Friday Roundup

News
Le Monde [FIXED LINK] talks about the case, here in machine translation (Marc is disconnected for the holidays). They say there's no resolution of the case, that Landis has gotten documents on file in the French case. They're frustrated by the case, and compare to Landaluze which is still not resolved. Then they change gears and talk about adoption of the WADA convention by UNESCO, which has some implications that are not clear to me, as the US has not signed on.

TAF notes in a comment there is sort of an acknowledgment that the hack/whistleblower/rat documents are authentic. My possibly improved translation of the relevant part of the sidebar:

[The emails] were taken following a data-processing intrusion. According to a source close to the investigation, the “hacker” would have used a Trojan horse and spent one month on the servers of the LNDD in order to get the supposed documents to call into question the reliability of the laboratory.

In which the "supposed" makes no sense at all, unless they are real; if they were fakes, there would be no need to get into the servers, you could just make them up. Further, there has been no denial by anyone, either LNDD, Bordry, or the recipient Federations and Agencies of the authenticity of the content. A reason for this might be that if they deny it, and are then shown to be lying, which would be bad; but they don't want to admit they are real either, so no comment is best. Could a motion to authenticate them to the AAA arbitration panel have any traction? Then we'd get to see what was "forged" and what was "taken out of context", as they were described originally. No one has yet released copies of these documents for examination, so we don't really know what the fuss is about yet. Go over to Rant's discussion of last week for what nitty-gritty we do know.

Procycling's latest news includes a blurb about the LNDD upgrade in computer security and a very odd mention of the David Witt Memorial cycling event scheduled for Sunday. They talk extensively about Dave Zabriskie's attempt that day to set a mark for an American hour record. He'll succeed unless he falls off the bike, because there is no existing record. Procycling doesn't mention that it's the David Witt Memorial, or Landis, Hammer, Roll, Ventura...

"A couple of months back some fire fighters perished in a forest fire in the Los Angeles area," he said. "This time record is part of a big event to raise money for their families.

”It's not so much a cycling event, but more an event to raise some money and the audience has been informed of the fact that I've just flown in from South Africa the day before, so regardless of my efforts they will be cheering, I hope." Apart from Zabriskie, a couple of athletes and some other celebrities will also be participating.

Daily Peloton started out running the exact same story, which was the CSC press release, then updated it with more event info. (We've been flogging it all week.)


VeloNews talks about camp for Team BMC in Mill Valley CA, owned by Andy Rihs (Phonak), and featuring Alexandre Moos. Also on hand was Jim Ochowicz. This is a "Continental" team; don't know what their schedule is.

Blogs
Rant offers some sample letters to send to representatives, prefaced with with his sense of the realistic goals. He had such a good time, he wrote another one. Variety is good.

The Monroe News blog talks about their top 10 stories of the year, and Landis doesn't make the list.

Spinopsys, an Ozzie, rates McEwen as his #1 high for the year, and the Landis affair as #1 low, which he does without belaboring guilt.

Dugard has no Landis news, but does talk about the song Mrs. TBV is playing a lot in the car lately. Baby!

Forums
There is some discussion at DPF of a paper in Blood Journal and subsequent letters concerning the reliability of the EPO tests. The interesting bit to Landis followers is the part in the letters about different labs having different positivity criteria, contradicting what Catlin says.


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