Floyd Landis’ team manager says it is “ridiculous” to think the American cyclist will face trial in France for hacking into a doping laboratory’s computers.

Landis, who was stripped of the 2006 Tour de France title for doping, is riding for the Orca Velo Merino team in the six-day Tour of Southland in New Zealand.

Team manager Wayne Hudson on Wednesday dismissed as “old news” reports that Landis and coach Arnie Baker might be tried in France for hacking the computer system of the Chatenay-Malabry lab, saying the American cyclist was “not losing any sleep” over it.

– Associated Press

Y’all know I don’t like to idly speculate, but guess what? Floyd Landis put someone up to hacking into the blood lab’s computers and stealing documents. I can practically guarantee it, because Floyd Landis is one of the sports world’s foremost liars.

If you were never forced to edit endless cycling stories for your last job, you might not know that Landis won the Tour de France in 2006 before blood tests revealed unnaturally high levels of testosterone. Landis first claimed it was because he was out drinking the night before the test, then tried to argue that he’s just more masculine than most men and so produces twice as much testosterone.

Landis reportedly told cycling legend Greg Lemond about his doping regimen, in a series of conversations in which Lemond told Landis that he had been sexually abused as a child.

When Lemond was called to testify against Landis, Landis’ business manager called Lemond from a listed number pretending to be his abusive uncle and threatened to tell the world about “how we used to hide your weenie.”

The thing is, I could hardly care less about international cycling and I’m not one for sanctimony over doping, but Landis would seem a whole lot more sympathetic if he just came out and said, “yup, I did it. Just like every other person who has cycled competitively in the last 15 years.”

Because if you were never forced to follow cycling for your last job, you might not know that professional cyclists enhance their performance to lengths that would make Jose Canseco blush, and that doping in the sport is so pervasive that it’s more or less impossible to succeed without doing so.

Hudson River Park’s newest pier — opening Friday and stretching 1,000 feet into the river — adds a West Coast flair to the Big Apple with competition-ready beach volleyball courts, skate park and kids’ climbing walls.

“It’s like a small part of Redondo Beach here in New York,” Connie Fishman, president of the Hudson River Park Trust, said of the newly rebuilt Pier 25.

Like Redondo Beach, with an ocean pier and a national reputation for beach volleyball, Pier 25 was designed for the active, outdoors set with futuristic kids’ playgrounds and climbing walls, miniature golf, basketball and volleyball.

– Tom Topousis, New York Post.

I suppose the climbing walls and volleyball courts are cool if you’re into that stuff, but I excerpt this Post piece here because of the mini-golf mention.

I am something of a mini-golf enthusiast, and though I no longer live in the city, I’m happy to hear Manhattanites will have access to miniature golf without having to leave the borough.

A little Internet research tells me there had previously been a mini-golf course on Pier 25, but since I never knew about it, as far as I’m concerned it never existed. Also, apparently there are nine holes at South Street Seaport.

This article makes the course at Governor’s Island sound pretty appealing, and though I didn’t get to play it while there for the Vendys, it did appear inviting. It just would have seemed strange, I think, for a lone man, stuffed to the point of delirium, to stroll up for a round of solo mini golf.

And I didn’t notice any moving obstacles anyway. Apparently there are some at the New York Hall of Science — I didn’t even know there was a mini-golf course there — but that’s only a nine-hole affair. Way too many area mini-golf courses are the terrain-based type, which I guess do a better job of simulating actual golf, but don’t feature big spinning wheels that knock your ball off the course or clowns that spit it back at you, Happy Gilmore style.

As far as I know, you pretty much have to go to Lake George to find a course with a bunch of moving, spinning things, and that’s terrible. Not that going to Lake George is terrible, because funnel cake and everything, but it’s just a long way to go to find decent moving-obstacle-based mini-golf. Get on it, local business.

I bet Miley Cyrus feels like she has accomplished a lot for a 17-year-old. She has sold billions of records, starred in a hit TV show, toured with the Jonas Brothers, and managed to live 17 years as the daughter of the guy who sang “Achy Breaky Heart” — likely exposed to that song countless times — and resisted going totally berserk.

But she has got nothing on Jessica Olmstead of Battle Creek, Mich.:

A 17-year-old Michigan girl began her big game hunting career with a bang — or rather a whoosh — by killing a 448-pound black bear with a bow and arrow from 16 yards away….

Her father, Tim Olmstead, told The Associated Press that his daughter eats the animals she hunts, including the bear, and does not kill just for fun.

He told the paper he’s been teaching others to hunt for more than 30 years and that he’s never had a student pick up the fundamentals as quickly as his daughter.

“I’m not just saying this because she’s my daughter,” he said. “But she’s probably one of the best listeners I’ve every taught. With the bear she showed a lot of patience. She tracked the bear, killed it, and gutted it like a pro.”

Wow. “Tracked the bear, killed it, and gutted it like a pro.” Wow.

Obviously I’ve come to grips with the fact that we kill animals for meat and I benefit by eating the delicious meat. I don’t think I could actually hunt though. I imagine once I got the animal in the sight or whatever, I’d wimp out.

It’s not any type of moral or ethical high ground since, like I said, I’m probably going to have a cheeseburger for lunch, plus I realize that in places like upstate New York they need people to hunt to control animal populations. I just don’t think I’d want to watch something that big and grand die at my hands, and it freaks me out a bit when, during hunting season in Vermont, you’ll sometimes see a guy drive by in a pickup truck with like six dead deer stacked in the back.

Closest I’ve come is firing guns in a shooting range, which is pretty awesome. I went with Rich the aforementioned Navy man with whom I am competitive, among others. They let you pick out what type of target you want to shoot at. Some look like regular targets, some like animals, some like home intruders, some like Osama Bin Laden; a pretty predictable gamut for a Northern Virginia gun range. But they also had zombies, so we obviously picked zombies.

Anyway, the zombies had circles on their chests that you were supposed to shoot at, and after we pulled them back Rich and some of the other guys were bragging about who had the most shots closest to the bull’s eye. You idiots! Why are you aiming for those circles? That’s only going to piss the zombies off more. I was apparently the only one there aiming for the head, which is how you actually stop the zombies from advancing. I even got a couple of neck shots in that might have severed the head, which would be ideal.

Pretty exciting stuff on Jeopardy! the last couple of days. A dude named Roger Craig — but not the old Niners runningback — got his career off to a blazing start by breaking Ken Jennings’ single-day earnings record in his second show ever and averaging something like $40,000 in winnings over his first five efforts.

But Craig, a computer science grad student, suffered an ignominious defeat yesterday at the hands of — of all people! — an Internet sportswriter and humorist named Jelisa Castrodale.

Castrodale played the game like someone who follows sports, obviously recognizing Craig’s dominance and seizing every time she had control of the board to go fishing for Daily Doubles, instead of just pathetically starting at the top of categories like novice players often do.

She found a few and fared well on them, enough to come pretty close to Craig in time for Final Jeopardy!

The third contestant, a police officer from Arlington, Va., was obviously thrown after he correctly answered a question about a doughnut pillow and Alex Trebek made a quip about the cop knowing all about doughnuts. Really just goes to show that you can study all you want for your Jeopardy! appearance, but the big wild card you can never prepare for is Trebek saying some f@#$ed-up s@#! that gets in your head and breaks your concentration. That dude was a complete non-factor for the rest of the match.

Anyway, Castrodale trailed Craig by only a couple thousand dollars when the Final Jeopardy! category was revealed: “SPORTS & THE MEDIA”

I instantly thought of ‘Duk’s question from February, and how hilarious and awesome it must have seemed for Castrodale, a sportswriter, to be faced with the category.

The answer was, as any sports-loving Jeopardy! fan could have predicted, shockingly easy: Something along the lines of, “On Feb. 8, 2010, a major newspaper in this American city ran a headline saying, ‘Amen. After 43 years, our prayers have been answered.'”

Hmm… what major sporting event happens in early February? What team won that sporting event in 2010? And hell, if you’re looking for an extra clue, which cities’ papers would employ such overt religious language?

Yet only Castrodale wrote New Orleans. The cop said Miami and Craig said Chicago.

So score one for the sportswriters.

I will continue my efforts to get myself on Jeopardy! someday, and continue cursing fate for not putting me on the show in which there were categories on Cy Young Award Winners and sandwiches. WHY?

Oh, finally: Castrodale is on Twitter under the handle @gordonshumway, which, if you’ll recall was ALF’s real name on Melmac.

An accomplished 13-year-old motorcycle racer died Sunday after he fell off his bike and was run over by another motorcycle at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The racer, Peter Lenz of Vancouver, Wash., was pronounced dead by the Marion County coroner, who said Lenz had sustained “traumatic injuries.” Lenz crashed on a warm-up lap before his race and was struck by 12-year-old Xavier Zayat, who was uninjured.

– Associated Press.

Yikes. Look: I’m not one to make sweeping value judgments, especially when it comes to parenting. And any way you look at it, that’s an awful, awful tragedy.

But holy crap, what the hell? 13-year-olds and 12-year-olds racing motorcycles at 100 miles an hour? Who thinks that’s a good idea?

I’m sorry. Just… I’m sorry. The AP story mentions that the accident may “fuel a debate about how young is too young for racers to be competing,” and I’ll go ahead and say 12 is too young. Have you seen a 12-year-old lately? That’s a child.

And don’t get me wrong, I was doing plenty of stuff that put my life in danger when I was 12 — most of it involving fire. But that’s exactly the point: 12-year-olds have terrible judgment. If someone said to 12-year-old me, “hey kid, you wanna go race 100-mile-an-hour motorcycles?” I’d be all, “Hell yes I do!” Now, at 29, I’d think about it more.

Just seems like a situation where some responsible party has to step in. The state, the sport’s governing body, someone.

Terrible things happen all the time and no amount of governing will prevent every tragedy. But to me it seems like a good idea to at least take kids out of harm’s way.