Eddie Pells of the Associated Press is reporting that the verdict in the USADA vs. Floyd Landis case is in, and that the decision finds Landis guilty of doping by a vote of 2-1. Patrice Brunet and Richard McLaren are said to have made the majority, with Chris Campbell dissenting. Pells reports:
According to documents obtained by AP, and to be made public later Thursday, the vote was 2-1 to uphold the results, with lead arbitrator Patrice Brunet and Richard McLaren in the majority and Christopher Campbell dissenting.
Further on, Pells notes:
Landis didn’t hide from the scrutiny — invited it, in fact — and now has been found guilty by the closest thing to a fair trial any accused athlete will get.
The thing is, close isn’t good enough. Any accused athlete deserves a fair trial. Period.
Pells manages to quote quite a bit from the ruling. Parts of the arbitrator’s decision appear to take LNDD to task for failing to properly train their staff and failing to perform the initial T/E tests correctly. As arbitrator Chris Campbell is said to point out in his dissent, if we can’t trust the lab to get a simple test like the T/E ratio correct, how can we be confident that they did the CIR/IRMS testing correctly?
It remains to be seen if Pells’ story holds up. But we should know sometime later today.
[First Update]
Sources confirm that the Pells story is correct. Information, including the majority opinion and Chris Campbell’s dissent, will be available on the USOC Pressbox site, if it hasn’t been posted there already. Sources also tell me that Landis’ suspension, under this ruling, runs from January 30th, 2007 until January 29th, 2009.
[End First Update]
Why start on January 30, 2007? Whatis the signifiance of that date?
I was wrong, wrong, wrong. I owe everyone a 6 pack of beer.
ORG,
That was the date that Landis agreed not to compete internationally. Remember the deal he cut to avoid having to face two inquiries at the same time? That’s what they’re basing the ineligibility on. Could have been worse. USADA wanted the suspension to start the day the decision was announced.
jbsmp,
Make mine a six-pack of Three Floyd’s. 😉
– Rant
I’m not drinking beer over this decision, and I don’t care who’s paying.
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Anyone got hold of the opinion yet?
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did anyone see coming the distinction drawn by the arbitrators between the two types of tests performed by LNDD?
Dear Clean Riders,
You have every reason to be concerned for your careers.
No professional rider is safe from verdicts reached through opinion “mislabled” as fact.
Act now or forever hold your peace.
p.s. LNDD is still in operation.
Is the system stacked against the rider? Is it not strange that the USADA reps voted against Landis and that FL’s appointed arbitrator voted in his favour. Having listened to parts of the testimony i expected McLaren to vote against FL but i thought Brunet would give a more balanced and reasonable assessment. Maybe they knew better then to bite the hand that feeds them.
Larry,
Actually, I’m not going to be drinking beer over this decision tonight. A stiff shot of Scotch, perhaps, but not beer.
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The decision documents have been posted at TBV, so I won’t duplicate the effort here.
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There’s a lot of reading and digesting to do. Between the decision and the dissent, there’s about 110 pages to go through. It’s going to be interesting, and depressing, reading.
Jimmy G.
Well put. Everyone subjected to these tests should be concerned. The system is broken and it needs to be fixed.
Luc,
It appears the system is very much stacked against the rider. Many of the motions in the case, pre-hearing, were decided 2-1, with Brunet siding with McLaren. Not much of a surprise that the final vote is the same.
Did I read the quotes correctly on Trust but Verify? Did they really conclude that eyeballing the peaks was perfectly acceptable?
If I understood that correctly, it means there is absolutely no chance in hell of a clean rider getting a fair hearing. Jimmy G. is right clean riders need to act now because the fix is in.
Rant is right “close to a fair trial” is still not a fair trial and everyone deserves a fair trial. Let us hope that the early reports are only part of the story. There had better be some damn good science (and eyeballing peaks is not science) backing up any conviction of Landis or I don’t think anyone should ever respect or trust WADA, USADA or the arbiter system ever again.
The hard core lab scientists amongst us (I’m not one) need to really chew this ruling apart. Good or bad we need to know if the ruling is truly justified or if the arbiters were snowed. As I’m sure rant would be willing to do, I am willing to provide space on my website/blog for any qualified scientist who would like to provide an analysis of the verdict. It is looking like a very dark day for science.
Majority decision is at http://www.usantidoping.org/files/active/arbitration_rulings/Landis Final (20-09-07) (3).pdf.
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Dissent is at http://www.usantidoping.org/files/active/arbitration_rulings/LandisFinalDissent.pdf.
p.p.s. Watch out, Oscar. Now that you’ve “won”, they’ll be testing all of your old A & B-samples. You may think you’re clean, but it’s not about what you think, is it?
Is that GL’s labored breathing you hear creeping up behind you?
I noticed that Floyd’s chain of custody argument was shot down in one place because the word ‘should’ was used instead of ‘shall’ or ‘must’ in the instructions dealing with COC.
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However, if you visit dictionary.com, the word ‘should’ is a variation of the word ‘shall’. One interpretation of ‘should’ is ‘mandatory.’
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… at least that’s the way I read it. This reminds me of why I preferred math to language study.
This ain’t over yet!!!
I don’t know how, not yet.
I don’t care how long it will take.
I personally will not rest till the bastids gets what’s coming to them!
I am mad as hell and I ain’t taking this anymore!
Even if I have to stand on a street corner and keep yelling my head off about this – I ain’t stopping!
And you can quote me on that.
Morgan –
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Our side lost. It is over.
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Honestly, I don’t know if FL is guilty or innocent. I’m not a scientist, and if you want someone to explain peaks and relative retention times, I’m not your guy. I’ve read smart-sounding stuff on both sides. Now that the decision is out, I will read the scientific analyses on this forum and elsewhere with great interest, but I know already that the experts will not agree and that I won’t be in a position to determine which expert is wrong and which expert is right.
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I will probably focus on the areas of the decision I CAN understand, like the analysis of the chain of title question. Actually, I’ll probably wait for Ken to weigh in on this.
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As a lawyer, I’m trained to respect the decisions reached by judges, juries and arbitrators. You put three guys on a panel and tell them they’re responsible for the professional career of someone like FL, and in my experience, they will consider the evidence in a way that’s more fair and complete than folks like you and I who are on the sidelines.
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However, my sense of things is that the decision be damned. The decision may be well-reasoned and scientific, it might even be the right decision for all that I know. If the decision is a good decision, it’s good because it makes a well-reasoned argument for a result that was finally decided in a lab outside of Paris in late July, 2006. FL was found guilty the moment someone found his first “A” test to be positive. The nature of the system is such that the accused athlete always loses. Once FL was accused, he never stood a chance.
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And I think, at the end of the day, that’s all I really cared about. I wanted FL to win, because he was a hopeless underdog, and (with the exception of my baseball loyalties) I root for the underdog no matter what.
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But enough is enough. Let’s thank FL for fighting the good fight, and do what we can to encourage him to quit fighting. FL should go on with his life, ride his bike, plan for his future. FL has already given this thing 14 months of his life. That’s enough.
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The thing to do is to give up and to move on.
I’ve posted my initial reaction to the findings on my blog under the title “Floyd Landis vs. USADA Verdict is in“. As you probably guessed, I’m none to pleased.
Larry,
I understand your point. But let me ask you this: If you were in Floyd’s shoes, and you knew in your heart that you were innocent, what would you do? Appeal or walk away?
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From my perspective, if I were in his shoes (and I could afford to carry on), I would appeal.
Ken,
I’ll be looking at your post soon. In the meantime, regarding what you said earlier, I would also be happy to offer space to any scientist who has the background to give a well-reasoned explanation of the facts, and whether or not the arbitrators were snowed. From what I know of the facts and the science, it’s hard not to believe they were snowed. But I’d love to see what an impartial observer would say.
Rant, if I were in Floyd’s shoes, I don’t know what I would do. If I were his friend, I’d tell him to walk away. He’s paying a terrible price for this, much more terrible than the monetary cost.
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Bad things happen to good people. Book of Job. You hope for divine retribution, or karma, and you move on.
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Rant, is there something you can do about the delay in our ability to submit multiple posts? I keep getting this error stating that I can’t post more often than once every 15 seconds, but in practice I seem to be limited to one post an hour.
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Ken, I’ve read your post on your blog, and I’ll point you to my post here under “Sucker Punched”. Sorry, but the general incompetency of LNDD does not fly as a defense under the WADA arbitration rules. The arbitrators are correctly applying the rules here. You have to show specifically where the lab screwed up, and then withstand any effort that the prosecution might make to show that the screw-up did not result in the adverse finding.
Rant,
If I read Landis’ character right and he is truly innocent, I think he will continue the fight if he has the money to do so. I contributed to the Floyd Fairness Fund for the first round and unless someone can convince me that the majority got the verdict right, I will contribute to his second round should he choose to keep up the fight.
Larry,
Sorry about the problem submitting posts. I’ve been looking into it (ironically, earlier today), but haven’t quite got the problem beat. Hopefully, I will figure it out soon. I’m not a great PHP programmer, so the innards of WordPress are a bit tricky for me. Eventually, I’ll get it figured out. In the meantime, my apologies for the difficulty.
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Bad things do happen to good people. If I remember the Book of Job correctly, after suffering through everything, Job eventually comes out OK. But he pays a terrible price in the interim.
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I don’t know what I’d advise Floyd to do right now. I can make good arguments for walking away, or for standing and fighting. The one problem I have with just walking away is that he’s been branded a cheater. And if I were in those shoes, I’d hate to have that foisted upon me. Worse than just being accused, this will follow him all the days of his life. On the other hand, it’s going to be a high price — financially and otherwise — to stand and fight. And the damage will be many times worse if he loses again. It’s a tough choice, and one that I don’t envy.
Well, I guess I will flip a comment I made yesterday: I hope Landis and team take a good long look at both the scientific(?) as well as the legal reason behind this decision before committing to one course or the other.
Great news! If only he’d admitted it from the start rather than wasting everybody’s time.
Birillo, why admit something if it isn’t true? If Landis was innocent, shouldn’t he fight to prove his innocence? The more one reads into the findings and the evaluations of the findings, the more it appears that even the majority found that at least the initial “A” sample was not a valid adverse analytical finding and that instead, LNDD screwed up. It appears that the ENTIRE guilty verdict is based on a single non-repeated test result from a subsequent testing. Furthermore, although I’m not positive on this, it appears that the positive finding didn’t even come from the initial “B” sample, rather it came from one of the other samples tested later in WADA’s fishing expedition in cases where those “A” samples had also tested negative.
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In science you can not hang on a single non-repeatable test result as a finding. All findings MUST BE REPEATABLE. If you have enough samples tested by poorly trained technicians using very poor laboratory procedures you will eventually get an adverse analytical finding from even a clean sample.
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WADA’s, USADA’s & LNDD’s handling of this case has been negligent to a point that it should be considered criminal conduct. Regardless of the obstacles that Larry has pointed to in his comment elsewhere on this blog, this is a case that desperately needs to be reviewed in a non-partial court of law. There are no checks and balances within the current WADA framework and there is no safeguards to protect the innocent. In WADA’s world view, the ends justify the means, and a few wrongly convicted athletes is a small price to pay in the war on doping. This is not just wrong, it is evil.
What I find hilarious when I read these comments is the assumption that Landis is probably innocent. This betrays an enormous ignorance of what actually goes on in cycling–ie. widespread doping at the elite level.
A paramount fact to consider is the sheer amount of riders who get off without ever testing positive. We just learned about Genevieve Jeanson–she was using EPO her entire career yet only tested positive once (and denied it of course).
Landis was busted with a high T/E ratio in the A sample. The B sample. In fact several of his Tour samples were also positive. The science held up in court.
Could justice be wrong? Sure. Is it likely. No way. 99.9% probability Landis is guilty. Really, if an interlocotur in this debate cannot concede that chances are (say 95%) that Landis was doping, then I don’t really know what to say. Follow cycling. Read about cycling. Learn something about the problems this sport faces. Then come back and lecture me about due process.
This sport has a right to defend itself against cheaters. Keep the f-ing lawyers out of it, and let’s have a clean sport!
Ludwig, you really are an a$$hole.
“There’s lots of cheating in professional cycling. Can’t give any stats, but there’s lots of it. Therefore Landis is probably guilty. Therefore his conviction is no big deal.” That’s your argument in a nutshell. And its stupid as all get out.
People like you make me sick.