Enough with the doping related stories, time to focus on the racing again and get down to brass tacks for purposes of our predictions and rank speculation. Now the topic of who has a chance to win is far above my pay grade, so I've chosen to focus on who has absolutely no chance to grab the brass ring in Beijing.
Starting in alphabetical order by country...
Algeria: Hichem Chabane
Hichem is remarkable in that his main claim to fame appears to be the fact that, rather than having a Wikipedia entry like the major stars, he's gone down and dirty by having a FaceBook entry. Since I don't have a FaceBook page, I can't see it, but I can only imagine that he's got loads and loads of friends. He also nabbed 29th place in this year's Giro del Capo
Chile: Gonzalo Garrido
The Chilean selected one of route, Neat Gonzalo march in the second location of the general classification of the Challenge of Seville; international test rutera where the Olympic selected one continued with its preparation facing Peking 2008. Great people in charge of the figuration of Neat in the starting of the Hispanic test. Also, according to Baseball Reference, he bats right, throws right and played for the Braves from 1968 to 1972.
China: Liang Zhang
Fifteenth at the Tour of the South China Sea, Liang is the great hope of the host nation. Notably, a search in Google pulls up just as many gynecological references for a Liang Zhang as it does cycling references. Perhaps Liang is keeping his options open.
Costa Rica: Henry Raabe Mendes
Henry rides for team Pizza Hut professionally. Truly one of the healthiest sponsors on the cycling circuit, no mention is made of the training value of consuming a Pizone with 2 liters of Coca Cola or whether creamy garlic sauce is a PED. He is, however, the national time trial champion of Costa Rica, which may or may not be the equivalent of being the Jose Feliciano of Mongolia.
Croatia: Matija Kvasina
I mention Matija primarily because he rides for the Perutnina Ptuj team and when I looked them up, somewhere I ran across the word "ploegfiche". In case you were wondering, ploegfiche is a delicacy in Japan where it is usually served with Ponzu sauce.
Iran: Mehdi Sohrabi
Mr. Sohrabi is the national champion of Iran. Of note, when searching for his name on Google, the first link is to a book discussing "High Levels of Natural Radiation and Radon Areas" Personally, I'm not sure radiation exposure study is as suitable an alternative for road racing as gynecology.
Namibia: Erik Hoffmann
Erik Hoffman has 119 connections on Linked In and has worked in the software engineering field, assisting in the development of Mirror42, Bluedust Ventures and KPI Library. I'm guessing that considering his background, he is probably a close associate of Mario Vermicello.
United States: Morgan Freeman
Due to a recent caduta, Morgan Freeman will not be available for either the Road Race or the Time Trial.