Two err.. Three for the Fourth

Published July 4th, 2008 in Andrei Kashechkin, Doping in Sports and Tour de France. 4 Comments

Lab B, Wherefore Art Thou Lab B?

Yesterday, the identity of the “Laboratory B” where Danish researchers sent samples for their study of EPO testing effectiveness came to light. Apparently, the lab in question is the German anti-doping lab in Cologne. And the lab’s directory is none too pleased with having been a subject of the researcher’s experimentation. In fact, he wants the article detailing their study and its findings withdrawn from the Journal of Applied Physiology.

As reported by Laura Weislo at CyclingNews.com yesterday, lab director Dr. Wilhelm Schänzer claims the study is “scientifically unacceptable” and says that the study’s results are factually wrong, demonstrate great ignorance regarding the criticised method and the operations of doping control laboratories, and are based on a serious lack of careful examination of provided data.”

Weislo’s article goes on to say:

Schänzer emphatically denied the accuracy of the study, saying that the Danish scientists misrepresented why the samples were being sent to “Laboratory B”. In a letter to the editors of the JAP, he explained that the lab was not aware that the results would be published, and was under the impression that the samples did not come from athletes. The results, he said, “were not obtained by means of the accredited method for urine analysis,” which means they were not subjected to the normal procedure for anti-doping controls.

To quote Mandy Rice-Davies, “Well, he would [say that], wouldn’t he?”

Here’s the thing. If the Danish researchers had told Dr. Schänzer and the lab that the samples were for a study to determine whether or not the urine EPO test does what it is said to do, the results would have been affected by that knowledge. This is not to cast aspersions on Dr. Schänzer or his lab’s employees. And it’s certainly not meant to cast into doubt the lab’s overall competence. It’s human nature to be much more careful and much more thorough, in a situation like that. In fact, this is a variant of a well-known phenomenon called “experimenter bias.”

The point of the Danish study was to see what happens under reasonably normal circumstances. To do that, the lab should receive samples just as they would in a regular case. In other words, they shouldn’t be told what the sample contains or why it’s being tested. They merely need to be told that a certain test should b run.

The study’s results, for those who don’t remember, suggest that there is something about the urine EPO test that isn’t quite right. That different labs, given the same samples will come up with different results. A good test should produce the same results regardless of the lab where it’s performed — as long as the staff are properly trained in how to perform such a test.

Going back to Dr. Schänzer’s argument that they should have been told what the samples were being used for. In being told that the results would be used for a study on the effectiveness of the EPO test, you can be pretty sure that the lab would have scored much better than it did. They would have taken the time and been very thorough in how they did the work. And, most likely, the results would have matched what the samples contained much more closely. In other words, the lab would have tested clean, so to speak.

As my wife pointed out when we spoke about this a short while ago, this is a double-standard. If the labs should be told when they’re going to be tested and evaluated, and what tests are going to be evaluated, shouldn’t athletes also be told ahead of time when they’re going to be tested, and what they’re going to be tested for, too? The Danish study was a bit like what the athletes are subjected to, only turned around on the anti-doping labs, themselves. What do you bet if athletes knew ahead of time when they were going to be tested and what specific tests would be run that there would be many fewer positive doping tests? I’m just asking…

The Curious Case of Andrei Kashechkin

Last year, shortly after the Astana cycling team withdrew from the Tour de France (following Alexander Vinokourov’s positive test for homologous blood doping), fellow Astana rider Andrei Kashechkin also tested positive for the same thing. Kashechkin was tested late at night while on vacation in Turkey, and the results were announced in the media about a week or so later.

His story has not gotten a lot of press lately, and much of his side of the story hasn’t been published at all. Until now. John Wilcockson of VeloNews has a two-part article (part 1 and part 2) about the Kazakh rider’s trials and tribulations in their pre-Tour coverage. It’s a fascinating story, which at times makes Inspector Clouseau look like Albert Einstein compared to the people charged with anti-doping testing and results management.

While the articles are clearly Kashechkin’s side of the story, and have little commentary about what happened from the other side, they paint a disturbing picture of how the Kazakh rider has been treated for the last 10 months. Among other things, Kashechkin says that:

  • The blood sample wasn’t properly handled by the vampires who came and tested him in Turkey (they didn’t properly transport it in a cool, refrigerated container)
  • The B sample should have been tested within three days after the A sample result, but instead was tested 3 weeks later
  • He had one blood test done after the A sample result was announced which refuted the test’s result, but attempts to get additional tests performed within the 3 months after the result (the time in which he would have still been positive, had he been blood doping) were rebuffed once the labs found out who he was
  • He has never received the test results (a/k/a the lab documentation package required to be delivered to an accused athlete)
  • The UCI failed to cooperate with the Kazakh cycling federation when they looked into the matter initially (and because of the UCI’s lack of cooperation, the Kazakh federation declared him eligible to race), but now, under pressure from the UCI, the national federation is trying to change their ruling in his case to a two-year ban

Whatever the truth of the matter is — whether Kashechkin tested positive and whether he doped — there is no excuse for the way he claims to have been treated. He should certainly have received the lab documentation package in a timely manner, and the UCI should certainly have cooperated with the Kazakh cycling federation in their investigation of the case. If even half of what Kashechkin says is true, it casts the UCI and the anti-doping system in a very bad light.

Kashechkin sums up his situation this way:

“Well, I am for the system, and I am for the normal anti-doping controls, but with the system it is very difficult to prove there’s been an error, and everybody makes mistakes, right?”

Ain’t that the truth. And, in his case, it’s hard to know who made the error — the anti-doping labs and the UCI, or the rider who’s sitting on the sidelines right now, waiting to get back in the game.

OK, A Third Item…

Tomorrow the Grande (de)Boucle (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun) begins. That’s right, it’s Tour de France time, and with it, the inevitable speculation on … who’s going to win? And who’s going to win the race to become the first doping violation during the event? I won’t hazard a guess on who the eventual winner will be (Evans, Valverde, Menchov, ??) And I certainly won’t hazard a guess on who will with that other competition.

Despite the bad taste that certain stories have left, the Tour is a spectacle unto itself. I’m not sure how much of the coverage on Versus that I’ll watch. Johan Bruyneel’s commentary during the last week should be pretty interesting to hear, however.

Floyd Landis (who is not forgotten) said this about the Tour earlier this week in an article written by Bonnie D. Ford on ESPN.com:

“I hope people who are interested in bicycle racing forget about me by the end of the week and turn on the television and watch the Tour, and give those guys the respect and attention they deserve.”

Well, we won’t forget about you Mistah Floyd, but we will be taking the time to follow the Tour over the next few weeks. With no returning champion, the race should be very interesting and wide open, indeed. Check out Peloton Jim’s prognostications on Endless Cycle. He gives a good run-down of who he’s looking for to win the Tour.

———-

And now, it’s time to go ride a bike. Have a happy holiday everyone.

500

Published July 2nd, 2008 in Doping in Sports, Floyd Landis and Michael Rasmussen. 31 Comments

When I started this blog, I never really imagined how long it would go, or how many posts I would write. This is post number 500. Hard to believe I’ve Rant™ed on for so long. Anyway, on to today’s topics.

Coming Home to Roost

With all the hubbub over the Floyd Landis decision, it would be easy to miss other doings in the world of doping. But in what seems to be the traditional scandal week that precedes the Tour de France, there is also news of the curious character known as “Kyllingen” or “The Chicken”. Michael Rasmussen, the Danish cyclist who woulda/coulda/shoulda won last year’s Tour de France has gotten both bad and good news in the last couple of days. Yesterday, he was handed a two-year suspension by the Monaco Cycling Federation for a series of missed doping tests in the runup to the 2007 Tour.

Today, he was awarded €665,000 (about $1 million US) by a Dutch court in its decision on a lawsuit Rasmussen filed against Rabobank for wrongful termination of his contract. He had sought €5.4 million ($8.5 million US). The judge’s award included the bonus that the Danish climbing specialist would have received had he completed and won last year’s Tour. However, the ruling also said that Rabobank was right to sack Rasmussen. As the Telegraph reports:

While Utrecht civil judge J Sap said Rabobank was entitled to fire Rasmussen for lying to cycling authorities but also ruled that they should have given him two months’ notice because Rabobank “could have or should have” known weeks before firing him that he had lied about his whereabouts.

The moral of the story: It’s bad to evade the vampires. If you do, you’re gonna pay. But if your team knows you’re hiding out elsewhere avoiding them, and they humiliate you and publicly fire you after a scandal blows up, they bear some responsibility, too.

Rasmussen’s ban runs until July 25, 2009. Given his current age, and the UCI ProTour ethics rules that will leave him ineligible to ride for a ProTour team until the 2011 Tour de France is more or less over, it’s unlikely that Rasmussen will ever be seen competing in the Grand Boucle ever again.

Those are the chickens coming home to roost during the now annual pre-Tour scandal week (which is a tradition I’d like to see discontinued).

Rules, Standards and the Law of Unintended Consequences

There’s something lurking in the Landis decision that I suspect the CAS panel didn’t mean to write (or copy and paste). Or if they did, they didn’t think it through. Because the precedent they’ve set has some far-reaching consequences and implications that have a huge impact on anti-doping enforcement in the future.

What’s caught my eye in the panel’s ruling? It’s the idea that the anti-doping labs don’t have to comply with written standards, they merely have to comply with the “concepts” in those written standards. Here’s what the panel wrote:

175. According to the Respondent, the ISL requires laboratories to comply with “concepts” found in the WADA Technical Documents on chain of custody.

…

178. The Panel finds that there was no ISL violation:
• The ISL requires laboratories to comply with “concepts” found in the WADA Technical Documents on chain of custody, not literal compliance with the WADA Technical Documents on chain of custody. In addition, pursuant to the WADA Technical Document on chain of custody, testimony may be used to establish chain of custody;

• The Respondent’s evidence and witness statements established that it complied with the “concepts” found in the WADA Technical Documents, such as LNDD 2014, 2015 (the laboratory plan);69 USADA0024 (transfer of bottles from one operator to another).70 The Tribunal accepts the evidence of Dr. Ayotte71 that there is no requirement of a single document, and that so long as each staff person in possession of the bottle is identified, a chain of custody is established;72

…

215. The Panel considers that there is insufficient evidence to establish an ISL violation:
• Pursuant to WADA TD2003LCOC (chain of custody):
“Any forensic corrections that need to be done to the document should be done with a single line though and the change should be initialed and dated by the individual making the change. No white out or erasure that obliterates the original entry is acceptable. “
• The ISL generally requires laboratories to comply with “concepts” found in the WADA Technical Documents on chain of custody, not literal compliance with the WADA Technical Documents on chain of custody;
• The corrections in the document do not obscure or confuse the identity of the sample nor cover up laboratory errors.

For those who need a refresher, ISL stands for International Standards for Laboratories. Standards are basically written rules that say, “this is the way it’s done.” True?

Imagine, if ISO 17025 (which is one of the accreditations an anti-doping lab must have) says, “On the subject of chain of custody, thou shalt keep exact records and thou shalt do it thusly …”, and if an ISO auditor discovers that a lab doesn’t keep records in the required manner, and in fact the lab is a bit lackadaisical about keeping chain of custody records at all, the lab could lose its ISO accreditation. A defense of “well, we followed the ‘concepts’ in the ISO standard” probably isn’t going to wash if the chain of custody isn’t documented properly. That’s a standard.

Now, on the idea of following the concepts in the standard. That’s tricky, who’s to judge that a lab followed the “concepts” correctly? You’re getting into some rather murky waters when the “rules” become subject to this kind of interpretation. How does one judge whether or not the lab has understood a document’s “concepts”?

In my career, such as it is, I’ve developed training programs for various corporations (among other things). When doing so, you write objectives for what will be presented. An objective that says “the learner will understand the concept of chain of custody” is a bad objective. Why? Because it’s difficult to measure a person’s understanding. Now, an objective that says, “the student will demonstrate mastery of chain of custody record keeping by creating and maintaining correct records as specified in technical document ABC” that’s something that can be measured. You have the requirements in the technical document. You have the records maintained by the student. Comparing the student’s efforts to the standards shows whether or not he or she can perform the task.

Same is true for evaluating a lab’s work. You can’t effectively measure their understanding of a concept. But you can measure how well they’ve followed a specific set of requirements. That’s what the ISL is. A specific set of requirements. Not a set of concepts to be implemented in whatever manner or fashion each individual lab sees fit.

Let’s step back a bit. Remember that WADA was formed, in part, because anti-doping practices around the world were not standardized. Some countries (East Germany before reunification) even used their anti-doping programs as research institutes to determine how to best avoid testing positive for drugs. Others (the US, for one) were said to be too lenient in their application of anti-doping rules. Each sports federation had its own sets of rules and standards and generally speaking, the state of anti-doping enforcement via the IOC and its affiliates was a huge mess, as illustrated by the number of scandals that rocked the sports world in 1998 (Festina was just one of many).

What’s WADA’s main reason for being? To standardize (they use the word “harmonise”) anti-doping practices throughout the sporting world. How do they do that? By establishing the WADA code, the ISL and setting up rules/standards on how the various tests are supposed to be carried out and interpreted.

So, in the example above, the lab might be complying with the “concepts” of the standard while not actually complying with the standard. Imagine technicians who keep track of the chain of custody by making notes on scraps of paper that they then put together when needed to show what’s been where when. Yes, they keep records. No, it’s not as thoroughly or properly documented as the standard requires, and it’s not kept in a single, organized, contemporaneous log or document. And, as an added bonus, some of those scraps of paper could be lost, meaning that some of the chain of custody records have vanished. No problem, as long as someone remembers where things were. Right? Wrong. Our memories aren’t always as accurate as we think they are. According to the panel’s ruling, if a lab kept records on scraps of paper, that would be OK, because they were following the concepts of the rule.

So what’s the big deal, you ask. It’s only chain of custody, it’s not as if this ruling applies to other standards. Well, the camel has gotten its nose in the tent in this case. It’s only a matter of time before the whole camel is inside. It’s not so far a stretch for a future ADA lawyer to argue that, well, the rules in a technical document covering a particular test aren’t to be followed literally, it’s OK to merely follow the “concepts.” Having set the precedent, it’s really only a matter of time before such an argument is used again — assuming that anyone fights a future case, which isn’t a given.

The Landis ruling is a clear shot across the bow for any athlete who may challenge a positive doping test. Follow this route, the panel is saying, and it will not only cost you your own attorneys fees, you’ll be paying a penalty to the anti-doping agency, too, for the “privilege” of being beaten.

Ultimately, this part of the panel’s ruling appears to mean that the rules aren’t rules, they’re merely suggestions. Which means that there are no standards, really. Which brings us all the way back to the situation in 1998. There are no consistent standards, no consistent rules, and anti-doping cases can and will be decided based on differing interpretations of what the “standards” for say, declaring a positive test, are. Or differing interpretations on how to actually perform a test. There is, and will be, no uniformity in how anti-doping practices and prosecutions are carried out throughout the world. We are right back to where we started.

It’s funny, in a dark humor sort of way. Richard Young, in representing USADA and WADA, has completely decimated WADA’s main reason for being. He’s also destroyed any requirement that labs follow specific, written rules and standards. In effect, they no longer exist. An ADA attorney merely needs to convince an arbitration panel that the labs followed the “concepts” or “spirit” or “idea behind” whatever the supposed rules and standards are. Actual adherence to the standards, however, is optional.

Or put another way, with this ruling, the CAS is saying that WADA has utterly failed in its mission to provide clear, uniform practices throughout the anti-doping world. Ironic, given the whole reason WADA came into existence in the first place.

Somehow, I don’t think that the CAS panel considered the implications of allowing labs to comply with the “concepts” rather than the written rules. In successfully arguing that only the “concepts” matter, Richard Young, in his own tenacious pursuit of victory, may have sacrificed WADA’s main mission in order to bring down one athlete.

Who Owes Whom?

Published July 1st, 2008 in Doping in Sports, Floyd Landis, Oscar Pereiro and Tour de France. 21 Comments

Over at the Huffington Post, Dave Hollander asks an interesting question:

It’s been two bloody years. I’d like to know: What does Floyd Landis owe Oscar Pereiro?

The answer is: Absolutely nothing. I know that sounds harsh, but it’s true. Hollander gives a bit of the history of stages 16 and 17 of the Tour in his tome, correctly noting that Pereiro was in contention at the time, and had Landis not come back from the dead, Pereiro would have been in yellow, and presumably would have won the race.

Not so fast. Rewind a few stages prior to Floyd’s famous meltdown. At the beginning of stage 13, Oscar Pereiro was sitting in 40-something-th place. Half an hour down from the leaders. He’d had a bad day earlier in the race, and had fallen far, far out of contention. And then, on stage 13, Pereiro and several other riders got into a breakaway. One that gained about half an hour on the pack containing all the riders in contention, vaulting Pereiro, who was basically roadkill before the day began, into the yellow jersey.

Letting the breakaway gain that much time was a tactical move by the team controlling the race at that point and their captain. That would be Phonak and Landis, respectively. Had Floyd and Phonak led the charge to catch the escapees, no doubt the peloton would have chased them down and Pereiro’s overall finishing place in the 2006 Tour would have been — forty-something-th.

Why did Landis give the yellow jersey away to Pereiro? As he explains in his book, Positively False, it was so that Phonak wouldn’t have to defend the yellow jersey all the way to the end of the race. They wanted another team to do some of the work defending the yellow jersey, so that they could keep from burning themselves out. It was a gutsy strategy, and Pereiro and his team did well to hold onto the jersey until Landis took it back on stage 15. Pereiro did really well by hanging on for dear life, finishing second place overall on the road.

This is not to disrespect Oscar’s abilities. He’s a top-ten, or near top-ten level competitor for the general classification at the Tour. But the plain fact of the matter is that he wouldn’t have been in the position he was, and he wouldn’t have finished second/first (depending on how you count it), had it not been for Floyd Landis. So, in some respects, Pereiro owes Floyd, rather than the other way around. Yes, Oscar didn’t get to celebrate his “victory” in Paris, like most Tour winners do, but them’s the breaks. He wouldn’t have been anywhere near a top ten finish in 2006 had it not been for his former teammate giving him the yellow jersey on stage 13.

Beyond that, however, is a matter of process. Having been accused of a doping violation, Landis was afforded the right to challenge his suspension not once, but twice. First at the AAA hearing in May 2007, and second in an appeal of that initial result to the CAS, whose decision was announced yesterday. Those appeals are part of the very thin veneer of “fairness” that the anti-doping system offers to athletes accused of doping. Anyone in that situation is entitled to exercise those appeals. Landis, as was his right, did.

You may think it was a colossal waste of time and money to appeal. You may think that the system is rigged and the results a foregone conclusion. You may look at the evidence and say, “Guilty!” You may look at the evidence and scream, “Innocent!” But within the anti-doping system, as we know it, Floyd Landis had every right to appeal to the AAA, and appeal again to the CAS. He owes no one a darned thing (except, apparently, USADA to the tune of $100 grand) for exercising those rights.

He doesn’t owe me. He doesn’t owe you. And he most definitely doesn’t owe Oscar Pereiro.

Stunned

Published June 30th, 2008 in Doping in Sports, Floyd Landis and Tour de France. 20 Comments
Jack Daniels
A toast to Floyd

I just finished reading through the CAS panel’s decision in the Floyd Landis case. I’m stunned by what I read. I can’t find a single point that Team Landis scored in the entire hearing, or at least, not a single point of any importance. While the decision gives a background of the issues and what each side said, with startling uniformity, they rejected the contentions of the Landis side.

I know Maurice Suh is a good lawyer. But reading this document makes it look like he’s been well and truly trounced by Richard Young and company. Granted, Young wrote the WADA code, or large chunks of it. I can’t think of a lawyer who would be more familiar with the ins and outs of that code, and more capable of navigating its language in such a way that he would prevail. Were Young to switch to defending athletes in front of CAS panels, I wonder what the results would be. I find it utterly amazing that in the course of the CAS proceedings that Maurice Suh didn’t score at least a few points along the way.

In looking through the original decision from last September, I thought the logic and reasoning at times was very contorted and convoluted. In this new decision, that’s not the case at all. It’s very uniform. Landis’ arguments are uniformly discounted and discarded, and USADA’s are uniformly accepted. With just a couple of instances when the panel threw Landis a bone. The most major of these, to my eyes, is that they did not agree with USADA’s contention that Floyd’s suspension should start as of September 20, 2007. A good thing, that, as it would have amounted to a three-year suspension by the time all was said and done (accounting for all the time that Landis has not been able to compete in UCI or USA Cycling events).

It seems the original panel appeared to give more consideration to Team Landis’ arguments than the CAS panel did. Could the case presented to the CAS panel have been so radically different to explain this result? I’m really puzzled by this result. I can’t say it was totally unexpected. At best, I thought that Floyd’s chances were a coin toss. I just never realized that the coin toss was of the variety “Heads I win, tails you lose.”

At least Floyd knows when he can start working as a pro cyclist again. The panel’s document is stunning and breathtaking, to say the least. What I’d like to know, given the way they’ve meted out justice is this: Why did this take two and a half months? The same result could have happened on April 19th with a bit of copy and paste

And so it goes. To move on into a different area, slightly, tonight’s reading raised an interesting question. Given that no test is perfect, nor are those who perform the tests, at some point an innocent athlete will be charged with a doping offense. We can argue if that’s already happened, but that’s beside the point of this question. Someday, it will happen. Reading through the panel’s decision in the Landis case, and noting that the two major cases where the ADAs have lost involved one particular issue (that of the same person working on the A and B samples in the cases of Landaluce and Jenkins), exactly how would a truly innocent person be able to prove his/her innocence in the current system?

The mark of a truly just system — whether we’re talking about the anti-doping system or a court system — is whether or not it affords a way for such a case to reach the proper conclusion — that the person is found either innocent, or in the case of a criminal system, “not guilty.” What evidence could be shown to establish an athlete’s innocence? Remember, the presumption here is guilt and the athlete has to prove his/her innocence. We may not like this aspect of the system, but for now it’s what we’re stuck with.

I’m really at a loss to figure out what a truly innocent person could do to overcome a doping charge. As easily as Landis’ arguments were tossed out by the panel, I wonder what arguments could actually work. I can’t think of anything an innocent person could do. And that concerns me, as it’s a failing of the system that such a case can’t reach the right end.

Food for thought, anyway. Time to call it a night.

Too Much To Hope For? Too Much To Ask?

Published June 30th, 2008 in Doping in Sports, Floyd Landis and Tour de France. 10 Comments

Yesterday I read both of the final briefs submitted in the Floyd Landis case. The first one I read was USADA’s brief, which is slightly longer than Team Landis’ by a score of 51-47 — pages that is. After reading the work of Richard Young and company, I had a sinking feeling. I told my wife, “If the panel buys these arguments, Floyd is sunk.”

Then, I read the brief from the Landis side, and I thought, “Perhaps, just perhaps, Landis might be able to win.” As I scanned through Arnie Baker’s The Wiki Defense 2.0, it appeared that maybe — if they accepted Baker’s arguments — the panel could go Floyd’s way. Baker’s book, weighing in at 441 pages (100 more than the first edition) contains numerous new pieces of information clearly informed by the case Team Landis put on in New York in March. It goes further into the reasons that this particular case should be overturned.

Well, as we’ve seen, that’s not what happened. Trust But Verify already has a preliminary read through the decision. In scanning through it for myself, I noticed that much of the panel’s decisions — with the notable exception of when Landis’ suspension should start — went exactly the way USADA argued. The wording of the panel’s decisions on each point, in fact, seems eerily similar to what Young and company submitted.

If ever there was a case that should have been won based on the problems uncovered by the athlete’s defense team, this is the one. Landis and his team uncovered numerous problems with how the lab in question performed their work. Both panels noted that while the labs may have been sloppy, their errors didn’t rise to the level needed to throw out the case. Well, given the presumption that the labs do their work perfectly because — well because we say so — exactly how is an athlete to prove he’s innocent. Or at least, not guilty?

The underlying message in this award is something I find particularly disturbing. Basically, what I see the panel saying is, “If you’re accused of doping, don’t bother putting on a defense. Roll over and take the punishment. Sure, if you’re actually innocent, then you’re screwed. But the way things are set up, now that you’ve been accused, you’re obviously guilty. Don’t waste your money or your time. Just take it and get it over with.”

The CAS had a golden opportunity with the Landis case. One thing that perhaps people on both sides of the case can agree on is that the lab work in question is less than stellar. It has some serious flaws, in fact. As does the WADA system, which needs to do better as far as establishing standards and then holding their accredited labs to those standards. Had they found in favor of Landis, they would have served notice that sloppy lab work, shoddy record keeping, clear violations of international standards and more would not be tolerated.

We hold athletes to a rule of strict liability. If it’s banned and it’s in them, they’re deemed to be guilty. Doesn’t much matter how it got there. Doesn’t much matter whether there was an intent to dope. Doesn’t even matter if the drug in question is even effective in doping. It’s banned, it’s in you, you’re guilty. Love it or hate it, that’s the system as we know it today.

Well, if the athletes are held to such a high standard, all other players in the system should be, too. Poor documentation, unclear records on how tests were performed, missing or non-existant validation studies, documents that “magically appear” when needed to refute the athlete’s arguments — all of these are things that should not be tolerated, either. If the errors are few, and have little effect on the actual results, perhaps there could be some leniency — just like in the instances where an athlete has been found guilty of doping because of an error by a coach, or for using something that in his/her home country doesn’t contain banned drugs but elsewhere it does. But taken together, with as many as occurred in the Landis case, the message should be loud and clear. “We don’t tolerate dopers. But we also don’t tolerate sloppy labs. If you can’t do your work right, you’ll suffer the consequences.”

But to deliver such a verdict on the eve of the Tour de France, and more importantly on the eve of the eve of the Olympics, that could shake the anti-doping system to its core. This might not be such a popular idea in certain quarters, and needless to say, there would be much political pressure to avoid such a decision. We will never know, of course, how much pressure (if any) was ever exerted on this panel, but a quick read of the award suggests that the panel pretty much caved to USADA on all of the important points. They threw Floyd a bone by not starting his suspension in September 2007, as USADA had asked for. But then they bitch-slapped the boy (sorry BSMB) for daring to contest the case, by levying a $100,000 award to USADA to help cover some of their costs. (One would hope that this would be the end of such cost awards against Landis and that WADA can go take a $1.3 million hike.)

All in all, it seems as if the ruling against Floyd Landis was preordained. Pat McQuaid offered Floyd some “sage” advice almost two years ago. Basically, he told Landis to “shut up and take it” because it would ruin him financially to contest the case. That’s the message, loud and clear. If you’re accused, just shut up and take it. You’re not going to win.

But Landis is not one to do so. He’s one of those rare people who has the courage of his convictions, and who could not and will not admit to something he didn’t do. The truth of the case at this point won’t matter — at least not to the vast majority of casual fans — because the CAS has spoken. But Landis should be applauded for standing up for what he believes in, despite the very high personal (and financial) cost for having done so. There is much we wouldn’t have known about the flaws of the anti-doping system were it not for Floyd’s courage in the face of adversity.

As Bill Hue said over at TBV,

Floyd is my hero because in the face of the biggest travesties of “justice” I have ever seen, he stood proud, determined, true to himself and his family and did not bow to those who define “the game” by making its rules, prosecuting those deemed to violate those rules and then stack the deck with those responsible to judge those “violations”. He made them work for it and we are all the beneficiaries of his efforts even though he ultimately derived no benefit, whatsoever.

Today, the Court of Arbitration of Sport finally declared the winner of the 2006 Tour de France after 2273 miles and 708 days. Floyd Landis won the race on the road but lost it, inevitably, to WADA and its useful idiots at the Chatenay-Malabry laboratory, the international media and those who slavishly kneel at the alter of the anti-doping gods.

In the end, it was perhaps too much to hope for and too much to ask that Landis would be exonerated. The system protects the system. Exactly where he goes from here has not been announced yet. We do know that at the end of January, he will be able to start racing again — assuming he finds a team. But, of course, it won’t be a ProTour team, as their “code of ethics” bars ProTour teams from hiring someone who’s served a suspension for an additional two years.

That means, by the time he could be on a ProTour team, Floyd Landis will be about 35. In this brave new world of the UCI versus the ASO, even if that happens, there’s no guarantee that he will be allowed to race in the Tour de France or any of the other big events.

Floyd Landis deserved better than what the system has dished out to him. Much better. Today’s ruling is — to use some classic understatement — a real shame.

I’ll be posting more commentary and discussion of the case later, after I’ve had a chance to read the panel’s ruling more thoroughly. And for those who may be wondering, despite today’s ruling and the possible end of the road for the Floyd Landis case (I wouldn’t bet on that, however) Rant Your Head Off will be around for a good long time to come.

And, for those who wish to do the same, tonight I’ll be raising a glass of Jack Daniels in Floyd’s honor. He’s a true champion who held his head high through even the toughest moments over the last two years. Respeck.

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