That's All, Folks!
The site will remain live as long as blogger keeps it, and we'll try to get it archived into the archive.org wayback machine. Comments will also remain open as long as anyone wishes to use them.
News, Research and Commentary about the Floyd Landis doping allegations.
CLOSED 31-DEC-2008
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One of TBV's sons gives Landis a "thumbs up" at the Tour of California, February 21, 2006 -- before things got complicated.
full size image/full image
The site will remain live as long as blogger keeps it, and we'll try to get it archived into the archive.org wayback machine. Comments will also remain open as long as anyone wishes to use them.
Posted by DBrower at 12/31/2008 11:59:00 PM 11 comments
Hey, it's over.
We know what the official word has been about the Landis case -- and the Federal case that might have looked into how we got that word through arbitration has been settled on terms that let Landis race right away, and USADA not to have to explain.
We also have our own access to the testimony, arguments and exhibits, and our many long-running discussions about the case.
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A long time ago, we said the Landis case presented a Rorschach test on your world view, and nothing that has happened since has changed our feelings.
If one believes "they all dope", then you believe all tests that are reported as positive no matter how they were achieved, and any irregularities in reaching that conclusion are immaterial. You assume the conclusion, that the athlete did it, and all recedes into irrelevant technicality.
If one believes they don't all dope all the time, and that some positive tests may not reflect the truth, then you want to be able to look to find out what might have happened to cause an incorrect positive. When you can't find anything that suggests a false positive, then you accept it as a true positive along with the athlete's guilt or lack of diligence looking into friends or the contents of food or supplements.
The underlying Truth (independent of result) in the case of Floyd Landis seems like it comes in one of the following flavors.
Posted by DBrower at 12/31/2008 10:00:00 PM 9 comments
Starbuck, before Battlestar Galactica, coffee, and TBV, was Capt. Ahab's first mate on the Pequod.
What I will remember from my stint here, and what I think may be the point of all of "this" , is the people. The memories of all of the readers and contributors, all of those people who gave of their time and effort because they so strongly believed in a cause, in a just cause in their collective opinion, are what I'll take away from this experience.
This site was MY lifeline to the case which I was obsessed with myself, and I only got involved in this because I pestered TBV endlessly with articles to post which I had discovered in obscure corners of the web. He finally said, and I paraphrase, post them yourself it's easy. The rest is now history.
Yes, there were mornings when I cursed the fact that I had to get up at 4:30AM to start my never ending search for "anything Landis" because I had an early teaching day. In retrospect however most of the time it was great fun, and without slipping into the maudlin, it was a great honor to be able to do something no matter how commonplace to "help".
So now it's done, as it has to be. Floyd has finally been able to resume his life and so must all of us, it seems only fitting. I am of the opinion that some good comes from almost any situation, no matter how awful suffering through it may seem at the time. Only Floyd will know if any "good" came from his ordeal. I know for myself the "good" that came from "this" was the opportunity to meet so many wonderful people. And so I end this where I began it, with the people.
Good luck to everyone who I have had the pleasure to "meet" whether in person or on line; Dave, Sandra, Bill, Marc, Dan, all of the bloggers and contributors, to you all I wish good luck! Please stay in touch if you can. Finally, good luck to you Floyd. In all of your future pursuits no matter what the outcome may be on the field of play at least you know your case fostered a community of caring and dedicated people who stuck with you all the way. That's no small feat, friend. Now, get on your bike and kick some serious ass for ALL of us!!
Posted by DBrower at 12/31/2008 09:00:00 PM 4 comments
Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.
...
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee
Posted by DBrower at 12/31/2008 08:00:00 PM 3 comments
Marc is a retired American living in Paris who joined us at the time of the Ferret.
My involvement in this fascinating struggle began on THAT day in July 2006. I had recently moved to Paris, and my in-laws were visiting from Connecticut. They had a whole lot more energy than I did, so on that day I'd begged out of whatever sightseeing forced march they'd planned. I didn't do it in order to watch the TdF--Floyd's collapse had wiped away most of my interest--but as long as I was home and the Tour was on the TV, I mean, why not watch? When my in-laws returned, haggard, from their endurance trial (it was July, remember), I said to them, "Oh, you'll never believe what you missed."
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A few days later we were on a bridge over the Seine, watching the riders enter Paris before the finale, and saw Floyd ride in. Or, at least, we pretended we did. In fact, the peloton swept past us under the bridge so fast and so tightly bunched that I was sure we'd only seen a large breakaway group, with the main bunch to arrive a little later. Only by my brother-in-law's replaying of the movie he'd shot was I convinced that a hundred-plus riders had really gone by that quickly. Floyd? Well, he was there somewhere, I guess.
When the supposed positive test result was announced, I didn't believe it. I still don't. I didn't then, not because of any naive belief that bicyclists didn't use dope--I'm almost 64: I remember Jacques Anquetil refusing the urine test that would have made his hour record official; I remember Tom Simpson collapsing on Mt Ventoux; I remember the suddenly miraculously beefy Bernard Thevenet beating Eddy Merckx. The reason I didn't believe it then is that I thought that of all racers Floyd Landis was the least likely to have cheated, or to go on lying that he hadn't. I believed that then, and I still do.
In the weeks that followed, I tried to make scientific sense out of what might have happened. I participated for a while on DPF. "My, what an unpleasant bunch most of their regulars are," I thought. For a brief time there was Free Floyd, but then it stopped. And, all of a sudden, TbV appeared. And not long after that, it seems to me (memory has probably falsely telescoped time here), the first of the LNDD (as it was then called) documents from the Chatenay-Malabry lab surfaced, and I found there was a small contribution I could make. I had, at one point in my life, been a typesetter; at another, a paleontologist (someone who pores over old manuscripts--and I assure you, most medieval scribes had far worse handwriting than the techs at LNDD); I knew some French and Italian.
As documents surfaced in unlikely places I was as happy, as we say, as a pig in shit. There were results to be translated, documents to be compared to determine--by matching stationery, typefaces, signatures--which might be the source of another, which might be forged, which genuine, and so on. In the end, all these fascinating espionage-like games were superseded by the substantive debate over the test procedures and the reliability of their results. My skill set became increasingly irrelevant, and the word passed to the scientists, where I could not follow. i didn't regret that. That was as it should be. The final word should scientific--or should have been. Nor did I regret the time I'd spent on now insignificant issues. I had fun, and I felt I was part of a small but important movement. There are still unanswered questions about the provenance of those documents, questions whose answers would reveal a backstory of manipulation of data and the media. I'd like to know the story, but I know it's unlikely I ever will. Tant pis. C'est la guerre.
The greatest moment--in respect to drama, if not scholarship--was TbV's "live-blogging," as we now know to call it, of the USADA hearing. An unprecedented opening of what had been nothing more than a Star Chamber, as well as an astounding feat of old-fashioned journalism. I would like to believe that dB's and Bill Hue's cracking open of this closed legal world will have a lasting effect. It will surely have some; it will almost as surely not have as much as we would hope.
Along the way, I have met--sometimes face-to-face, most often not--some of the most interesting people I have ever known. I rarely have had as much fun on the internet as I did while all of us on this site were taking on giants, armed only with our curiosity, ingenuity, civility, and sense of justice. Thanks to everyone who made this wild ride possible: dB, first of all, and strbk, Bill Hue and Mr. Rant. and, of course, Mr. FL himself. I will miss this community, but somehow feel I'm bound to run into many of you again in some other fight for reality-based regulations in this sport we love. As the French say, "Courage. On les aura."
Posted by DBrower at 12/31/2008 07:00:00 PM 3 comments
Let me ask you.
Have you ever held a position in an argument past the point of comfort?
Have you ever defended a way of life you were on the verge of exhausting?
Have you ever given service to a creed you no longer utterly believed?
Have you ever told a girl that you loved her and felt the faint nausea of eroding conviction?
I have.
That's an interesting moment.
Guess you gotta be the way you are.
Guess you gotta see things your own way.
If everyone laughs when the joke's on you.
Don't take it so hard.
You can look on the light side.
Well a man was hit by a train.
And his body was startin to drain.
The doc said the man's half dead
I say he's half alive.
It's all in the way you look at it.
Posted by DBrower at 12/31/2008 06:00:00 PM 2 comments
Wolfram Meier-Augenstein testified for Landis at the AAA hearing. He is an expert in isotope ratio spectrometry, invented a number of the techniques, and is widely published. He also sent us a short, direct responses to the topics we suggested, and this longer piece, which we have reformatted. In the cover letter, he writes:
I have attached a slightly amended version of my "who watches the watchdogs" response to the original majority panel decision; a document I stand by to this day. It focuses on the real problem here, non-fit-for-purpose procedures incompetently applied by a lab with no adequate quality control and quality assurance procedures in place. If LNDD would be assessed by a proper accreditation body (such as UKAS) to either ISO-17025 or to GLP I should like to think they would fail.
“We call the length of time between injection and position of the target compound peak a retention time [tr]. On the other hand, the time difference between the peak of an unretained compound and a target compound is called the adjusted retention time [tr’]. We call the retention time of a compound that is not retained by the stationary phase the gas hold-up time [t0].
Posted by DBrower at 12/31/2008 01:00:00 PM
Labels: winnowing
Howdy, pardner!
Bing Crosby sings the theme song better than we can.
Quickrelease thinks there's something fishy.
Rant gives us a nice send off.
The Boulder Report gives a fond farewell. If we were pedantic sorts, we might complain about being called Southern Californian, which is like calling someone in Gunnison a front-ranger. But that would be unnappreciative: Lindsay has kept his own counsel and not been tied into a fixed position.
Team Ouch has a web site, and a twitter feed.
Is the team motto going to be, "Putting the hurt on"?Epic Carnival runs a year-ender by Gary Gaffney of Steroid Report, suggesting that the sport of cycling be euthanized, with Landis as but one example.
The Grauniad's Barnry Ronay makes Landis one of his Sports Villains of 2008, listing no other cyclist. That's staying power for someone who didn't even compete in the sport for the year.
Musings Blong Orrbésau thinks "TBV is a sorry excuse", but is talking about a different one.
Whew.
Finally, this tidbit from BobkeStrut, talking about the book Sneaker Wars.
Dick Pound is mentioned for his behind the scenes arm-twisting of National Olympic Committees (NOCs) in the early 1980s. Pound, tightly connected to IOC chair Juan Antonio Samaranch, made the rounds of the worlds NOCs in order to convince them to give up their marketing rights and sell them back to the IOC home office in Switzerland. The end result was that the Olympics could then have a single, global marketing campaign and the beneficiary of this was Adidass Horst Dassler. Surprise, surpriseDassler was a major force in getting Samaranch elected as IOC head, and as a payback Samaranch would contract Dasslers shadow sports marketing firm to handle the Olympic marketing campaign.
Posted by DBrower at 12/31/2008 03:00:00 AM 7 comments
What was a daily roundup became an "irregular report" of links with specific Landis interest, with brief comment. We avoided bashing, gushing, or gross stupidity. Unless it was funny.
We're still around for mail, but don't expect much or quick response. Thanks!
Comments are welcome, but may be edited/moderated or deleted for propriety and relevance. The decision of the judges is final. Your milage may vary, taxes and license additional.
"As always, Trust but Verify has the best coverage, if you want to delve into it." (Doucheblog)
"Floyd Landis: Blog on Landis Doping Allegations" (LA Times [better than nothing])
Total Poindexter Website Prize: to the fabulous geniuses over at trustbutverify, who not only are perhaps the most impassioned defenders of Floyd Landis' virtue beyond only the boy himself, but actually seem to understand the detailed scientific arguments they put out that the rest of us (well, me) are too stupid to even coherently summarize. Floyd, you better be innocent, or you owe these folks a *major* freakin' apology! (racejunkie)
"TalkingpointsBeforeVeracity " (Will@topix, our #1 fan)
"For another solid synopsis of the latest developments check out the always trenchant Trust But Verify site." (JohnnyBaseball)"For more in-depth daily coverage, go to trustbut.blogspot.com)." (Martin Dugard, author of Chasing Lance)
"Who does awards for blogs? I sense a nomination is in order." (Carlton Reid, of BikeBiz)
"Hands-down champion of full-and I mean full-coverage of this hearing is the blog Trust But Verify. You'll have to have excellent background knowledge of the issues, and wade through page after page of detail to get to anything interesting, but it's raw and unfiltered and all there. The guy who runs the site, a cycling fan from Northern California, began casually providing a clearinghouse for Landis case news nearly 10 months ago, and now he has the haunted look of a man whose life has been hijacked and wants it back. (Loren Mooney, co-author of Positively False, at Bicycling)"thank you for you balanced look at what is happening with floyd." (Michael Farrington. Green Mountain Cyclery, Ephata, PA.)
"This genuine Floyd basher would like to thank you for the hard work you put into this great resource." (Spinopsys Phil)
" Trust but Verify, the essential clearinghouse blog about the Landis case" (Mark McClusky of Wired magazine)
"if you want the latest news on the Floyd Landis case, Trust but Verify is the go-to site. The author is biased in favor of Floyd (so am I) but the reporting is neutral and comprehensive." (12string musings)"Great blog. You're tagged. " (BikingBis. Great, more work)
[More...]Thanks to Free Floyd for the idea, and Groklaw for some inspiration.
PK/Strbuk is similarly inclined.Bill Hue is a passionate about fairness and justice, and is relatively indifferent to Landis' guilt or innocence
Marc is an American living in Paris.
If someone who leans towards guilt would like to contribute directly, please inform us.
Sharing a diversity of viewpoints is the best way we know of to arrive at the truth.