[Deadspin] Six cyclists preparing to start a race in Østlendingen, Norway, were hospitalized today after they all drank laundry detergent, believing it to be some kind of sports drink. They are all fine, so it’s OK to laugh.

The town’s paper, the Østlendingen, reported that the detergent was a new product developed specifically for athletic apparel. The race organizers had even passed it out at a previous race without incident. “No one drank the samples,” the race’s bewildered press officer said.

“We also believe that it clearly appears that this is a detergent,” said the detergent parent company’s Head of Information Anne Gjemdal. “It is emphasized on the label on the front.”

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When you were a kid, did your parents ever put those little child locks on the cabinets? You know the ones I’m talking about. Where you had to push down on a little knob to open the drawer? Sometimes people use them for pets, too. Anyway, the basic idea is that you put these on your drawers and cabinets so that the little ones can’t get into all the chemicals under the sink and drink them. The last thing in the world that you want to discover is your four-year-old passed out on the floor of the kitchen because he mistook the Formula 409 for a bottle of Gatorade. 

Well, I wouldn’t have thought that those kiddie locks would have too much utility once kids pass the age of six or seven, and yet here we are. Apparently we need to hold bicyclists’ hands not just through drug laws, traffic laws, and human decency, but also through common sense and basic reading comprehension. Maybe this explains why bicyclists never bother to stop at stop signs: they have no idea what those strange S T O P symbols actually mean. 

To look at things from another angle though, this little fiasco explains a lot. Someone handed these idiots a bottle of some unknown substance, and they just drank it down without ever bothering to find out what it was. Is it any wonder that steroids are such a problem in competitive cycling? Shit, everybody wants to jump on Lance Armstrong and call him a lying scumbag, but if these people are any sort of representative sample, the poor guy probably didn’t even know what he was taking! That’s the bicyclist way. If someone hands you a liquid, you DRINK that liquid, no questions asked. I’m on Lance Armstrong’s side now more than I ever was before. It was probably some rival team who gave Lance those steroids. Just handed him a big jug of steroid juice and walked away. No doubt Lance thought it was a delicious bottle of laundry detergent and drank it down. Typical bicyclists, trying to destroy an American hero. But you can’t put this one past me.