[QUOTE=Chief Pedant]
I guess I will take your word for it that there is good evidence Mr Landis was treated unfairly. The evidence I have seen cited by the governing bodies is that his T/E ratio was high (not necessarily his absolute testosterone level) and that a confirmatory test for exogenous testosterone was positive.
I understand there is controversy and apparently, incompetence, around all of this. Perhaps one reason to throw the whole thing out is that a second test was supposedly rushed to the SAME lab so the French could go on their August vacation.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, long story short, it was a high T/E ratio, but a low absolute value of testosterone, and then the confirmatory test was IRMS (isotope ratio mass spectroscopy) than can supposedly tell C-13 rich plant derived testosterone from C-12 rich human testosterone. The IRMS test was also “positive” by deviation from the norm, but the values within the IRMS varied enormously, which is definitely not supposed to happen with IRMS. Nothing that would have even held up to the pier review process in any respectable scientific literature. The USADA hearings are a rubber stamp, out of the dozens of cases presented, they’ve never reversed a positive finding, and the selection for panelists isn’t from qualified scientists but two of the three panel members are basically chosen from friends of the USOC board that have little qualification to hear the cases. So, the USADA hearings always split 2-1 (as they did in this case) with the athlete-selected arbitration member voting in the athletes favor.
The next step is possibly the CAS (Court for Arbitration of Sport) in Switzerland, and they’re a much more rigorous and serious organization than the yokels at USADA and WADA. They have occasionally thrown out doping cases on the basis of scientific or procedural questions, and in many cases they’ve been born out by what later became standard practice in “doping labs.” For instance, there was an Austrian triathlete a few years ago that won in the CAS because he was rather convincingly able to demonstrate that he did indeed naturally produce a positive on the WADA’s supposedly new hot-stuff isoform ratio EPO test.
The doping labs aren’t exactly top-flite institutions that attract the best and brightest in academia. Mainly PhD holding dead-enders that can’t get post-docs or faculty positions elsewhere.
Anyway, like in any professional sport, cheating exists in cycling, and it’s certianly possible that Landis was doped. But, more so than any other sport except for possibly track and field, cycling has put up a fight against it. To use one popular American sport as an example, what happens to steroid users in baseball? A few game suspensions or a warning? In cycling, the first doping case is a 4 year ban, lifetime ban for the second.
