Closer Look at the "Typos" Give More Doubt

By Correspondent Marc, who reconstructed the Ferret pages.

Click on a page image to see the original PDF scan.

The recent news took me back to the original Ferret documents where I noticed some anomalies I had not before.

Up until now, I was not too sanguine about the "label typo" defense, but looking again at certain pages of the lab report has made me a believer, at least to the extent of saying that the mistakes are serious enough to throw significant doubt on how reliably we can associate the laboratory conclusions with Floyd Landis. The relevant pages of the report (they relate to the A sample, I believe) are USADA 008 (= Ferret p. 3) and USADA 009.

I had been puzzled by the newspaper reports (Le Monde, Figaro, etc.) saying that the labelling error had been in typing 994 474 instead of 995 474 (Floyd’s actual ID number) since, on USADA 008 I had earlier noticed an error substituting 995 475 for 995 474 (that is, an error in the sixth digit rather than the third digit). As it turns out, though, I think both errors were made (by different people), and together they muddy the water enough to make me queasy about relying on the lab results.

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It was looking at USADA 009 that showed me something I had not noticed before. On p. 009, the official in charge of "approving" the IRMS CIR--the isotope--results (this official and all others, including the "Caroline Loubet" who signed at least one of the letters in the packet Sam Abt received, can be identified from pages 019 and 020 of the report) repeats the results reported on p. 008 (the lab report). The original lab report is dated July 24; the approving report is dated July 25. No problem.

But the approving official clearly wrote the wrong ID number, originally writing 994 474, I think, and corrected it by writing a much larger 5 over the original wrong digit. (This, I think, must be the source of the newspaper reports of what the labelling error was.) Even this would scarcely be impressive, except that if you go back to the lab report, it looks very much as if the person "validating" the original test also wrote down the wrong ID number. It looks to me as if the correct number, 995 474, has been written on top of correction fluid whiting out an earlier error.

I found two aspects here significant.

1. The newspaper reports make it sound as if the error was a simple typing error, made while preparing the final report for distribution. But in fact the error was not a typing error at all. It was a handwritten error--a copying error from one source to another, probably--made not once but twice, by two different people.
2. The error was not made in some distant office during the final prettying up of the report for publication, it was made in the lab report of the isotopic test, then again in the immediate technical approval of the lab report. One explanation of these consistent errors so near the lab level would be that these errors are the result of a very early labelling error of the specimen or aliquot. But if that were the case, then I would say from a defense point of view that the association of the tested sample with Floyd is fatally flawed.

It is also possible that the approving officer put down the wrong number by copying the wrong number from the validating scientist's mistake on the lab report, realized it was wrong, corrected it by overwriting the 5 on his report, then went back and made the validating scientist correct the number on the lab report. But at this distance, how could you prove that was the sequence? Even if you asserted this were the case, very much the same doubt would remain about the reliability of the identification of the sample.

I don't think there can be an entirely innocent explanation for this double error. Somewhere--and I'd say quite early in the process--there was some sort of sloppiness. To these officials these are merely 6-digit numbers. (It is only supposed to be us who know that one of those 6-digit numbers is Floyd Landis.) Two officials make the same error in transcribing a particular specimen's number? Doesn't that suggest that the specimen came to them with the wrong number on it? For that matter, how would the second official know that the number was wrong, since it was merely a number? But such unanswered questions are the very heart of the Landis defense, and I am now convinced that there really are grounds for doubting the association of those results to Floyd.

But there were also some quite different questions that arose when I took my latest look at these documents.

The misidentification I had originally noticed (995 475 instead of 995 474) was committed by different person than the ones who made the error reported in the newspapers. You can see this different error on p. 008, just above the isotope results. It is clear to me that it is a simple error since this person has written Floyd's ID correctly in the lower portion of the form. (This is an "approving" official actually, and you can confirm that it is the same person who wrote both sections by the handwriting and the idiosyncratic way of doing dates). This official was in charge of approving the results of the gas spectrometer tests. In the lower part of the form, Floyd is reported as normal or negative for this battery of tests, though the official reports above that those test results are unreliable because there is evidence of masking.

Both notations by this official are dated July 25--that is to say, a day after the isotope tests. My new questions: if this is the A sample (before you had any reason to suspect wrongdoing), why would you do the isotopic test before you got the results back from the gas spectrometry tests? And why isn't there any discussion in the lab report as to why the initial normal/negative results were treated as suspect?

Couple the premature (or does it not seem to be, to others?) performance of the isotope tests with the inability of the IRMS officials to pin the right ID number on the sample, and you've got a situation murky enough to cast doubt on the reliabilty of the final results.

Marc

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