Monday, March 24, 2008

Monday Roundup

Today is scheduled to be the last day in Floyd Landis' appeal to the CAS which has been taking place in New York City since March 19. News from the proceeding has been hen's teeth scarce. Perhaps after it has ended some word will come out on what has transpired.


News
AFP/Google (same thing at Velonews) reports the Landis v. USADA appeal hearing is closed, with final submissions due by April 18. A decision is due/expected in June. If the first hearing is typical, the submissions will be proposed findings of fact and law; we would not anticipate new evidence or arguments not presented before in the briefs or raised at the hearing.

The AP report adds,
Floyd Landis’ hearing in front of the Court of Arbitration for Sport ended Monday after 35 hours of testimony spanning five days that included 14 witnesses and written testimony from 10 others.

That's a hard slog, so there must not have been many breaks. There's probably a lot of people just starting to sleep again after a long period of preparation.

Also this hint we won't be getting much public information until the award is made:
Landis' attorney, Maurice Suh, said he would not have any comment on the hearing until after the decision was released.

Rats, but probably a sensible choice. We may go sporadic in the interim, riding more and typing less. Don't say you weren't warned.

CAS press release is also available, saying very little.


ESPN's Bonnie Ford has a long piece on Slipstream at the Tour of California, with a sidebar about the ACE divorce. First the Slipstream:
"When I first started riding bikes I could climb fairly well," [Zabriskie] says that night. "Then somewhere along the way, something happened, and I lost it a little bit. Last off-season in '07, I kind of asked myself the question, what happened, what's wrong. I changed my position quite a bit, moved the seat back. I went to a bike shop, got all measured up. I think that helped get some of what I used to have back."

OK, that gives TBV an idea, move the seat back. Check. Let's hope it's good for 20 watts. On the ACE Split:

ACE co-founders Strauss and Paul Scott parted ways earlier this month after ACE's management decided that Scott's involvement in the legal defense of dethroned 2006 Tour de France champion Floyd Landis, whose appeal is being heard by the Court of Arbitration for Sport this week, posed a professional conflict and public relations problem.

[...]

Scott has founded his own company, Scott Analytics, and is developing a program similar to ACE's for the Rock Racing team. Maurice Suh, Landis' chief defense lawyer, is also a legal adviser for Rock Racing.

Strauss developed the network of labs and independent contractors who do the blood and urine collections wherever the team is racing. Scott, a research chemist who formerly worked at the World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited lab at UCLA, designed the templates used for analyzing the samples. Both are amateur competitive cyclists and devised the idea for ACE on the way to a race together in 2006.

Slipstream owner Doug Ellis and High Road owner Bob Stapleton said they did not pressure Scott to leave and found nothing improper about his role in the Landis case. Both expressed hope that ACE would hire someone with proven credentials in the field. "Part of our agreement with ACE was that they would beef up their scientific side,'' Stapleton said.


With the Landis appeal basically over, Scott can focus on running new test programs. We remain perplexed about the imagined conflict of interest, unless having a view that differs from USADA, WADA and/or the UCI is perceived as prima-facially conflicted with The Program. It's pretty hard to say that Scott, who has spent most of his professional career in anti-doping, is pro-doper. Evidentally being pro-good science and pro-good lab practice makes enemies, and ACE didn't want any enemies right now. They'll get in trouble soon enough should one of their monitored athletes turn up a positive, and there was no need to start early.

PodCasts
The Spokesman speak of the Landis appeal, Van Impe's drug test, and the Rock/Cipo affaire.

Blogs
Rant relates an old article written in 2000 on t/e ratio testing to a new one posted here on Friday. He feels that those in charge should note the genetic variants cited in the piece and act accordingly.

Michael Gacki
was wide awake and decided to do some writing, most of which concerned what are to him meaningful song lyrics. He also made note of an old friend who just happens to be Michael Henson, Floyd Landis' spokesman from 2006-2007. Henson, and another friend, apparently wanted to write a book of people's stories detailing what they experienced as a result of the tragic events of 9/11/01. Sounds like a good idea.

Epic Carnival has a roundup by Gary Gaffney in the "'Roid Report". He points to a study that suggests HGH has synergestic affects with other things for athletic performance; this extends the "nothing seen by itself" report of a few weeks back.

He goes on to "cops on roids" to keep up with the thugs on the streets, and hopes for good testing. We wonder about $500 a test cost. On the other hand, it might result in industrialized cost scaling, and uniform standards, and a much larger sample base for statistical analysis.

Then, there's a throw-away that 95% of NFL players are on PEDs, and a riff on the Billiards player who was found positive for an EPO masking agent, with the typical talk of EPO, but nothing about the masking agent. That is, we don't know if there was any EPO involved at all, really.

(A comment says: "The truth about the Billiard guy is: He was tested positive for Hydrochlorothiazid, a diuretic which was included in his anti hypertensive medication which he has for medical reasons. His faul was that he missed to get an therapeutic use exemption which would have been no problem. That's all. There is nothing coming close to EPO doping. " Shock: overreaction by the to sensationalized selective release of information by the Alphabets involved. We haven't seen a quotable cite for this detail yet.)

He offers a new take on the bills for the Landis case, now in appeal, saying the French should be thanking the US taxpayers for footing the freight to prosecute the case .

9 comments:

snake said...

More on the Tammy Thomas case from the SF Chronicle:

highwheel said...

I like the exaggerating media reports. The truth about the Billard guy is: He was tested positive for Hydrochlorothiazid, a diuretic which was included in his anti hypertensiv medication which he has for medical reasons. His faul was that he missed to get an therapeutic use examption which would have been no problem. That's all. There is nothing coming close to EPO doping.

N.B.O.L. said...

VeloNews is reporting that the Landis CAS hearing has closed. Results expected in June.

Unknown said...

TBV,

"we would not anticipate new evidence or arguments."

Not even the different column on the IRMS? If this is true, it's a pretty big deal scientifically.

Unknown said...

TbV, do you have anything to say about the different columns?

syi

Unknown said...

Very small additional tidbit in the AP report: "Floyd Landis’ hearing in front of the Court of Arbitration for Sport ended Monday after 35 hours of testimony spanning five days that included 14 witnesses and written testimony from 10 others."

syi

DBrower said...

Let me rephrase: "new arguments not raised in the pre-trial briefs and explored in the hearing".

I expect the column issue was explored in depth. What I'm saying is that neither party will get to bring up new things not previously argued, like for instance, whether the post-S16 IV was a "prohibited method" violation.

TBV

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

This is interesting. The most serious crime in our society might have a false conviction rate of nine percent. Nice.

For me, the money line is near the end:

People who maintain their innocence are more likely to be innocent.

Who woulda thunk?

syi