American finisher, not a factor, and 67th place more than 3 minutes back) * (Danilo Di Luca…who’s that?)]/(It’s not the Tour de France)=

Answer: No more than 8 minutes of coverage (including commercials). Follow 1980s CBS cycling journalism formula: 1 random peloton shot, 1 crash, and the final 30 seconds of the race. Create fake, weather related cover story to account for the missing 82 minutes of planned Amstel Gold footage. Provide Phil Liggett, Paul Sherwen, and Bob Roll with gratuitous amounts of alcohol to keep them quiet.

And in honor of the abbreviated OLN coverage, here’s the post-race comments of disgruntled Rabobank teammates Michael Boogerd and Oscar Freire in haiku form:

Boogerd
Botched Cauberg leadout
Glanced back…torched by Di Luca
I hate you Oscar

Freire
Read the script, biatch
Who’s thrice donned rainbow-striped threads?
Go cry to Breukink