Friday, September 22, 2006

There you go - How Landis was told


This is the one page FAX Landis got telling him the Review Board had rejected his request to dismiss the case, from an emailer. See if you can tell from this if they really read the filing Landis made. If this is page 007 of 009 on someone's FAX machine, what were the other pages about? Also note it's a letter dated Sep 15 that is about a conference they held on Sep 18th. That's crossing t's and dotting i's for you! It looks like Landis got it on the 19th, and absent anything in the interim, they put it out on Friday the 22nd.

Update: source emailer says the other pages of the FAX were cover pages and procedural boilerplate.
Let's look at the timing again. Sep 15th was the Friday, and the 18th was the Monday, and it looks like it was sent to USADA at 14:43 on the 18th. The USADA did what they do to ratify it, and sent it to Landis at 16:49 on Tuesday the 19th. Then there was silence until late in the day on the 22nd, when Landis released it, appearing first in an AFP report.

It looks like the ADRB got to it within a business week, and USADA turned their part around in about a day. No reason to complain there, I don't think.

Then it appears Landis waited for a few days for some other shoe to drop, and when it didn't, made an announcement on Friday afternoon. This ended the pope watch, and got it into a news cycle favorable to them. You could complain that Landis should have announced it Tuesday evening, or Wednesday if they'd been as prepared as they claim for this outcome. Doing so might have been more consistent with their claims of wanting "open, transparent process."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The fact that the letter is dated 9/15 but refers to a teleconference could be they pre-prepared (if that is a word) the letter before hand. Could be the result was already determined, could also be there is/was a second one prepared in case they ruled in Landis' favor.

DBrower said...

Fair point. I'm sure the Landis side had a happier release prepared as well. Still, don't you think they might have figured out how to correct the date on the release to look right? It seems suggestive of a certain general sloppiness of approach.

TBV

Anonymous said...

General sloppiness seems to plague this case from the start.