Word On The Street Is …

If you’ve read what AFT has posted here and on Trust But Verify about what the word on the street is among American pro cyclists, you already know that he tells us that many (or all) of his sources believe that Floyd Landis got caught cheating because of blood doping gone bad.

Should we believe him? Hard to say. Take a look at what he’s offered in a comment on my previous post, “Who Are You?”. What he offers of his identity certainly gives him some amount of credibility. Just how much may be a subject of debate.

So let’s give AFT/Water Carrier the benefit of the doubt and assume that the story he tells is the conventional wisdom of the American pro cycling scene.

This conventional wisdom certainly casts an interesting light on the American pro cyclists. And it’s not an entirely flattering one, either. The fact that a number of pros (how many remains unclear) would suspect such things about Floyd Landis indicates to me that there are some pros out there who have done exactly what AFT/Water Carrier says. Such suspicions must come from somewhere, after all. Personal experiences of some of AFT/Water Carrier’s source, perhaps?

I haven’t gotten the sense that any of AFT/Water Carrier’s sources have given him any hard evidence that Landis, himself, has done such things, other than the general suspicion of the community. But from what he’s passed on to us, we now know something about the extent to which some pro cyclists will try to beat the system.

What AFT/Water Carrier says about the blood doping gone awry is intriguing, although I don’t know how well the science stacks up on whether it could be true. Garbage In/Garbage Out is one way of looking at it. If the “cleaning” was done poorly, as his sources allege, then eventually the synthetic testosterone in a blood bag used for doping would clear out of a person’s system. Would there be enough to show up in CIR/IRMS? Don’t know. In principle it sounds like it could. In practice?

What his sources can’t account for is the extremely low E that caused Landis’ T/E ratio to be out of whack. And that’s what led to the CIR/IRMS test in the first place. Having gotten to the point of CIR/IRMS testing, if what these sources say is true, perhaps it might account for the CIR/IRMS results. But I question whether it would really be enough to produce the results allegedly found by LNDD.

As open-minded investigators of the Landis affair know all too well, the science behind the anti-doping tests isn’t perfect. So it’s not too surprising to think that the science behind the cheating would be imperfect, as some have suggested in comments at TBV. Actually, it’s highly believable that the science behind the cheating is less than perfect, because it depends on just who happens to be advising the cheaters.

It’s hard to say whether any of the “science” involved in doping is credible. But one thing is certain: No matter how stringent an the enforcement of anti-doping rules may be, there will always be people who will try to find creative ways to side-step the enforcement regime. In other words: No matter how good the anti-doping system may be, we’re always going to have people who try to beat the system.

Was Floyd Landis one of those people who tried to beat the system? Personally, I don’t think so, even if the conventional wisdom amongst pro cyclists says otherwise.

There is one thing to remember about conventional wisdom, however. Back in the late 60s and early 70s, the conventional wisdom was that the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was a song about LSD. Years later, it turned out that the song was inspired by a drawing by a very young Julian Lennon called (what else?) “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Sometimes the conventional wisdom, even if it sounds convincing, is wrong.