Stefan Schumacher has been excused for his peculiar pre-Worlds blood test results because he had diarrhoea. And also because Germany is at the center of a campaign to completely discredit anybody whose name appears when they type cycling + drugs into Google, and so they can't possibly have anything bad come from internal German Federation tests taken on the nation's most impressive rising talent. But mainly the thing about poo.

We've always liked Stefan. He looks a bit odd, but he's also the boy who knocked Hincapie off in the final day of the 2006 ENECO Tour to take the overall, then looked upset on the podium while we were jumping for joy in front of the TV at home. And now we like him even more, since he's joined the school of thought that suggests any excuse is instantly credible so long as you make it so embarrassing that you wouldn't possibly have made it up.

Well done Schumi, but we've been doing this for years. In our mid-teens we managed to miss lessons for every single teacher in secondary school by using variations on a story about a penis getting stuck in a jam jar. And in university we managed to miss a whole week of lectures by claiming we'd been locked to a trash barge by a transexual prostitute in Amsterdam.

If this whole situation doesn't spark hundreds of cycling fans worldwide phoning in sick to work describing how they're doing "dribbley bum wees" then we really despair. Take it, use it. It really works.