Thursday Roundup

News
Eurotrash Thursday at PezCycling News notes FL's involvement in the David Witt Memorial Cycling Classic Sunday in San Diego....

This Sunday 17th, Floyd Landis alongside David Zabriskie and former Tour riders Bob Roll and Robbie Ventura will hit the track in San Diego. Alongside these male stars of our sport will be 2006 World Champion Sarah Hammer.

The Philadelphia Inquirer runs the AP story about the LNDD tightening computer security.

An article in sports daily l'Equipe claimed the hacker allegedly was part of Landis' defense team - but Bordry said yesterday he had no reason to believe that.

The Guardian runs a Reuters story noting Sports Quotes of 2006 with Floyd's quote being couched between Dick Pound's and Christian Prudhomme's.

"The image of your sport and right now your flagship event (the Tour de France) is in the toilet and you've got to do something about it or the risk is that your sport will be ignored by everybody, marginalised by others and it won't be sport any more" -- WADA chairman Dick Pound in July after nine riders were withdrawn on the eve of the race because they had been implicated in a Spanish doping investigation.

"I know a lot of people are going to think I'm guilty before I have a chance to defend myself. All I'm asking for is that I be given what everybody in America is accustomed to -- innocent until proven guilty, rather than the way cycling is normally treated" -- Tour winner Floyd Landis after it was announced that he had tested positive for testosterone during the race.

"For us, he cannot be the Tour de France winner any more" -- Tour director Christian Prudhomme in August. "Technically we cannot say he has lost his title but he has soiled the yellow jersey."

Pez reports that former Tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc has said,

in his opinion, an official Tour 2006 winner won’t be known until June next year, “We are condemned to live with this gap between the two times, the time of the result of the sport and the slower time of the time of the judicial process.”

The same Pez roundup talks about the Witt Memorial as well, and the breathless news that Basso is changing sunglasses.

Blogs
Rant considers the strict liability doctrine, and finds it Pythonesque, with Taco Bell joke.

Dugard notes various conspiracy theories, and is amazed that LNDD has admitted more errors -- not that it will help the case.

Potholes, Lancaster county cycling blog, says UK interview shows Landis having a blue Christmas. Earlier, they went into the spat with LeMond, quoting TBV, and the November hack.

SFTwin jumps off the fence and onto the "Free Floyd" side, with pointers to the LAT articles, the LandisCaseWiki, and TBV. But he still thinks he going to be found guilty because of the way the system is set up.

DMorr's Live Journal discusses the war on sports drugs and notes the Landis case with links to the LAT series.

The labs are sloppy (as the Floyd Landis doping documents show) but the assumption is that their testing is always flawless

Forums
Bicycling.com forum considers the LAT series, and is derailled by the insults and scorn by "SuperDave" (no relation), who appears to be in the "if accused, you are guilty" camp, and denigrates anyone who thinks otherwise.

At DPF, Tom Fine starts a thread considering probailities of guilt based on WADA statistics, with a pointer to a calculator application that lets you play with various assumptions. He gets around a 1 in 1500 liklihood of a false positive on the combination of tests used against Landis, meaning 1 in 1500 clean people tested would be falsely labelled positive. Note this is not the same thing as saying there is a 1 in 1500 chance he is innocent!

Late at DPF, Jellotrip reports on the CAS Decision on Johannes Eder that gave him a ban for using a Saline IV. This is the first case of this kind we have heard of, and it is troubling given some of the previous rumblings (and here, and way back on DPF) about IV use at the tour, including Landis' after S16. The gist of the decision seems to be that

• There wasn't medical supervision of the IV, the athlete did it on his own.
  
• There were no records kept.
• There was an inspection and paraphenalia found;
• The vagueness of the rule is unfortunate.

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