Zurich to Rapperswil, Rapperswil to Vaduz, Vaduz to Davos, Davos to St. Moritz, etc., etc.

In total I rode 1,000km over 15 days in Switzerland, climbing the Albula Pass on a sunny Tuesday and the 27-switchback, cobblestone San Gottardo Pass on an equally sunny Monday. In between I took a picture of Cancellara’s right leg in Capolago during the Thursday time trial and watched Evie Stevens power up the Aquafresca climb numerous times in Mendrisio on a Saturday.

The fact is, the world championships is a boring bike race to attend in person because it is five hours of Zambia, Thailand and Estonia in a breakaway, then two hours of Spain vs. Italy. But the people you get to talk to are really interesting, and I got to meet some key insiders and ask them the dumb questions that had been pinging around in my head all season.

Like, for instance, was the revenue stream that Lance Armstrong created for himself a sore point for Federations and Organizers? Was the radio ban a well-thought-out idea? Why were this year’s WCs in Mendrisio just 20km from the circuit for last year’s race in Varese?  And why is George Clooney on the cover of every newspaper and magazine in Italy?

My interlocutors around the 13.9-km course must remain anonymous. You just have to trust me when I say they are key figures in cycling. Why trust me? Because I paid the Columbia J-school tuition and spent nine months prostrate to the higher minds before I got my paper and was free.

In short, Armstrong’s endorsement and sponsorship earnings were soybombs dropped into the traditional meat-and-potatoes world of bike racing, and created friction between organizers, federations and television companies that work in partnership to bring bike racing into people’s living rooms, one cycling authority told me.

But, this authority said, the reality of modern business practice also intruded, and instead of "growing the sport" by 20 percent and investing in broadcast partnerships, then splitting the increased revenue accordingly, the old, stuck-in-the-mud organizers and federations have sought to hold on to their slim television revenues rather than split the profits with new platforms like internet broadcasters, a la the Tour of California’s Tour-Tracker websites.

Not uncoincidentally, people told me the ToC’s switch to May was likely to make it the second or third most popular tour in the world, and was in fact welcomed by the Giro, because the time difference won’t hurt their broadcasts.  Everybody agreed the Vuelta was headed back to April, because nobody really wants to come after the big July drama of the Tour de France.

The chief instigators for moving the ToC out of rainy February and in to sunny May were California government officials, who want a better image of their tourist possibilities on European TV screens. And, my source told me, you can not put on a race in the United States without government help, as road closures just piss off too many drivers.

As for technology, the radio ban is seen by most as a dumb idea, and about as impossible to implement as this week’s stupid UK Independent story from Robert Fisk about oil exporters switching out of the dollar to a currency basket.

Others said a better idea would be to open up the radio channels to live broadcast in the final hours of a race.

A federation official from a non-english speaking country told me that World’s was their yearly high-point, because they used it to accumulate points for slots at the quadrennial Olympics.  He said they have to play two games every year: attracting their top pros to come and race for no money at the end of  a long, hard season, and cultivating domestic pros in a limited race schedule to effectively "sell" them in to feeder teams for the ProTour.  What made this all so hard was that none of the pros in this non-english speaking country want to come home to race because the roads are filled with murderous drivers.

Another cycling federation authority told me it costs about $100,000 to bring a full men’s and women’s team to the World Championships.

The general theory put forth by everybody I spoke to about having the World Championships in roughly the same place two years in a row was that Italian fans can be counted on to come see a race and spend money, and Lake Como is more or less the best place to be on a bike in late September.  The Italians were rewarded on Saturday with a Women’s world champion.

Which brings me to my final point, Mr. George Clooney.

He lives on Lake Como. Pictures of his Italian girlfriend are the most widely-sought-for image on the Italian internet. Newspapers and magazines that can put a photo of him (or, in a distant second-place, Sting) on the cover sell much more than newspapers and magazines with pictures of whatever else in Italy qualifies as news.

In closing, I passed a lot of really beautiful places in Switzerland on my bike, including the small towns of Prosto in the Italian part above Lake Como and Hard, up in the hills near Aarau, which prompted the headline. Prosto is a non-English word that means ‘simple’, or ‘easy’.