Oh No!
You were expecting a happy ending?
Ga-Ga-Ga-Ga-Ga-uh-Good--The site will remain live as long as blogger keeps it, and we'll try to get it archived into the archive.org wayback machine. Comments will also remain open as long as anyone wishes to use them.
Hey, it's over.
We know what the official word has been about the Landis case -- and the Federal case that might have looked into how we got that word through arbitration has been settled on terms that let Landis race right away, and USADA not to have to explain.
We also have our own access to the testimony, arguments and exhibits, and our many long-running discussions about the case.
[MORE]
A long time ago, we said the Landis case presented a Rorschach test on your world view, and nothing that has happened since has changed our feelings.
If one believes "they all dope", then you believe all tests that are reported as positive no matter how they were achieved, and any irregularities in reaching that conclusion are immaterial. You assume the conclusion, that the athlete did it, and all recedes into irrelevant technicality.
If one believes they don't all dope all the time, and that some positive tests may not reflect the truth, then you want to be able to look to find out what might have happened to cause an incorrect positive. When you can't find anything that suggests a false positive, then you accept it as a true positive along with the athlete's guilt or lack of diligence looking into friends or the contents of food or supplements.
The underlying Truth (independent of result) in the case of Floyd Landis seems like it comes in one of the following flavors.
(Some people will also mix in accusations he doped with something else, probably in the oxygen vector, and we'll need to get to that as well.)
We know clearly that USADA believes (1) is the case, that he's a dirty doper. We also know that he has presented himself as (3), an unjustly accused innocent.
The excluded middle
No one who matters has been interested in considering (2) - that it seems to be there, unknown to Landis.
Let's see why that has been off the table for everyone.
First, from USADA's point of view, (2) is either an inadvertent ("no-fault") case, or a problem in the procedure. Neither is appealing to for USADA to consider. If it's an inadvertent, there's no great moral reward for taking down a dirty doper; if it's an unexplained phenomenon, it suggests either a scientific or execution hole in the anti-doping mechanism which is hard to explain and embarrassing.
From USADA's position, it is better to win a case as intentional doping than to consider any alternative.
Similarly, there seems little reason to believe that USADA has ever seriously considered the possibility that (3) might be true. There's no hint in any of the available information to believe they ever considered it was anything other than a true positive, which they were fully committed to prosecuting.
From the Landis point of view, (2) either leads to a complete scientific rat-hole of trying to understand how some natural (and non-prohibited) phenomenon leads to the result, or to an inadvertent/no-fault finding that costs the Tour victory he believes is earned. Both of these are ugly for him to consider. He knows he didn't dope, and USADA isn't making any overtures that suggest there might be something scientifically curious going on.
None of the external players, WADA, the UCI, or the ASO have any interest in a finding that is equivocal. Thus, they instantly and loudly locked themselves into position (1) before there was any particular review of the results.
Locking into Position
One form of position lock happened as soon as rumors of an AAF started to circulate, first in the peloton, then from the UCI. At that point, it became very difficult for LNDD to consider withdrawing the AAF, or looking into the possibility of mistakes --- which the lab had done numerous times the same year in other reported AAFs that had been kept appropriately confidential. The lab became locked -- and this, we learn later -- leads the relevant government agency down the same path, and the AFLD locked itself in support of its laboratory.
At the beginning, Landis' is confused, and appears willing to consider at least some scenarios of (2) - the "from my own organism" business would have been a claim of natural, non-prohibited process, and plausible with only a T/E violation reported. Similarly, alcohol was mentioned as a possible complication based on speculation, and might (still!) explain the IRMS results.
Only when it becomes clearer that (a) talking is not helping; and that it is not only a T/E test, but an IRMS result does he shut up.
The next we really hear from Landis is based in no small part on Arnie Baker's analysis of the provided documentation: the test doesn't show exogenous testosterone. This belief seems initially based on the most restrictive reading of the "metabolite(s)" rule, and is compounded by what seems to be a lot of haphazardness in the documented testing. In the world the way Team Landis sees it, this shouldn't be a positive test.
Now, Landis becomes locked into position (3), that there is no positive test result, and files a submission with USADA for consideration by the Anti-doping Review Board for the case. In retrospect, almost everything of significance in the case is hinted at in that brief (12 page) filing.
At this point, things become murky at USADA, because there is intentionally no transparency in the ADRB process. It is not known how or if the ADRB really considered the points raised in the Landis submission. By design, there are no minutes and no reasoning provided for its simply reported conclusion: The Test is Valid. The ADRB accepted the reported AAF -- and from there, it appears that USADA locked itself into position (1), though it might have entertained pleading of (2) had Landis offered it.
Clunk, clunk, clunk, the sound of gates closing, and maneuverability foreclosed.
Clunk.
Positions Fixed, Reinforcements Called
USADA realizes that Landis is not going to roll over and calls in the heavy artillery of the HRO law firm, in the particular form of Richard Young. Mr. Young happens to be the principle author of the WADA Code, and is victor in several contentious cases, Hamilton, Gaines, and Montgomery. He also happens to be an arbitrator in the CAS pool, and has served on many Panels. He is the very definition of someone "inside the club."
It is not known what orders were given to HRO by USADA, either explicitly or implicitly. By appearances, the essence was "win this case, period."
The Nuts
The only people now openly considering (2) are internet "kooks", who think there might be something to the alcohol or diet theories; and those who speculate that Landis was somehow spiked by someone. The alcohol theory is scoffed at, and no one pursues the spike theory at all. Perhaps it is too similar to the scenario purported by Gatlin, or Jeff Adams. In any event, these considerations go nowhere.
The Litigation Machine takes over
It's Autumn. Landis is trying to get discovery on material before hearing. HRO/USADA say he doesn't need anything else, and if he wants more, to get it through the arbiters, who are not yet selected. The selection is delayed by intense litigation positioning on the part of both sides.
From USADA's point of view, Landis is fishing for something to blow up there case, and they don't want to give anything that puts the case at risk. They do not appear interested in helping him find the truth, but winning the case.
From Landis' point of view, USADA is stonewalling information he needs to understand what happened. He makes the information he has available to the public starting debate on the merits and methodology.
Holes do start to appear in issues that might normally appear in a case, not least through Baker's powerpoints. USADA needs to consider all these issues, and is unsure what is really going to be argued. To this degree, "the wiki defense" is strategy of radar-jamming with chaff. There are real points discussed, but a lot of dummy ones as well.
Then, in December, the Landaluce award comes out, and HRO/USADA thinks it may have problems -- some of the little holes shown by Baker might be trouble, in the hands of one Panel or another. In an interview, Tygart says he is "ready to go" with what he has, but that is not what is happening behind the scenes.
HRO/USADA comes up with novel strategy: test the other B samples from the tour, to (try to) eliminate the possibility of any Landaluce-like problems. This has never been done in any case before. There's no procedure for it, and no mention of the possibility in the WADA Code or the USADA rules. USADA informs Landis of its intent, and has in fact already shipped samples taken in the US to LNDD for testing.
Landis objects. It's not permitted anywhere, and the A's of the same samples were negative. He threatens suit in Federal Court. USADA retreats, for the moment, and some negotiations take place.
Landis is dead set against LNDD doing any more testing. He says he'd be happy with UCLA, but UCLA claims not to be available. He objects to Montreal because of prejudicial statements already made in the case by Ayotte, the lab director. He's apparently open to Australia, but USADA is not citing transport and logistical problems. No agreement is reached, and nothing happens.
Finally over December and January, the AAA Panel is put in place, and the first things they need to resolve are discovery questions and this testing of alternate samples.
It appears that the Panel gives Landis most of the discovery he wants, though USADA/HRO will quibble over significant things later.
It claims not to have the power to order depositions (though it probably could "encourage" them), so testimony must be done live, which will turn into a curse for Landis.
Then it finds a wash-cloth and says that since the samples are owned by the UCI, the agencies can do anything they like with them. If they want to test them, and use them as "additional evidence" against Landis, they, The Panel, can't stop them. Such evidence can't be considered an AAF, per-se, but it could be accretive.
Notably, there is no way testing of these samples can be to Landis' benefit as a defense -- non-positivity indicates nothing, while positivity can be added to the weight against him.
HRO/USADA decide they will test them.
At LNDD.
Only weeks before the hearing is going to proceed.
(We reflect how much uncertainty that now remains might have been avoided had these other tests been done anywhere else.)
The tests are done, and both sides get their prejudices confirmed. USADA gets the reports it wants, positives on some of the alternate B samples. Landis' experts get confirmation of their beliefs that the IRMS people at LNDD don't know what they are doing. Both groups of experts complain about the behavior of each other.
The same thing happens when the original data is reprocessed in different ways -- there are variations that Landis' side takes as indicative of non-reproducible process, and which USADA thinks is close enough to the margin of error as to be perfectly acceptable for "comfortable satisfaction."
Landis does not get the actual data from the tests. USADA claims he could "tamper" with read-only CDs, when USADA keeps separate copies that could easily be compared.
The Panel accepts this absurdity.
To this day, Landis has never gotten a copy of the actual data that was used to find him guilty, nor has it ever been evaluated by non-WADA experts.
AAA Hearing
During the hearing, the Landis side thinks it has raised plenty of doubt about the reliability of the tests. There are significant sideshow distractions that turn out to have no bearing on anything substantive. The unfortunate mid-hearing meltdown of Landis' friend and manager regarding Greg LeMond poisons the atmosphere for the press. USADA's lead attorney Richard Young shows a certain mastery of leading witnesses to say what he wants. Another tactic is played out: Have non-communicative witnesses chew up Landis' available time during cross-examination, leaving him short of time to present his own case.
AAA Award
The majority award from Brunet and McLaren is a logical travesty, culminating in seven key paragaphs that make little sense scientifically or logically. No matter. The result is what the Alphabets desire, and most in the press and public move on, not looking at the details. There is no real mechanism for review, per-se, of this flawed award.
CAS Appeal
The only option is a de-novo (from-scratch) hearing of the entire case. Landis is running short of money, and needs it on the cheap. USADA too, is running out of money, but manages to get direct funding from WADA, which is not a party to the case. New issues are discovered by the Landis team, and presented - clear errors in the certified documentation, contradictions in testimony. USADA comes up with answers to the new observations -- one might say, manufactures answers -- and ignores many of the contradictions in their own prior argument.
The time for cross-examination card is played to the max. USADA submits lengthy declarations of more witnesses than they called during the AAA hearing, and Landis is forced to skip cross-examination of many because there just aren't the hours available.
CAS Decision
The CAS decision is a completely political document, reflecting the hard line that Landis must lose. It does not address many of the substantive issues that were raised, accepts USADA's stories on everything, and boils down to: The Lab has a presumption of correctness, and nothing you can present can change that, especially if we chose to ignore it.
Adding smackdown and insult to injury, the CAS panel blames Landis for USADA having more witnesses than there was time to cross-examine: It fines Landis $100,000 for USADA's trouble in bringing all these witnesses to the hearing in New York.
Both panels obviously chose to ignore things that should have caused a "burden flip", and they did so with tautologically backward reasoning. Based on the presumption of lab correctness, the errors could not have caused the AAF; and since they could not have caused the AAF, the violations were not departures that would cause the burden to flip to USADA. This assumes the conclusion of a step that was never taken. The conclusion the departures would not have caused the violation should only have been made after a formal burden flip, with USADA made to prove the harmlessness with a different burden of proof, not with a presumption of correctness. In declining to declare departures in the Landis case, both Panels have shown it futile to challenge lab correctness. The only winning strategy is to find Landaluce errors in gross form, not technical details.
In both cases, the compelling testimony of John Amory that the values that hung Landis just make no sense was not challenged, but obfuscated by reference to non-peer-reviewed studies that remain unpublished to this day. Mr. Young's tap-dancing to convince the AAA Panel that presentation at a workshop meant something was seen by peers, and that was "peer-reviewed" in the formal sense should have been an embarrassment, but was accepted by that majority as good-enough to muddy Amory's point.
Federal Case
Landis made public in his complaint that the CAS process is fundamentally compromised by the revolving door of roles parties play in the CAS/IOC/WADA/Federations club. Obvious appearances of conflict of interest were not properly disclosed, nor even understood as anything but business as usual.
USADA chose to settle the case before answering the claims on the record, and Landis is free to race.
So, what do we think about Landis?
We still don't know if Landis doped with testosterone on Stage 17 of the 2006 Tour de France, or in the vicinity of any other stage as suggested by the alternate B sample results. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, or maybe something else happened that is unexplained.
There's enough oddity for us in the test methods used, the reported data, and the stonewall, hardball litigation tactics used against Landis that we don't have a "comfortable satisfaction." The points reiterated in the winnowing still seem to raise what ought to be quite reasonable doubt and lack of comfort. But I am not a CAS arbiter.
There have been insinuations he did something in the oxygen vector, but no case presented. The evidence is equivocal to us (see here, here, and here for discussion).
Perhaps there was a belief he was a guilty man, and anything done in the cause of bringing him down was acceptable. (Bill Hue has an even darker theory of this.) Not much effort seems to have gone into dissuading the perception that "anything goes in this prosecution". Maybe it wasn't worth the trouble to blunt that view, as long as the "correct" result was achieved, and who was really going to look, anyway?
Landis has held on to position (3) long past the time where a rational game theorist would think it worthwhile. It would have been expedient at several points to say, "I didn't do it, but I'm not willing to contest it at this time. I just want it to be over and be able to race then."
That Landis didn't ever choose that easier route is reflective of the stubbornness that prompted the attack on Stage 17. In many contexts, it would be admirable.
If he is innocent, it is impossible for us to say he was wrong to fight it with all the determination he showed.
If he is guilty, and has been lying through his teeth all along, he has certainly paid a heavy price, including a string of family tragedies we will not enumerate.
If the truth is really one of those (2) cases where no one's public position was correct, it doesn't look like we'll ever know.
Throughout, he's always acted as a wronged innocent. Consistent with that, he has done more to make the facts about his case known than any other accused athlete has ever done. Even when it hasn't been convenient, or obviously to his benefit, he has provided us all the information we've ever requested.
Landis did made mistakes -- sharing Greg LeMond's phone number as number one, then saying too much too early when he didn't know, and letting his frustration show from time to time. (He may have provided a good warning for the dangers of typing-while-intoxicated.)
The unique existence of this window into the system is due to solely his commitment, openness and willingness to let the world see. We hope we've done credit to that idea of transparency, and that over the long term he'll feel it was worth the attempt.
No Apologia for dopers
There is nothing that irritates us more than being called apologists for dopers:
We've never denied any of that, despite attempts to characterize us as doing so.
Some have said we're too soft on dirty dopers. Frankly, as individuals they don't interest us - they are perpetrators and victims, and we're more interested in having a system that works than in finding scapegoats. There's only so much value in outrage at stupid individual behavior.
We are more irked with powerful systems that, by policy, institutionalize a counterproductive environment that leads to stupid behavior.
We are occasionally tossed complaints we should care more about the clean riders, and the fans than the dirty dopers.
This presumes we know who is clean and who isn't, and we don't. We don't think everybody dopes all the time, or that all the high performers dope much of the time, or that all the winners necessarily dope. Many reasonable people think otherwise, and we ought to be able to disagree without disrespect or vilification.
We also think the side of outrage is more than adequately represented by the WADA/IOC/Federation/State players, and the corporate media, beginning with L'Equipe, and the Olympic broadcasters and their affiliated outlets. That is a powerful Sporting-Entertainment Complex shaping opinion and policy for its own benefit. Nor is there a shortage of blogs and other grass-roots efforts expressing such frustrations.
We chose to do something different. We'd have been wasting our time if, when we looked into the corners, everything was tidy and in order. Instead, we found equivocal data, badly written rules, a house-of-mirrors system for resolving disputes, and little effort to asuage these concerns beyond bluster and platitude.
The lack of participation in Winnowing from those who are part of the WADA system isn't because we didn't try, but because those people chose not to participate and give their side now that the case is over.
Towards Real Solutions
Rational analysis with game theory indicates that the look-the-other-way omerta of the participants of the sport is, in fact, the best strategy for them to adopt given the rates of failure and the risks. In order the change that culture, something needs to significantly change the values of the predictable outcomes.
For testing to be effective, it must both catch a significant of the true dopers, and not be seen as arbitrary. The current tendency to target athletes based on performance (or rumor) may appear to be cost-effective, but it runs counter to the real goals of changing the mass behavior. It means that the non-targeted mid or back of pack riders, or those in undertested events are unlikely to be tested and caught. This serves to inculcate the "it's worth the risk, because there isn't much" mentality.
It means that mostly high-profile riders get caught, and that doesn't change the culture so much as damage the very stars a sport needs for positive visibility.
Targeted testing isn't wrong, but it is inadequate to change the culture.
We have observed that the cost of doing enough tests so that each rider in the Tour de France was likely to be screened at least twice during the three weeks is not high -- on the order of $30,000 more, selecting 8-10 riders a stage rather than three. Despite the hand-wringing, this approach isn't taken. That it isn't says that the people making the decisions are more interested in The Appearance of Doing Something than in solving the problem. It they weren't, they'd understand the damage of taking down high profile participants costs more in the long term than in more testing of more people earlier in their careers. There's no small part of this that comes down to warfare between the ASO and the UCI, and possibly the Tour vs. L'Equipe factions of the ASO itself. In any event, a cycling divided has no hope of working in its own best interests in the face of things like WADA and the IOC, which we'll get to later. And we won't more than mention the pathetic nature of rider's organization, and the war the UCI has with the idea of a collective-bargaining union representing the lowly participants.
We've suggested on many occasions that there be team penalties with teeth for doping. The one we like is for a team to lose starting positions in major events if they have a rider suspended, for the length of the rider's suspension. If a team has too many suspended riders, everybody is out of a job. That is peer pressure. Firing the rider should have no effect on the team sanction.
Given the consequences, we think either the certainty of offense needs to be higher, or the time of penalty lower. Or both. We don't see how lengthening sanctions does any good. If the likelihood of being struck by lightening is low, it doesn't make much difference how big the bolt is. Lower penalties would reduce the urge to fight and dispute, and lower the correctness bar for the testing itself.
Lots of cheaper tests with shorter punishments reflecting the quality of the tests would do more to change the culture than the targeted, high profile approach that is being taken. Joe Papp would have been better served if he'd been caught much earlier, with significant testing in the second and third tiers of races. By the time riders work their way into the top ranks, the "teachable moments" are long past.
Especially with targeted testing, we wish that enforcement were more transparent, reliable, and done in a way that encouraged confidence by rational third parties that examine the system. What we've learned in the Landis case is that, while well-intended, a lot of the enforcement effort involves dubious application of science, and large doses of "trust us" that do not appear to be as justified as claimed.
There have been no shortages of doping scandals in cycling since the Festina affair. There appears to be little statistical evidence that what has been done in enforcement since has had the desired effect. The party line, part of To Be Seen to be Doing Something, has been to Get Tough, with harder and harder sanctions, with less discretion. In some countries, criminal law is being brought to bear, with results (Puerto) that leave hardly anyone happy. The intersection of national law with an intended-to-be-uniform worldwide Code will lead to many inconsistencies and turf wars. While criminal law is harsher than suspension, the burdens of proof are much higher, and most of the cases to date have been for perjury, not for actual doping offenses.
And with criminal law, we do not looks to arrests and convictions to judge the rates of crime, but to the number if incidences of crimes. How many robberies, thefts or murders were committed and/or reported? With doping, we have no idea what the rate really is, and if the trend is going one way or another. We only measure tests (patrols), AAFs (arrests) and sanctions (convictions).
Can we say The System is working to reduce the incidence of doping?
We can't.
And we don't see how pursuing the same course with greater effort is going to produce appreciably different results.
The Big Picture
It seems to us the entire WADA anti-doping system is a fig-leaf for the commercial interests of the Olympic Movement. While it is presented as an intersection of science and law -- any many participants believe in their part -- it is really a public relations exercise to preserve as much as possible the pristine image needed for highly paid television images -- The Sporting-Entertainment Complex in action.
Let us not delude ourselves that these interests don't count. There are literally billions of dollars riding on these images. Bonds are issued, areas condemned, flattened, and immense construction made, all relying on the perception that the competition is "clean."
Cycling is a whipping boy for the Olympic anti-doping movement. It is a sport that has physiological demands that respond well to doping, and is itself poor enough that it has no particular leverage in the policy debate. What the IOC/WADA want for their image preservation is more important than the practical needs of any particular sport, especially cycling. It suits the IOC/WADA/CAS crowd fine to beat up cycling, because there is no fight back. The sport has a problem, and we can show we Mean Business. Game on.
This makes it easy to fall into position lock on a cycling case.
In contrast, the alleged football (soccer) player involvement in Operation Puerto has been completely swept under the rug. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to think the commercial interests of Football have had much to do with that. Is football an endurance sport where conditioning matters? Is there really reason to think there has been hardly any oxygen vector doping there? Yet the number of cases against football players seems remarkably, one might think, "suspiciously" low.
Heading to the Exit
TBV's real employ is in the architecture of highly available and scalable software systems, used in mission critical areas such as financial exchanges, commodity exchanges, and backing highly visible commercial websites. From my experience in these systems, it is apparent that almost anything can be made to work correctly a large fraction of the time. While not easy, it is the bread and butter of the industry.
What is not easy is handling cases where parts of a system fail. In our experience, when failures occur, they do so frequently in ways that were unexpected or under-considered in the design. This leads to a second level of truth: only the failure cases are interesting.
System failures are an inevitability, and need to be addressed. "One in a million" chances are 1000 times a second with a 1 GHz processor, and four times as often as that with a quad-core. The true test of the reliability and trustworthiness of a system is how it handles these failures when they occur.
What I've seen of the anti-doping from testing through arbitration is a system that has over-represented its reliability. In most cases, it probably works well enough, just like most computer systems. But when there are, or may be, problems, the system does not seem much interested in finding out possible root causes. It wants to producing a "result" that is "finding dopers guilty", per the rationale of the WADA Code. In customer service terms, it appears to be more interested in "closing the call" rather than in truly "resolving the problem."
Fortunately for me, I have no personal vulnerability to this system, nor any vested interest in it. This makes it possible to walk away with a clean conscience after sharing these thoughts.
I am saddened that we've been unable to come up with a reliable, trustworthy way of addressing the doping that is done.
I am left with doubts whether the WADA approach is effective or doing more good than harm to sports caught in the crosshairs. I want to watch the Tour for courageous riding and tactics. I don't believe perp-walks do the sport or the cause any good.
The WADA arbitration process has shown itself to me to be incapable of dealing with discovery issues, including depositions. It systematically encourages a "run out the clock" strategy by the side in a dispute that enters with a favorable burden proof, which is unlikely to be the athlete. This is not an issue where there is little dispute in a case. When there is a major difference of opinion, it becomes a systemic failure that can lead to questionable results.
As Prof. Straubel has noted, doping adjudication is quasi-criminal, and an arbitration system equipped for contractual disputes isn't set up to handle that effectively.
I believe the open hearing held in the Landis case illuminated these issues. I do not see where an open hearing added appreciable cost to the parties. Thus, allowing open hearings at the discretion of the accused party seems a good way of allowing visibility that would encourage trust in the process. Having an open hearing is a strategy that has risk, but if the athlete wishes it to be done in the open, it is hard to see a reason to refuse.
Secret evidence in secret trials do not encourage confidence in the conclusions.
I expect the Alphabets to try to close the open-hearing option as soon as practicable.
I wish there were more approaches being considered than what seems only to be escalated reliance on tests whose reliability isn't as good as presented, in turn leading to harsher and harsher penalties. The unwillingness to address the statistics of false-positives in an open way seems to me to be intellectually and morally dishonest.
The belief that that harsher penalties is a disincentive seems questionably founded. Death penalties haven't been shown to much affect murder rates. Doping bans that are effectively sporting death sentences seem equally likely to be effective as a deterrent.
One of the first organized sports Americans pick up is baseball, with umpires making calls. There are important things for children to learn from the experience. By example, force plays at first and phantom tags at second are always called OUT.*
The lesson for the kids is that authorities are often arbitrary and wrong, and there isn't much you can do about it. They can see things as they want to, rather than as they are, and they rarely admit the possibility of error. You can either accept that and play on, or quit participating in that game.
Thanks to everyone who has read us over the 2-1/2 years we've been following the case, all our our contributors, commenters, and sources who know who they are. We particularly want to thank Strbuk for saving our sanity in 2006, Bill Hue for insight we'd never have obtained in any other way, and Marc for a broad view and exceptionally generous hospitality.
It has been a far more interesting, involving and rewarding experience that we would ever have imagined, and we're truly humbled for anyone to have taken us seriously.
TBV's family has endured much in support our investigations, and it is time to give them more of the attention that they deserve.
It's a new year, a new beginning. Let's all try to enjoy the good parts, not get bent out of shape with things that are not as we'd like them to be, and humbly do the best we can with the things we can improve.
Best wishes,
TBV
*Avery Brundage and Mr. Pound mayhave carried grudges from their Olympic experiences; Frank Shorter may feel cheated by Cierpinski; Greg LeMond certainly feels diminished by those who followed him.
I hold the pain a speedy slap hitter carries for automatic calls on force plays.
Starbuck, before Battlestar Galactica, coffee, and TBV, was Capt. Ahab's first mate on the Pequod.
What I will remember from my stint here, and what I think may be the point of all of "this" , is the people. The memories of all of the readers and contributors, all of those people who gave of their time and effort because they so strongly believed in a cause, in a just cause in their collective opinion, are what I'll take away from this experience.
This site was MY lifeline to the case which I was obsessed with myself, and I only got involved in this because I pestered TBV endlessly with articles to post which I had discovered in obscure corners of the web. He finally said, and I paraphrase, post them yourself it's easy. The rest is now history.
Yes, there were mornings when I cursed the fact that I had to get up at 4:30AM to start my never ending search for "anything Landis" because I had an early teaching day. In retrospect however most of the time it was great fun, and without slipping into the maudlin, it was a great honor to be able to do something no matter how commonplace to "help".
So now it's done, as it has to be. Floyd has finally been able to resume his life and so must all of us, it seems only fitting. I am of the opinion that some good comes from almost any situation, no matter how awful suffering through it may seem at the time. Only Floyd will know if any "good" came from his ordeal. I know for myself the "good" that came from "this" was the opportunity to meet so many wonderful people. And so I end this where I began it, with the people.
Good luck to everyone who I have had the pleasure to "meet" whether in person or on line; Dave, Sandra, Bill, Marc, Dan, all of the bloggers and contributors, to you all I wish good luck! Please stay in touch if you can. Finally, good luck to you Floyd. In all of your future pursuits no matter what the outcome may be on the field of play at least you know your case fostered a community of caring and dedicated people who stuck with you all the way. That's no small feat, friend. Now, get on your bike and kick some serious ass for ALL of us!!
Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.
...
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee
Marc is a retired American living in Paris who joined us at the time of the Ferret.
My involvement in this fascinating struggle began on THAT day in July 2006. I had recently moved to Paris, and my in-laws were visiting from Connecticut. They had a whole lot more energy than I did, so on that day I'd begged out of whatever sightseeing forced march they'd planned. I didn't do it in order to watch the TdF--Floyd's collapse had wiped away most of my interest--but as long as I was home and the Tour was on the TV, I mean, why not watch? When my in-laws returned, haggard, from their endurance trial (it was July, remember), I said to them, "Oh, you'll never believe what you missed."
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A few days later we were on a bridge over the Seine, watching the riders enter Paris before the finale, and saw Floyd ride in. Or, at least, we pretended we did. In fact, the peloton swept past us under the bridge so fast and so tightly bunched that I was sure we'd only seen a large breakaway group, with the main bunch to arrive a little later. Only by my brother-in-law's replaying of the movie he'd shot was I convinced that a hundred-plus riders had really gone by that quickly. Floyd? Well, he was there somewhere, I guess.
When the supposed positive test result was announced, I didn't believe it. I still don't. I didn't then, not because of any naive belief that bicyclists didn't use dope--I'm almost 64: I remember Jacques Anquetil refusing the urine test that would have made his hour record official; I remember Tom Simpson collapsing on Mt Ventoux; I remember the suddenly miraculously beefy Bernard Thevenet beating Eddy Merckx. The reason I didn't believe it then is that I thought that of all racers Floyd Landis was the least likely to have cheated, or to go on lying that he hadn't. I believed that then, and I still do.
In the weeks that followed, I tried to make scientific sense out of what might have happened. I participated for a while on DPF. "My, what an unpleasant bunch most of their regulars are," I thought. For a brief time there was Free Floyd, but then it stopped. And, all of a sudden, TbV appeared. And not long after that, it seems to me (memory has probably falsely telescoped time here), the first of the LNDD (as it was then called) documents from the Chatenay-Malabry lab surfaced, and I found there was a small contribution I could make. I had, at one point in my life, been a typesetter; at another, a paleontologist (someone who pores over old manuscripts--and I assure you, most medieval scribes had far worse handwriting than the techs at LNDD); I knew some French and Italian.
As documents surfaced in unlikely places I was as happy, as we say, as a pig in shit. There were results to be translated, documents to be compared to determine--by matching stationery, typefaces, signatures--which might be the source of another, which might be forged, which genuine, and so on. In the end, all these fascinating espionage-like games were superseded by the substantive debate over the test procedures and the reliability of their results. My skill set became increasingly irrelevant, and the word passed to the scientists, where I could not follow. i didn't regret that. That was as it should be. The final word should scientific--or should have been. Nor did I regret the time I'd spent on now insignificant issues. I had fun, and I felt I was part of a small but important movement. There are still unanswered questions about the provenance of those documents, questions whose answers would reveal a backstory of manipulation of data and the media. I'd like to know the story, but I know it's unlikely I ever will. Tant pis. C'est la guerre.
The greatest moment--in respect to drama, if not scholarship--was TbV's "live-blogging," as we now know to call it, of the USADA hearing. An unprecedented opening of what had been nothing more than a Star Chamber, as well as an astounding feat of old-fashioned journalism. I would like to believe that dB's and Bill Hue's cracking open of this closed legal world will have a lasting effect. It will surely have some; it will almost as surely not have as much as we would hope.
Along the way, I have met--sometimes face-to-face, most often not--some of the most interesting people I have ever known. I rarely have had as much fun on the internet as I did while all of us on this site were taking on giants, armed only with our curiosity, ingenuity, civility, and sense of justice. Thanks to everyone who made this wild ride possible: dB, first of all, and strbk, Bill Hue and Mr. Rant. and, of course, Mr. FL himself. I will miss this community, but somehow feel I'm bound to run into many of you again in some other fight for reality-based regulations in this sport we love. As the French say, "Courage. On les aura."
Let me ask you.
Have you ever held a position in an argument past the point of comfort?
Have you ever defended a way of life you were on the verge of exhausting?
Have you ever given service to a creed you no longer utterly believed?
Have you ever told a girl that you loved her and felt the faint nausea of eroding conviction?
I have.
That's an interesting moment.
Guess you gotta be the way you are.
Guess you gotta see things your own way.
If everyone laughs when the joke's on you.
Don't take it so hard.
You can look on the light side.
Well a man was hit by a train.
And his body was startin to drain.
The doc said the man's half dead
I say he's half alive.
It's all in the way you look at it.
Wolfram Meier-Augenstein testified for Landis at the AAA hearing. He is an expert in isotope ratio spectrometry, invented a number of the techniques, and is widely published. He also sent us a short, direct responses to the topics we suggested, and this longer piece, which we have reformatted. In the cover letter, he writes:
I have attached a slightly amended version of my "who watches the watchdogs" response to the original majority panel decision; a document I stand by to this day. It focuses on the real problem here, non-fit-for-purpose procedures incompetently applied by a lab with no adequate quality control and quality assurance procedures in place. If LNDD would be assessed by a proper accreditation body (such as UKAS) to either ISO-17025 or to GLP I should like to think they would fail.
“We call the length of time between injection and position of the target compound peak a retention time [tr]. On the other hand, the time difference between the peak of an unretained compound and a target compound is called the adjusted retention time [tr’]. We call the retention time of a compound that is not retained by the stationary phase the gas hold-up time [t0].
Howdy, pardner!
Bing Crosby sings the theme song better than we can.
Quickrelease thinks there's something fishy.
Rant gives us a nice send off.
The Boulder Report gives a fond farewell. If we were pedantic sorts, we might complain about being called Southern Californian, which is like calling someone in Gunnison a front-ranger. But that would be unnappreciative: Lindsay has kept his own counsel and not been tied into a fixed position.
Team Ouch has a web site, and a twitter feed.
Is the team motto going to be, "Putting the hurt on"?
Epic Carnival runs a year-ender by Gary Gaffney of Steroid Report, suggesting that the sport of cycling be euthanized, with Landis as but one example.
The Grauniad's Barnry Ronay makes Landis one of his Sports Villains of 2008, listing no other cyclist. That's staying power for someone who didn't even compete in the sport for the year.
Musings Blong Orrbésau thinks "TBV is a sorry excuse", but is talking about a different one.
Whew.
Finally, this tidbit from BobkeStrut, talking about the book Sneaker Wars.
Dick Pound is mentioned for his behind the scenes arm-twisting of National Olympic Committees (NOCs) in the early 1980s. Pound, tightly connected to IOC chair Juan Antonio Samaranch, made the rounds of the worlds NOCs in order to convince them to give up their marketing rights and sell them back to the IOC home office in Switzerland. The end result was that the Olympics could then have a single, global marketing campaign and the beneficiary of this was Adidass Horst Dassler. Surprise, surpriseDassler was a major force in getting Samaranch elected as IOC head, and as a payback Samaranch would contract Dasslers shadow sports marketing firm to handle the Olympic marketing campaign.
Wolfram Meier-Augenstein testified for Landis at the AAA hearing. He is an expert in isotope ratio spectrometry, invented a number of the techniques, and is widely published. He sent us some short, direct responses to the topics we suggested, and a longer piece which we'll publish separately.
On the Merits of the Landis case
The data produced by LNDD are scientifically flawed (ambiguous peak "identification"; no matrix matched positive quality control, no matrix matched negative quality control; only one parameter being used as qualifier to declare a failed test) as well as biologically / biochemically (results make no sense from a biochemical point of view regarding testosterone metabolism).
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Conduct of the Landis case?
It was a witch hunt; the accused is presumed guilty; WADA lab employees are under WADA orders not to testify against another WADA lab; the panel of 3 is comprised of 2 WADA appointees and 1 independent. At present WADA is judge, jury and executioner, which is unacceptable in any civilised society.
Wisdom, merit and effectiveness of anti-doping as currently practiced?
Anti-doping control is sadly a reality and will remain so to ensure fair competition as best as this can be achieved. However, turning the screws by lowering thresholds and tolerances below researched and published conservative thresholds and tolerances based on population statistics and the natural variability, even intra-individual variability of the human body increases the number of false positives. More innocent athletes are labelled as drug cheats for the sake of catching "all" real drug cheats. One almost suspects another motive for doing this is so WADA can continue to justify its existence (and the money spent by and on them).
What could be done in anti-doping that might work better?
Anti-doping should be more open to scrutiny; anti-doping labs should be monitored and quality controlled by organisations independent of WADA. Like any forensic service provider anti-doping labs must be open to peer assessment and participate in proficiency tests (international laboratory exercises). If 13C isotope analysis is to be used this ought to be carried out only by qualified staff on GC-IRMS/MS hybrid systems (available commercially "only" since 1995!!!), i.e. instruments that can measure 13C isotopic composition of a peak AND identify the compound causing the peak AS WELL AS probing for peak overlap with minor components under IDENTICAL analytical conditions during the SAME analysis.Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley, "Proper Studies", 1927
Dr W Meier-Augenstein, CChem, FRSC
Senior Lecturer - Stable Isotope Forensics
Centre for Anatomy & Human Identification
University of Dundee
Principal Scientist - Stable Isotopes
Stable Isotope Laboratory
SCRI
Invergowrie
Dundee, DD2 5DA
United Kingdom
Dan Rosen's Rant Your Head Off predated us by a few days, but he was smart enough to avoid being daily, and to have a wider focus. The experience led to a book. The wisdom of being sporadic helped him avoid burnout, and the wider focus lets him evade the sell-by-date that came with our narrower interests.
Joe Papp is an American sometime-professional cyclist who was busted for testosterone use and testified for USADA at the AAA hearing. He has openly admitted his own guilt.
When TBV invited me to share my thoughts on the puzzle that was the Landis Affair, I eagerly accepted – though weeks passed before I could finally articulate my perspective on the case.
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As I said during the arbitration hearing in Malibu last May, I didn’t – and don’t – have any ill-will towards Floyd Landis. I understood how my testimony as a witness for USADA could have been perceived by Landis and his supporters, but I took the stand to share with the world my own story, and to state for the record that testosterone, along with many other drugs that wouldn’t seem ideal choices for endurance athletes, are hungrily gobbled-up by professional cyclists and used exactly as I described.
The claim that there is no “scientific” evidence to support the use of testosterone for recovery by professional cyclists during multi-day stage races is a red herring – scientists and medical professionals are ethically-prohibited from carrying out the very research studies that would be required to support or disprove the theory that Androgel® works beyond having a placebo effect. Besides, with finite resources available to support the anti-doping movement, would that research represent the best allocation of funding in pursuit of the goal of “clean-sport?” I would rather see money spent to improve the efficiency and the integrity of the testing and reporting process, to ensure that other athletes accused of doping don’t suffer the same injustice that befell Floyd.
Yes, even though he was convicted of doping, I think that the anti-doping system failed Floyd Landis.
I don’t place the blame on USADA – an agency that treated me justly and respected the basic tenets of fairness during the adjudication of my case – but rather, with the foreign parties who violated Landis’ rights as an athlete and precipitously disclosed the results of his A-sample to the media.
Floyd was criticized for his public “wiki” defense, and I think he erred tactically in some of his statements, but if parties to the case other than Landis hadn’t violated their legal and ethical obligations of confidentiality, there would have been less questioning of the integrity of the entire testing process.
The anti-doping agencies should aggressively fight cheating in sport, but in a manner that leaves no room for conspiracy theories or the challenging of test results based on gross violations of an athlete’s privacy. The laboratories charged with analyzing samples must be held to the same standards to which accused athletes are subjected, because when a process and protocols are intentionally contravened (as in the case of LNDD’s leaking Landis’s results to the media), one can reasonably question the motivation and reliability of those who should be scrupulously neutral.
Full Post with Comments...
Arnie Baker MD (ret.), is a prolific author of cycling training and medical information. He was Landis' first coach in California. On hearing the accusations, he worked actively on interpreting the available information for the defense, and prepared the well known presentations and various versions of The Wiki Defense publication.
(For more complete documentation see: http://arniebakercycling.com/books/wiki.htm.)
Bruce Goldberger Phd, is prominent forensic toxicologist, and lab director who testified for Landis at both hearings. Prior to involvement in the Landis case, he'd been invited to apply as a candidate to replace Catlin as Director of the UCLA WADA laboratory.
As many people know, I was reluctant to get involved in the Landis case as I do not work for (and never have) an anti-doping laboratory. I have been practicing forensic toxicology for more than 25 years and much of my work has focused on novel analytical techniques and quality assurance/quality control procedures.
But, when given the opportunity to study the materials from the LNDD laboratory, I immediately agreed to work with Howard Jacobs and Maurice Suh. I was distressed by the quality and interpretation of the analytical data, chain-of-custody documentation, etc. If the Landis case was prosecuted in a U.S. Court of Law, the data would have never met the Frye and/or Daubert standards of evidence.
Also, I learned quickly that the WADA Anti-doping program was constructed to such a degree that accused athletes are greatly disadvantaged when defending themselves. For example, WADA Laboratory Directors cannot consult for an accused athlete; and defense experts like myself are criticized because of a "lack of expertise and experience". Further, the WADA IST and ISL are woefully inadequate to ensure a fair and equitable system which protects the rights of the athlete while ensuring the success of an anti-doping program.
Finally, I want to thank TBV for maintaining a blog devoted to the Floyd Landis doping allegations. It has been a valuable source of information.
Bruce Goldberger, Ph.D., DABFT
Spinopsys Phil, an Australian self-described Floyd-basher, sent these regrets, and made good on his promise of mention at Cycling Central.
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I really appreciate you asking. First off congratulations of a fine blog and more importantly a fine example of what media might look like in the future. You've demonstrated that long form journalism in the digital age does not end with a 10,000 word article in a major magazine or newspaper but will be done a few hundred words at a time by a team of experts and amateurs contributing their knowledge. Yours will be an important historical archive for years to come.
Unfortunately I won't be able to contribute, busy as I am now as cycling content editor/producer for Australia's Tour de France broadcaster SBS at their brand spanking new cycling site Cycling Central.
Anyway, you can bet that I will be making note of the passing of TBV in a weekly piece I write for the site.
Regards,
Phil
John Amory MD, is a leading andrologist (male hormone specialist) who testified for Landis in both hearings, arguing the metabolism of testosterone as documented in all reviewed studies does not have divergences between the adiols claimed in the test values.
Amory had served on USADA anti-doping review boards prior to the Landis case. In response to a specific question, he replied, "I would considering serving on an ADRB again, but part of me is very glad to be focusing on my clinical duties and my research (male contraception, oral testosterone development), and out of the contentious world of doping. "
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My thoughts about the Landis case are as follows:
1) The results of his IRMS were scientifically indeterminate. There is a nice discussion of this in the article by Berry from Nature which makes this case more eloquently than I can.
2) The criteria for positivity of the IRMS should be standardized between labs based on larger normal samples. For example, the UCLA lab requires the delta of both the 5-alpha-androstanediol and the 5-beta-androstanediol to be significantly elevated, but WADA only requires that a single metabolite be elevated. The latter approach reduces the specificity of the test, thereby increasing the risk of a false positives, which is probably what happened in this case (5-alpha abnormal, 5-beta normal).
3) Testing of the "B" sample should be performed at a centralized reference lab and the results from the B sample should corroborate the results from the "A" sample before a positive result is resulted. Using replicated results from two labs would vastly improve confidence in the results as it is unlikely both labs would be wrong in the same way, and it would defused "the lab is out to get me defense."
4) Only peer-reviewed published literature should be considered as evidence. In the Landis case, the prosecution argued that the 5-alpha/5-beta discrepancy was secondary to the use of testosterone gel by Mr. Landis.
They hypothesized that the use of the gel specifically increased 5-alpha reduced metabolites of testosterone. To support this, they referred to a very small unpublished study that administered testosterone gel in normal men by Schanzer and colleagues. However, in this study only two men had undergone IRMS testing and only one of whom had the isolated elevation in his 5-alpha metabolite. To my knowledge, this study has still not been published, despite that fact that this group has been very active in publishing in this area. Was the original hypothesis correct? Does testosterone gel use selectively increase 5-alpha metabolites? Clearly, it is preferable to use peer-reviewed published papers to try to understand this, and prevent erroneous and premature conclusions from being reached.
John K. Amory MD, MPH
Associate Professor of Medicine
Division of General Internal Medicine
University of Washington
La Cronica de Hoy says Landis/OUCH-Maxxis will participate in the Tour of Mexico in March, following the Amgen Tour of California.
Lancaster Online's big news of the year roundup has Landis' loss at CAS an also-ran story, behind: the economy, the election, some murders and fatal accidents, a politician retiring, a fraud case, and closing of a local landmark retailer. And the Phillies.
Cyclisme Review.eu (translated) passes on a rumor from Les Dessous du Sport that L'Equipe has been told to tone down the doping coverage, to the disappointment of the staff, and suggests this is bad news for the readership.
411mania posted a letter from Chris Bell about the death of his brother Mike. Bell's documentary film Bigger Faster Stronger included a visit by Chris to Floyd Landis' (legal) altitude chamber.
My older brother Michael aka MAD DOG in the wrestling world, passed away yesterday from unknown causes. He was residing at a sober living place in Orange County and was celebrating 60 days of being clean and sober from any drugs or alcohol. His roommates found him dead in his room at about 2:30pm yesterday and he was pronounced dead on the spot by medical experts. The cause of death is unknown and does not appear to be self inflicted.
My brother was my true hero growing up and I always wanted to be big and strong like him. He was the inspiration for me to make my movie Bigger Stronger Faster* because I saw how the American Dream negatively affected his sense of self worth. I will always remember my brother as the nicest guy in the world that sometimes got caught up in the wrong things. I am so sad right now over his passing. He was on his way to getting his life back on track and he was taken away from us at such a young age. My family thanks everyone who has sent emails and called. It really means a lot.
I Love you Michael.
Your little brother,
Christopher
In the film, Mike Bell was said to have previous health issues, but no cause of death was known at release time. Once the film went public, the media went crazy claiming that Bell had attempted suicide in the past.As we noted in Pause, Mike Bell was bi-polar. The Bell's hometown paper, The Poughkeepsie Journal has the best article.
I'd gotten "Bigger, Faster, Stronger" for Christmas, and was watching it in the morning. I'd paused it yesterday at about the 1:05 mark, when filmmaker Chris Bell's brother Mark was talking about lying to kids on the football team he was coaching about whether he took steroids.
Last night, we see the news that other brother Mike "Mad Dog" Bell was dead at age 37.
This morning, as I unpaused the film, and watched a confession to the Bell parents about trying steroids, I read that Mike had been found at a California rehab center, and that he'd been "clean" for 60 days. He'd been in treatment for alcohol and pain killer (ab)use.
While I read that, his dad was talking about Mike's delusions, how he wasn't facing up to what he was doing, and how he was afraid one day, Mike would be found dead.
His mother agonized over what could have made her boys be unsatisfied with their bodies, and not content with the perfection God had given them as they were.
Email informs us that Mike had been diagnosed as bi-polar, and had been on and off medications intended to treat it.
Our condolences to the Bells.
If anyone would like to attend his memorial service in the NY area it will be held on January 10 at 10 AM at Faith Assembly of God, 254 Spackenkill Road, Poughkeepsie, NY 12603.
Maurice Suh and Daniel Weiss represented Landis at both the AAA hearing and the CAS appeal. Rather than write anew, they pointed us to a piece in the Los Angeles Daily Journal in January 2008, from before the CAS hearing. We hadn't seen it before.
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The phrase ``presumed innocent until proven guilty'' is not just a tag line for legal dramas such as ``Law and Order'' --- it is a core principle of our legal and societal fabric. The practical effect of this principle is remarkable, but one that is largely lost in doping cases. Presuming that an athlete is guilty based on the test result alone assumes that the antidoping tests are infallible. This is not true. As seen in recent months, accredited laboratories do conduct tests improperly. For instance, the two European World AntiDoping Agencyaccredited laboratories that tested American sprinter LaTasha Jenkins were found to have violated a clearly established testing standard. Antidoping systems must take into account the fact that the laboratory results and methods are not always correct, and should place the onus, in each and every case, on the testing authority to establish not only that a valid test for performance enhancing drugs was positive, but also that the test was performed in a scientifically reliable manner.
What has been lost among the scandals, admissions and denials of the last several weeks [Jan 2008] is the great opportunity that all sports have to craft a comprehensive system that achieves clean competition without sacrificing the rights of the athlete.
Rational Head took long part in the scientific discussions at the Daily Peloton Forums. He, like Christiane Ayotte, found he had no time to say more.
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Thanks for the invitation.
At various times I expressed my thoughts at DPF on all the topics you listed. Unfortunately, I am going through a period when I simply don’t have much time to participate even in the DPF discussions.
Your blog was quite informative and is appreciated.
Best of luck.
RH
US Air Force Major (for identification only, yada, yada) John Gilliland wrote an overlooked piece for us dealing with prosecutorial discretion. He is an Air Force judge advocate, involved in numerous drug prosecutions involving urinalysis testing.
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In a cover letter, he writes:
A bit of context for my piece: my office, which is the prosecution function for my Air Force base, just finished some litigation in which there were some defense shenanigans involving discovery material. This coming week we have a court-martial that entails a controversial discovery request. I made the decision to provide that information knowing that it isn't admissible but that the defense may work that information into the court anyway. We're still smarting from last week's fiasco, but the case this week is an apples to oranges comparison.
It's irritating when other folks don't play fair, but there's a big difference between playing unfair and playing in ways you're not used to seeing. I've seen both in the last couple of weeks, and I keenly understand the importance of understanding that difference. Justice, someone's career & freedom, and our reputation depends on the prosecutor's ability to make that distinction. You call foul against the former; you just do your job (and don't whine or mischaracterize it, a la Mr. Tygart) when confronted with the latter.
Duckstrap is a consultant to pharmaceutical companies on setting up statistically useful and regulatory compliant development evaluation. He's looked at the available data along with us and heavily participated in the discussion. He too makes reference to the Berry argument.
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How does the Landis case look from the vantage of two years’ perspective? Muddy. I submit that nobody knows for sure whether Floyd took testosterone on that fateful day in July except Floyd. Not me. Not the folks from the ex-LNDD, and certainly not USADA or CAS. Or perhaps more pertinently, that nobody (again excepting Floyd) who strenuously purports to know, actually knows what they, in fact, do not know. I believe that CAS verdict was influenced by the politics of anti-doping much more than a strong scientific case; that by the time the case got to that point, the science was almost an afterthought. That is wrong in my view.
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Here are the things I am convinced of:
1) The statistics of the anti-doping testing are flawed. This is Don Berry’s argument, and, for me, it is convincing. The essence of it is this: if you believe that a relatively small fraction of riders dope with a particular agent, then the test for that agent needs to be very very specific, with a very low false positive rate. From screening to confirmatory T:E ratio to IRMS, LNDD’s procedures never came close to that standard. The new tests for CERA, where there is a specific molecular signature to the molecule allowing its distinction from endogenous EPO may approach that standard.
2) Overall, LNDD’s assay procedures and methods were inexcusably slipshod. The lack of adherence to procedures for sample custody were symptomatic of a broader scientific sloppiness that saw really bad chromatography in the screening procedure, unidentifiable peaks in the “confirmatory IRMS chromatography”, and finally, actually different chromatography conditions in the IRMS chromatography, so there was no definitive identification of the molecule(s) whose IRMS signature was measured. These are systemic, methodological issues with the assays as they were run in that lab. It does not mean that this tecnology could not produce a definitive answer, but in the hands of these hacks it did not. It doesn’t mean they didn’t get the right answer, but it also means they couldn’t know that they had—hence neither can we.
As for Floyd, whether he did or didn’t, I wish him all the best. If he did it, then he has taken us all for quite the ride, but has also paid a huge price for it. If he didn’t do it, then I believe he has done about all a person could do to exonerate himself, and appears, wisely, to have chosen to move on. It is couragous to fight the fight, but also couragous to put it behind you and get on with the business of living life. I’m glad to have played a small part in the drama, and am even more grateful to TBV for providing a forum for civil and knowledgable discourse of the subject.
Kevin Dykstra, PhD
aka “Duckstrap”
Klaas Faber is a widely published author on statistics for accreditation of chemometry measures. He's looked at the Landis case since it became public. He cites below the editorial in Nature by Donald Berry. (Our posts referencing Berry)
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Laboratories have arranged that they don't need to give the full data, in the WADA TD2003LDOC. In contrast, the Dutch Forensic Institute, for example, is obliged to give everything the defense needs, because that's arranged by law - a law that holds for governmental bodies (i.e. not for a lab that is paid by sport organizations and/or anti-doping agencies). For that reason, I was never able to have a good look at Floyd's data. And neither was the defense. During the hearings before the CAS, for example, the analyst of the laboratory was not able to reproduce the numbers that have led to the blue 'dot' in Figure 1 of Berry's Commentary in Nature! However, they were able to meet the required burden of proof ('...to the comfortable satisfaction of the hearing body...') on all occasions.
(click for larger)
-androstanediol (a, b), and androsterone and 5 
-androstanediol (c, d). Panels b and d show samples the French national anti-doping laboratory (LNDD) designate to be 'positive' (red crosses) or 'negative' (green dots); the values from Landis's second sample from stage 17 is shown as a blue dot. Axes display delta notation, expressing isotopic composition of a sample relative to a reference compound." (source: Nature)
T-DO (2006) 29, page 2Carlton Reid is a UK-based cycling media mogul.
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Trust But Verify is closing, but I don't feel closure.
WADAWatch was started because the sometime-jurist author was taken aback by what he believes is the horrible wording of the WADA Code. It intrigued him enough to take vacation time to go to a WADA Conference for the press and meet and speak to many of the principals. His meta-legal analyses of The Code seem to us essential reading to anyone interested in rationalizing The Code. (Unfortunately, that may not include many of the current stakeholders.) One of the points he finds most troubling is the abandonment of the Quigley rule, something which seemed to have formed good guidance to CAS panels before the adoption of the WADA Code.
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As Trust but Verify prepares to shut down this superb Encyclopaedia Floydia, many of its readers are still awestruck at the outcome(s) of the Floyd Landis case(s): a victory fully enjoyed by 'the anti–doping movement' in arbitration, and withdrawal of his US Court case. It was late–summer 2008, when WADA president John Fahey announced WADA's contentment: the 'aggressive campaign against' that movement by Floyd Landis came to its arbitrated end.
And only two weeks ago, Landis withdrew his US Court case, leaving unexamined a vital, major scrutiny of the explicit conflicts of interest that permeate the private world of major sports legal arbitration.
The facts and evidence of Floyd's case stood for something profound: the fundamental concept that even Athletes have civil rights, and that a quasi–legal system of Jurisprudence/private arbitration that sought to retain monopoly control of those Athletes' lives, should uphold Western legal ideals in according those rights.
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The Landis Decisions offer proof that such is not to be, as long as a 'small group of insiders' is permitted to prioritize the protection of their own livelihoods, and the incestuous legal fraternity holding this monopoly power, throughout WADA, and Agencies, Labs and ADOs.
Those of us who were aghast that Dick Pound, former WADA president, might be installed as president of the Court of Arbitration for Sport, may wonder at what influence the man had had, in the CAS Decision confirming Floyd's positive Testosterone test. With the Landis Decision, CAS moved away from its prior legal basis, expressed in the famous Quigley Rule. That 15 year–old ruling called for implementation of a fair system, where 'rules are clear' and deviations from their meaning were often quashed, as we'd seen in the Landaluce case. WADAwatch believes, but certainly cannot prove, that the Landis Decision issued by CAS had some profound ex parte input from Pound: the former “Voice of WADA”, former candidate to become CAS' president. A Pyrrhic victory for the Omerta of WADA.
However, because Professeur de Ceaurriz and his LNDD lab techs, obsolete machines and tainted laboratory documentation, their pro forma COFRAC certification, the whitewashing French AFLD Ministry, vocal Dick Pound and WADA, with its 'independent expert witnesses' and institutional discrimination(s), supported by the USADA and Richard Young, who altogether (USADA and WADA) spent several millions of dollars, were fully supported by both the AAA Panel (majority), and the CAS Panel:We do not know how, when, where and, to what degree
Floyd was ingesting Testosterone, if at all;
Thanks to Floyd Landis' legitimate, unnecessarily–expensive defense and appeal:We do know how LNDD, USADA, WADA, AAA and CAS
confirmed theWADA Code's systemic viability
– in spite of having exposed its every
substantive and procedural flaw.
In other words: we don't know 'how Floyd was wrong', but we do know 'why WADA was right'.
Perfectly.
We may also never know, what honest inadequacies are, legally, nor what differentiates the acceptance of a WADA accredited lab having followed the concept(s) of rules (CAS Decision), rather than following the 'letter of the law'. Gone forever, are French accusations that Floyd's friends 'hacked' into the French lab's computer system (which some surmise was a way to disinform how evidence was destroyed, to erase traces of French shenanigans...), and gone, for some time, are the concepts expressly displayed in the WADA Code Fundamental Rationale.
We will never know why France was allowed to bring its renegade case against Floyd without being in violation of WADA Code Article 15.4, nor why its lab, in violation of Article 6.4, received full support throughout Floyd's disciplinary process. We will never know why USADA was not required to inform WADA of 'departures' (Article 7.1/7.2) before Floyd had to spend millions trying to prove those multiple, inexcusable LNDD failures. And the list goes on...
Someday Athletes may realize that the present system only serves to act as an Insurance Policy, protecting Event Organizers from Sponsorship withdrawal. WADAwatch hopes to aid Athletes, by simply encouraging WADA to enforce internally, the words of its Fundamental Rationale, not the least of which being: “Respect for rules and laws”.
Thanks to our friends, who made Trust but Verify THE daily Floyd site.
Christiane Ayotte is the director of the Montreal WADA lab, and testified for USADA at both the AAA and CAS hearings. She quickly sent a brief reply to our solicitation.
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Thanks for the invitation.
All what I had to say in relation to the findings reported by Paris, the interpretation of the results, all the arguments raised by the athlete's experts is totally contained in the declarations submitted to the CAS Panel. [...] I have no desire for polemic and see no reason to challenge the faith that is yours. Friends must trust, not verify.
All the best!
Christiane Ayotte, Ph.D.
INRS-Institut Armand-Frappier
Race Junkie is a blogger who is most truly resplendent in the full-foaming rant. On this occasion, she takes off the rabid mask and adopts more respectable form, reflecting her day job as a civil rights attorney.
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In the two-odd years since Operacion Puerto broke bang in the middle of the Giro d’Italia, bringing a good hundred cyclists into disrepute and effectively ending the careers of, well, Jan Ullrich mostly, the big questions remaining in the fight against doping seem to be: should it be done, are we doing it the right way, and, on a related note, does it seem to be working?
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Should it be done? Of course.
Leaving aside the moral argument that winning through cheating is a cheap two-dollar watch of a victory, which it is, I don’t think a very young or very flush rider—or team manager, for that matter--with history-in-the-making riding on his or her choice is in the best position to make an objective judgment as to whether taking some dubious concoction of unknown long-term safety or efficacy is a good idea—that’s right, I think we need to protect riders from themselves, as well as the avarice of those who literally profit off their success.
Are we doing it the right way?
Sometimes. I’m no scientist, but rigorous out-of-competition doping controls seem to be a good idea to keep some folks from amping up their pre-race training only to reap the benefits by racing clean at showtime, and during-competition controls are unquestionably the right thing to do for the sake of the riders—dirty and clean—and the sport itself. I think the problem is in the process: as in the Landis case, setting up the “right” outcome through press blitz only obfuscates the truth, and not requiring an independent lab to analyze the “B” samples guarantees that the lab and the people who hired it have a vested interest in proving they got it right in the first place. For my money—and I say this as someone who benefits from gross rumormongering—confidentiality and objectivity should be the top priorities to ensure both perceived and actual justice.
Finally, is it working?
Well, certainly the governing bodies’ argument that snagging so many dopers only proves the controls are working is ludicrous, in that to me it only proves that (1) the new generation whose mindset we’ve presumably changed is just as dirty as the previous ones, and (2) as soon as one method’s detectable, the race is on to find the Next Big Thing that’ll outwit the tests.
But can we stop, just because human frailty so often outpaces science? No. Because one day, once again, I’d like to gasp at the beauty and power of a spectacular win without having to wonder, just a little bit, whose guiding hand, or needle, is behind it.
One Mint Julich is a frequent contributor on the Daily Peloton Forums, and heavily participated in the productive scientific discussion there. At our request, he summarizes it all from his point of view as follows.
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I’m a scientist who is fairly familiar with, though not expert in, the methodology used to test Floyd. I was fairly impressed with the evidence against him in the IRMS test, including:
1)the size of the delta values for one of the metabolites;
2)that this metabolite also exhibited a large delta value in Floyd’s samples after several other stages of the TDF;
3)that a second metabolite also had a sizeable delta value (after both stage 17 and as I recall, several other stages), above or very near the 3.0 criterion (depending on how one treated the standard error for the procedure)
4)that the delta values for the remaining two metabolites, though not reaching the 3.0 criterion, were still substantially negative;
I did not feel that the various technical errors pointed out during the trial were that damning against WADA’s case. For example, the evidence was very compelling that the metabolites were identified correctly, and while contamination was possible (which could skew the delta value of a correctly identified metabolite), it seemed to me unlikely to exist to the extent needed to account for the high delta values, and there was no evidence raised during the trial to indicate there might have been such contamination. Certainly the amount of sloppiness should raise some concern, since if the lab consistently made this many errors, sooner or later they would likely significantly affect the conclusions of some doping test. But I did not think they did in this particular case.
I also believe that the conclusion was strengthened by the initial positive T/E test. Granted, there were problems with that test, too, and in the end it was actually thrown out by the panel. But calling results inadmissible does not mean the conclusion they point to is false, any more than failing to read a defendant his/her rights means the defendant didn’t commit the crime. Floyd did have a fairly high T/E value, I think that’s very clear, and given that the T/E test is an independent indicator of synthetic testosterone, I think it provides greater reason to believe in the IRMS results.
Having said all this, I never felt the case against Floyd was slamdunk, and had this been a capital crime, where guilt must pass the beyond reasonable doubt test, I would have been somewhat conflicted. I felt the biggest problem was the lack of consistency among the delta values for different metabolites. The literature generally indicates that the delta values of these metabolites follow each other closely, and given the origin of these values, that is what one would expect. WADA did produce some evidence that this would not be the case following transdermal application of testosterone, but this was preliminary data, based on only a few cases, has not yet to my knowledge been published, and still lacks, I believe, a strong conceptual basis.
The bottom line for me, though, was that one very high delta value. Barring contamination, I don’t see how it could indicate anything but exogenous testosterone.
Dirt Roadie is a 56 year old attorney, "practicing until he gets it right." When cycling, he says he prefers riding the high mountain and low desert terrain of Colorado and Utah, on or off-road. He participated in our analysis of the CAS appeal.
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Floyd, and allegations of doping. So, looking back, what happened and what have we learned?
Human behavior is, on a large scale, dictated by faith (think Islam, Taoism, Buddism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity). But even in secular issues, one is often faced with taking one side or the other based largely on just such faith, since the "truth" may never be known.
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I've never met the guy. I have no idea if a conversation with him would get beyond "Wow, you're Floyd Landis. Cool!" I will note that the only person who is likely to truly know whether Floyd used testosterone claims he did not. 'Nuff said. However, I am also not inclined to accept the "legal" conclusion that he did, partially because I also see nothing in his miracle ride that cannot be readily accounted for by the events of the two days as described by StarrTrek's saga of the magic water bottle.
If, as I am strongly led to believe, he did not use testosterone, his story is one of the great travesties of sporting history.
And if he did use testosterone, it may still be.
Indeed, there were never any allegations of blood doping, use of EPO or other similar and blatantly egregious offenses. But I'll use the word innocent in the broader sense of meaning either truly innocent or at least not guilty of anything more than a minor infraction when compared with the "industrial strength" offenses noted above.
In the 2006 Tour de France, Floyd Landis had a VERY bad day (a "jour sans") followed by a VERY, VERY good day when Floyd put all his remaining chips on the table and won the hand.
Then came the extended bad period commencing when Floyd was accused of doping based upon LNDD lab tests of, shall we say, questionable validity. See Arnie Baker's The Wiki Defense.
There were two independent arbitration hearings, AAA/CAS and CAS. But in contrast to typical legal proceedings where an appellate court reviews a lower court decision for "error," the second arbitration hearing started over from scratch. Each time the arbitrators did little more than rubber stamp the allegations of USADA, despite the AAA acknowledging clear problems with the lab work and one of three arbitrators ruling in Floyd's flavor. The written CAS opinion resonated with a decidedly less-than-objective tone.
I was reminded of a case I dealt with many years ago involving "scientific" data in the context of a "bottom of the bureaucracy" DMV administrative proceeding (NOT a trial in a court of law). Very simply, the ONLY issue was whether the blood alcohol content was above .15 %.
A machine had shown a BAC of .155%, .005% over (two zeroes after the decimal). BUT, the machine's "accuracy" was considered acceptable if it read within ± .01 (just one zero after the decimal) of the presumed value when testing a specially prepared "control" sample.
So, the machine read over the legal limit by just HALF of the acceptable error of the device. (Think of trying to measure to the nearest inch using a yardstick marked only in feet.)
Nonetheless, that issue clearly sailed right over the head of the DMV hearing examiner (next step up from the guys who give driving tests) who pounded his gavel (Yes, he had a freaking gavel) and proclaimed, "These machines are very accurate!"
In Floyd's case, both the AAA and the CAS might just as well have pounded their gavels and announced, "These labs are very accurate." Indeed, the CAS panel explicitly stated "LNDD benefits from the presumption that it conducted sample analysis in accordance with international laboratory standards." Sort of a Nixonesque, "if a certified lab does it, it's not improper."
All the while, Floyd's "guilt" was taken to heart by the Floyd critics, many of whom were part of the anti-doping system, happy to have a scapegoat. The word "witchhunt" has been used repeatedly and accurately.
Is/was there a doping problem in cycling? Yup, no question. Should an innocent cyclist be sanctioned? Seems like an easy enough question with an obvious answer, but the anti-doping crusaders seem to think that destroying the reputation and livelihood of an innocent individual is acceptable "collateral damage." Yup, capital punishment for jaywalking. That'll stop 'em.
In a final step, Floyd presented extensive evidence and asked a U.S. Federal Court to acknowledge flaws in the CAS under applicable legal standards, suggesting a system seemingly dedicated only to achieving "convictions" and not necessarily based upon justice or accuracy. But alas, we will never know how this challenge would have played out. In itself, this may be a systemic travesty equivalent to that endured individually by Floyd.
In the end we may have only learned that bad things can happen to good people and that "truth" is only a relative concept. And in a witchhunt where the target is the Wicked Witch of the West, the victim may unacceptably be Glinda, the Good Witch of the South.
Larry, the loquacious, has been a frequent contributer and commenter here and at Rant. He's taken full advantage of the lack of length restrictions here in the blogosphere. A banking attorney, his calling card here was "Larry's Curb Your Antitipcation", a researched series considering various legal issues, anticipating things in the CAS appeal.
He originally wrote most of the following in comments at Rant, though this is revised here.
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I was sorry to hear about the end of the blog, but I guess it’s time.
My primary emotion is a certain kind of relief. Like most legal disputes, the Landis case dragged on past the point where it made any sense. Floyd deserves credit for finally putting an end to this chapter in his life. Sometimes it takes more courage to end a fight than to continue it.
I am grateful to Floyd Landis for providing us with a detailed examination of the anti-doping system at work. It is the closest such examination we’re ever likely to see. Whatever you may think of the outcome of the Landis case (and my thoughts on this are on the record), Landis and USADA funded millions of dollars of legal process, producing a considerable body of information, most of which is publicly available. This body of information is not complete (and no body of information is ever complete), but with enough time and background knowledge, anyone can dive into this information and reach a reasonably informed conclusion about the Landis case, and about the anti-doping effort in general.
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I come away from this experience convinced that the anti-doping effort is a failure. For the most part, the ADAs do not catch the dopers, nor do they deal fairly with the athletes they accuse of doping.
I think the main reason the ADAs are failing is that their science is not up to the job of catching dopers. In the Landis case, the media was fond of saying that the ADAs “found” artificial testosterone in Landis’ system, but this was not even close to the truth. Artificial testosterone is chemically identical to natural testosterone, and even on a subatomic level, you cannot tell the difference between a molecule of artificial testosterone and a molecule of natural testosterone. This is the way it works with the current crop of performance-enhancing drugs: they mimic natural human biochemistry, and they look for all the world like stuff that humans produce naturally. Finding performance-enhancing drugs in a human body is NOT like finding a plum in a pie, or a fly in a bowl of soup.
It turns out that the anti-doping tests rely heavily on statistical analysis. The tests look for a statistical anomaly – a measure of stuff found in an athlete’s system that is supposed to be so unusual that it could not have occurred by chance. Then the scientists try to prove that the measurement would NOT be unusual if the athlete doped. This is not a bad way to conduct science, so long as the scientists proceed carefully.
But as we’ve seen, the ADA scientists have not proceeded carefully. The measurements they took of the stuff in Landis’ system (even if these measurements were reliable and believable) turn out NOT to be so unusual after all. It turns out that the scientists have not done the testing they needed to do to determine what is usual and what is unusual … and worse, the scientists have drawn improper conclusions from the little testing they HAVE performed.
An optimist might conclude that the ADA’s science will improve in time, and that the anti-doping effort will improve along with the science. But I am not an optimist. It is obvious that performance-enhancing drugs are “improving”, becoming both more performance-enhancing and more difficult to detect. Even today, the use of most performance-enhancing drugs goes undetected, and many of these drugs are simply not detectable by any means. It may simply be the case that the science does not exist for the detection of some of these drugs. Moreover, even if there is a scientific means to detect the current drugs and the new drugs, there is no present ability to fund the development of this science. Contrast the budget of an outfit like USADA with the billions and billions of dollars spent each year for research and development of new drugs.
There is no realistic hope that sport can be made drug-free by urine testing, or by blood testing, or by any variety of scientific test. All that’s left for the anti-doping effort is to deter drug use by other means, by ramping up the punishment for athletes sanctioned for drug use (or alleged drug use), and by relying on traditional police efforts (wiretaps, informants and criminal penalties) to catch the dopers. The criminalization of anti-doping may have its advantages, but I have no interest in being a fan of any sport that relies too heavily on criminal law to stamp out cheating. It is not my idea of entertainment to watch cyclists being carted off in handcuffs. I’d rather tolerate the doping than watch the Tour transformed into some kind of multi-national “sting” operation.
We’ve talked about how the anti-doping system can be improved, but in the current state of the anti-doping movement, the only change being considered is how to get “tougher” on dopers. There will be no reforms to improve fairness to the accused athlete, or testing accuracy.
Where does this all lead? It is obvious that doping is an integral part of nearly every sport, as is anti-doping. Most athletes will get away with doping; a few athletes will be caught and will face different degrees of punishment, depending on the sport. A few athletes will be wrongly accused of doping, and will have no realistic avenue for self-defense, nor will we have any way to tell (short of an honest confession) which accused athletes are guilty and which are innocent. Those of us who are sports fans will have to put up with this situation as best we can. Those who choose to become athletes may have to dope in order to earn a living, and will have to live with the unfairness inherent in the anti-doping effort.
As for me, while I’ll probably never enjoy being a fan as much as I used to, I will take the attitude that every athlete is competing clean, except for a handful conclusively proven to have doped. If I’m unable to take that attitude, then I won’t watch, because what would be the point?
Take care and see you down the road.
Howard Jacobs, AthletesLawyer.com, actively represented Landis through the AAA hearing, and is well known for his defending many doping cases. Not wanting to dwell on specifics, he wanted to highlight some of the unique things about the atmosphere of the case:
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I think the Pepperdine hearing was a unique experience for those who were interested enough to follow a doping case from start to finish, even if the doping case at issue was atypical of most such cases. The fact that everything was made available - from the laboratory documents themselves, to the briefs and evidence, to the actual examination and cross-examination of witnesses, allowed those who were interested to draw their own informed opinions about the accuracy of the test results, the quality of the laboratory work, the fairness of the rules, and the fairness of the arbitration process itself.
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Not surprisingly, different people viewing the same evidence came to markedly different conclusions on each of these subjects. While I have my own opinions, they are based on the same evidence and the same testimony that has resulted in such exhaustive and detailed debate on your blog site and others. What I do hope is that this process revealed that drug testing and the anti-doping process is not as black and white as most people previously believed.
It is doubtful that such a public hearing will ever occur again, as it is doubtful that such unique circumstances will repeat themselves in the future.
The public leak of the "A" results, the online posting of the "B" results the moment they were reported, and the intense media scrutiny around a positive drug test of the Tour de France champion created a situation where a public hearing made sense. Those same factors also created a situation where the media actually cared enough to attend and cover the Pepperdine hearing.
Those factors are not likely to combine again.
In fact, if the rules regarding disclosure of positive test results are followed, no athlete will ever request a public hearing, as the test results and the existence of the hearing would remain confidential until after the arbitration decision is rendered.
Best regards,
Howard Jacobs
When we decided to roll up the tent at the end of the month, we thought it would be good to have some final thoughts on the matter, and not just from us.
To that end, we've contacted a number of people from all sides of the discussion, and asked them if they had anything they'd like to say. Some said yes, some said no, some hoped to participate but found they could not, and some didn't answer in time for us to include. We regret the submissions fall towards one side of the debate. We did try to send a balanced set of invitations, but response is beyond our control.
In order to entice those who didn't want to make too big a commitment, we suggested "a few paragraphs" of perhaps 500 words, and if struggling for particular topics, we offered as suggestions:
