Irregular Report 27

Here and There
Rant presents a discussion about Floyd Landis' recently filed Federal lawsuit between Judge Bill Hue and "DirtRoadie". A must read for those into the case.

Basil Chesterton Sinclair got Greg LeMond to consent to an interview for his blog after LeMond's "appearance" at an Interbike Lance Armsrong news conference last week. The uncut transcript is posted with some comment about a "fearful" Floyd Landis:

Even Floyd Landis, after what he did to me last year, I have empathy for him. I don’t believe he’s a bad person. I feel he acted out of fear, most likely threatened like a lot of people have been and had to go one way. You could tell just by his actions. And you read that in Tyler Hamilton’s deal

Racejunkie writes about a bunch of recent cycling stories that have little to do with actual competition, but lots to do with court action and doping cases, past and present.

WADAwatch is back from his summer hiatus and writing about the ASO among other tidbits. Welcome back Ww.

The Ig Nobel prizes are out, and

the medicine prize was awarded to a team at Duke University in North Carolina who showed that high-priced placebos work better than cheap fake medicine.

This is known by all the doping witch-doctors. Always choose brand name Obecalp™!

At rec.bicycles.racing, one of Landis' harshest critics seems to have had a minor paradigm shift, after having run down the federal suit since hearing of its filing:

Okay, I read Floyd's filing. These are my conclusions:

1.) U.S. federal court probably does have jurisdiction.

2.) U.S. federal court still might not want get involved though because it would involve nullifying the contract Floyd signed with the UCI that specifically waived any right to appeal (Chapter 14, Rules 289-291) and if they were to appeal, it should still probably be done in Switzerland, where BOTH PARTIES agreed it would be done.

3.) CAS is an extremely corrupt system and the lawyers in the CAS pool are basically white-collar criminals running their own court syndicate where one hand washes the other. It's a pay-to-play system. But I already knew that years ago because the IOC controls CAS and WADA and it's only about protecting their money interests and TV image with sponsors. It has little to do with justice for athletes.

The sections in the brief that show almost outright corruption and egregious incompetency and Rules violations are on pages 24-26, 32-33, and 61-64.

4.) Floyd and his fellow cyclists are still idiots for knowing all this and still agreeing to take out a license with the UCI and thereby agreeing to be subjected to CAS oversight. So I will not be donating to his defense in the near future since he keeps going back to shack up with his abuser - the UCI and CAS.

5. Cyclists should unionize or they will continue to get beatings like some kind of trailer park meth-head.

Velo Vortmax writes about the return of Lance and about Floyd Landis' lawsuit filed in the federal courts last week. VV has some good questions and also wonders just what would happen if the federal courts somehow ruled in Floyd's favor.