DOPING SCANDAL AT THE GONDOLIER RACES

You may or may not know of Venice, Italy’s annual Regatta, where hundreds of boats fill the Grand Canal and Saint Mark’s Bay for parades and competitions. One of the races is the gondola race, where gondoliers compete to get to the finish line. There’s now a drug scandal at the races: One gondolier tested positive for marijuana in his system during a regatta last month. That oarsman was stripped of his second-place win and banned from competing for over a year. A lawyer for the gondolier called the decision ‘unfair,’ saying that regatta’s participation rules don’t mention anything about drugs.
* There was supposed to be something in there about drugs, but the people writing up the rules were stoned and spaced it out.
* The guy came in second ’cause he kept stopping to buy little bags of Fritos.
* Venice is plagued with flooding problems, sinking problems, overcrowding problems and corruption but, yeah, a gondolier smoking weed is pretty serious.
* They also suspected something when some tourists asked the guy to sing a gondolier song and he broke into Weezer’s “Hashpipe.” (or Willie Nelson’s “Roll Me Up And Smoke Me When I Die”)
* They got suspicious about performance-enhancing drugs when some of the gondoliers started offering water-skiing.