Saturday Hearings: Second Update

Sometimes things intervene in our best laid plans. I would have been watching the hearings Saturday afternoon except for one small thing. Even though I got into the courtroomview.com web site, when I tried to view the session (or at least listen in), I got nothing.

So for my nightly commentary, it’s going to come from having devoured the posts at TBV. After Dr. Schnäzer’s testimony from this morning, I had the feeling that things were going the wrong way for Team Landis. Dr. Schnäzer, in most respects, was an excellent witness for USADA. Team Landis scored a few points on him, but I think that overall USADA did better.

Then, as I was finishing up the first update, I read the beginnings of Don Catlin’s testimony. It started out looking like it would be much the same as Dr. Schnäzer’s story in the morning. But after the cross examination started, Team Landis came out strong, and I think they scored better on this one that the previous effort.

One thing they missed in the cross examination, though, was a chance to challenge Catlin on this statement:

q: would low doses of testosterone affect ability to recover in a long stage race?
a: it would help recovery from major exercise.

While GRG from Steroid Nation talks about the behavioral effects of testosterone (and I have no reason to doubt him), from a recovery perspective, this statement is unproven. In the Saturday Warmup post today and a previous post, I talked about some research I did at PubMed for this very phenomenon. What I found was that very few studies have been done on whether testosterone helps recovery from exercise (two that I could find) and both studies concluded that either there was no evidence for such a claim, or that it has yet to be determined. [Memo to Maurice Suh: Read Rant. It helps. 😉 ]

For those who don’t know PubMed: When searching for medical or biological research articles, PubMed is the place to go. If you can’t find it there, it probably hasn’t been published.

On cross examination, Maurice Suh gets Catlin to talk about whether lab staff are allowed to assist in the defense of an athlete accused of doping:

q: I’m going to highlight sections. “the lab should not provide testing services in defense of an athlete”, did you write that?
a: no, it seemed to have changed.

q: [Conduct detrimental] that would cast doubt.
a: i do.

q: is this a description of being a good citizen.
a: yes.

q: have you ever testified in an anti-doping trial, have you ever testified in defense of an athlete.
a: one case with Mr. Jacobs that might be classified that way, perhaps another a year or two on a hair loss product, where I got beat up kind of badly.

q: the zach lund case?
[ catlin looks aside ]
a: mr. jacobs was in two cases.

Later, Suh asks who in WADA gave Catlin grief over helping Zach Lund.

q: you testified you received grief for testifying on the zack lund case?
a: yes.

q: what was the source?
a: I don’t think wada was very happy.

q: Olivier Rabin.
a: I don’t think he was very happy.

q: did he contact you before the hearing.
a: no, he was there, and they spoke to me.

q: what did they say.
a: before the case started, it was made clear to me it was not a good idea for me to do this.

q: who is Olivier Rabin?
a: Scientific director of WADA.

While we’ve had a much more dramatic example this week, doesn’t Rabin’s actions sound a bit like witness tampering? If this is a good description of what happened, Rabin must’ve been skating awfully close to the line here.

In other parts of the cross examination, Suh had Catlin grade various chromatograms and other data from the Landis lab documentation pack and other sources. If I followed things correctly, it appears that Catlin gave C to C- grades for a number of items from the Landis lab pack. That sounds like a definite point for Team Landis. Also, Suh got Catlin to admit that Landis’ lab results if the tests had been run at UCLA would not have triggered an adverse finding by UCLA’s standards, something that Team Landis has been saying for months.

q: you said earlier you’d looked at the results, and the CIR values, and you’d have declared an AAF, according to the positivity at your lab.
a: No, not with my lab criteria, but with the WADA criteria.

q: if you had obtained the same results, if accurate, you would not declare an AAF when you were head of UCLA?
a: No, that’s not what I said. I said I’d declare according to the WADA criteria with a letter saying it wouldn’t meet our criteria.

And it gets a bit better:

q: let me show GDC 534, confidential letter from UCLA, refers to letter, “results indeterminate, we suggest additional samples” dated 2003. What about these values? 5B -23.6 5a -27.7
a: these are absolute, not deltas.

q: these would be -4.4 and -.3
a: correct.

q: in a situation where you had a -4.4, you declared these indeterminate.
a: yes.

q: did not declare adverse.
a: indeterminate, yes.

Overall, while not perfect for the Landis defense, Catlin’s testimony and the cross examination went better for them than the testimony from the previous witness.

As the day ended, Floyd Landis was called to the stand. Originally, I’d heard that USADA would be calling him, but that wasn’t the case. It was his defense team who put him on the stand. It appears that they finished up Team Landis’ questioning by the end of the afternoon session, which leaves the cross examination for sometime Monday. The biggest highlight of Floyd’s testimony was his testimony about The Call. TBV has a separate post with a number of comments. If you’re interested in Landis’ testimony, give it a read, including all the comments. TBV sums up the position Floyd finds himself in right now very well, when he says:

Landis has all day tomorrow, and part of Monday morning to think how this is going to stand up to cross-examination, and he needs to be telling the truth, however ugly.

This is still a science case first. While it appears to be a battle of duelling experts there’s a possibility of a sudden insight revealed by the defense, the rabbit the supporters have been hoping is in the bottom of the bag after all.

This business of that call really clouds interpretation of the science, and USADA has shown no compunction in throwing stink bombs. It’s not going to go away.

This is sad, because it really takes away from the glaring issues that have been shown throughout the hearing about the acumen of the labs and the one-sided rigidity of the adjudication structure.

Tomorrow’s a rest day in the stage race known as the Floyd Landis hearings. A chance to catch up with other things. This is, like the Tour, a multi-day event. Regardless of the strength (or apparent strength) of a particular witness, it’s the sum total of all the testimony from both sides that will determine the outcome. That, and the opinions of the three arbitrators. Let’s hope that they will not be distracted from the fundamental issues of the case, and that they will take the time to render a fair and fully informed decision.