Today’s Floyd Landis hearings started out with testimony from Claire Frelat, and unlike yesterday’s hearing, it appears that both USADA and Team Landis finished questioning Mlle. Frelat in the morning session. This leaves the afternoon session open for testimony from Dr. Christiane Ayotte and Greg LeMond.
Maurice Suh did a good job at chipping away at Frelat’s testimony, getting her to admit to a number of mistakes she made during the various tests she ran in April, along with a potential bombshell admission regarding the original Landis B sample tests conducted in August 2006.
q: So you’re saying when you did this test, you knew that the IRMS test was being done was Landis’?
a: yes, the B, I did know that.
This appears to be a breach of WADA protocol, and may be a big problem for USADA’s case. WADA’s protocols require that testing be “blind,” meaning that the person performing the tests should not know whose samples are being tested. Where this is gets into fuzzy ground is the fact that there were outside observers present, watching over the testing. That being the case, one might be able to make the argument that a reasonable person, with some knowledge of what’s going on in the world, would know why the observers were present and whose sample was being tested.
But it certainly is an interesting little fact, the question is how much Frelat’s knowledge of the fact that she was testing Floyd Landis’ samples might have influenced the results. Also, just because she admitted to knowing whose sample it was, doesn’t mean that she made the results come out a certain way. But it doesn’t look good.
As I’m writing this, Greg LeMond is beginning to testify, so I’m going to sign off and file an update later.
