By Michael Calore
The skies above Floyd Landis continue to grow darker. Will the gathering clouds continue to keep his career shrouded in a fog of conspiracy as he claims, or will they open up and rain down a damning deluge of proof?
The French press is reporting that new evidence, uncovered using controversial techniques, provides further proof that American pro-cyclist and Tour de France winner Floyd Landis took testosterone to boost his performance during the 2006 race.
From the LA Times:
Even more troubling – not for Landis but for the entire sport – are the consequences of the new protocols used to uncover this evidence. In multi-day cycling events like the Tour, the stage winner, the riders in the top placings and a handful of randomly-selected riders are required to give urine or blood samples. Two samples are taken, a primary "A" sample which is immediately tested and a back-up "B" sample that's tested in the event that the "A" sample is mis-handled, destroyed or comes back positive. If the "A" sample doesn't throw up any red flags, the rider is declared fit to ride and both samples are banked. In this case, only one of Landis' A samples showed a positive, so the B samples being tested are being done so without a positive result in the A sample.
The United States Anti-Doping Association (USADA) asked for Landis' "B" samples given throughout the Tour to be tested for exogenous testosterone. An arbitration panel overseeing the case agreed to allow the tests. Landis fought the decision at first, then asked that the samples be tested by a lab at UCLA instead of at the same French lab where his original positive was discovered, the Laboratoire National de Depistage du Dopage (LNDD) at Chatenay-Malabry.
The equipment needed at the UCLA lab was under repair, so Floyd's urine stayed in France, undergoing testing at the same lab where the initial tests were performed. Official findings have yet to be released by USADA, but L'Equipe's report says that, yes, Floyd's "B" samples showed signs of synthetic testosterone. Floyd asked to have an observer from his legal team present at LNDD to witness the test. L'Equipe says an agent from the Landis camp was there, but Landis says USADA denied the request.
Today, a UCLA professor has berated this denial as "bad science".
The decision to retroactively test Landis' "B" samples is trouble for both retired cyclists and those currently racing. Under this new precident, nobody is safe from their own past.
If the powers that be call for it, any riders' "B" sample can be trotted out and tested retroactively. Several racers and team support personnel active in the mid-1990s (such as Willy Voet and Laurent Roux) have broken cycling's unspoken rule of omerta, spilling the beans on who took what during which races and who injected them with it.
It should be noted that the French press, French cycling authorities and the lab where the testing was done have a notoriously close relationship, and that they have conspired in the past to smear the reputation of another, well-known American cyclist.
Still, any rider named in one of cycling's dozens of doping cases, especially cases that have been shelved due to lack of evidence, must be shaking in their carbon fiber racing shoes.
