Straight to CAS (Correspondence, Part 3)

This is Part 3 of our series on correspondance between Landis and USADA. In Part 1, we heard USADA deny further document production. In Part 2, we learned what Landis had been asking for.

On 29-Sep, having received the ADRB report, the Landis side sent a FAX exercising their rights to a public hearing. Before planning for that got very far along, USADA had another idea, going direct to CAS, bypassing the initial stage completely...

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Click on the page images to see the complete original document.

Landis' 29-Sep request for hearing is reproduced at right. This was announced and widely reported to be the first use any athlete had made of the provision for an open hearing. No matter what, this was going to be breaking new ground for the USADA side.

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Sometime in October, USADA verbally raised the possibility of avoiding the AAA hearing and going straight to a CAS hearing to expedite the resolution. Landis agreed to explore this.

On 16-Oct, coincident with the request for documents and interrogetories covered in Part 2, Landis sent a note describing the conditions under which he would agree to go directly to CAS, reproduced at left. They were, in essence:

1. Use USADA and AAA rules;
2. CAS rules lower in precedence than #1;
3. Public hearing with CAS;
4. Decision binding and final.
5. Terms to be part of written agreement;

Which does not seem to be an outrageous list. If the objective of the proposal was to eliminate the delay and expense of the step, then this plan would have accomplished that goal.

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On 23-Oct, USADA sent a letter to AAA saying they were pursuing this option. The main difference was going to be changing the pool for the third arbitrator to be the full CAS pool, and not just the North American list.

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On 1-Nov, USADA sent a followup letter to AAA saying this wasn't going to happen, that things should proceed for an AAA hearing.

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What happened? On to Part 4 ...

Back to Part 2

All documents presented in this series can be found in the collection at archive.org.

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