Reply With Quote
You don't even know what you are arguing, do you?
Must think Andreau is French, right?
Dumbass.
July 27, 2006
Landis Fails Drug Test After Triumph in Tour de France
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Floyd Landis, who on Sunday became the third American cyclist to win the Tour de France, tested positive for a banned substance after winning Stage 17 of the race, his team announced today.
The Phonak team confirmed that Landis returned a positive “A” sample after Stage 17, in which he pulled off one of the most remarkable performances in cycling history. Landis struggled in Stage 16 the previous day, losing several minutes to his rivals. But in Stage 17, on July 20, he attacked over three grueling Alpine passes and won the final mountain stage of this year’s Tour by nearly six minutes, regaining much of the time he lost the previous day.
( doesn't sound good. bomb out one day, then go like a bomb the next day. )
“The Phonak Cycling Team was notified yesterday by the UCI about an unusual level of testosterone/epitestosterone ratio in the test made on Floyd Landis after stage 17 of the Tour de France,” the team said in a statement, referring to the international cycling union. “The team management and the rider were both totally surprised of this physiological result.”
A positive “A” sample does not prove that a rider used performance-enhancing substances; a second sample, the “B” sample, still must be tested to confirm the result.
“The rider will ask in the upcoming days for the counter analysis to prove either that this result is coming from a natural process or that this is resulting from a mistake in the confirmation,” Phonak said in the statement. “In application of the Pro Tour Ethical Code, the rider will not race anymore until this problem is totally clear.
“If the result of the ‘B’ sample analysis confirms the result of the ‘A’ sample, the rider will be dismissed and will then pass the corresponding endocrinological examinations.”
Tour de France drug-testing protocols require that the stage winner and the overall race leader are tested after every stage, plus at least two random selections.
Landis’s mother, Arlene, said this morning that she talked to him on Tuesday but that they did not discuss the drug test.
“I didn’t talk to him about that, but I know he’s taking medicine for the pain in his hip,” she said. “They stirred up trouble for Lance, too.”
Landis has a degenerative hip condition and planned to have hip-replacement surgery this fall. He finished the three-week, 2,267-mile race 57 seconds ahead of Oscar Pereiro of Spain, a former teammate of Landis who now rides for Caisse d’Épargne. Andreas Klöden of Germany, riding for T-Mobile, finished third, 1 minute 29 seconds behind Landis.
“I want to say thank you to everybody who kept believing, most of all my team,” Landis said after accepting the winner’s trophy, with the Arc de Triomphe behind him and the United States flag raised on a flagpole in front. “When things weren’t going so well, they kept fighting and never stopped believing.”
Landis, 31, kept the trophy in American hands after Lance Armstrong won it seven consecutive times before retiring after last year’s race.
The early part of this Tour was overshadowed by a doping scandal that left four of the top five finishers from last year’s race out of the event, among them Ivan Basso of Italy and Jan Ullrich of Germany, who had been among the favorites.
But Landis’s victory put the focus back on the race. His story of being reared in a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania, giving up mountain biking for road racing, then overcoming chronic pain to win cycling’s marquee race was expected to make him a worldwide sports celebrity.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
You don't even know what you are arguing, do you?
Must think Andreau is French, right?
Dumbass.
If Landis did this he is an idiot and an embarrasment.
If he did cheat...I wonder what his logic was, what makes guys think they can get away with stuff like this?
Or are they just willing to damage their reputation forever for the few moments of glory till they are caught?
Mo like you don't even understand why you got slammed...
Must think Andreau is French, right?
Dumbass.
Classic Chump ass pulling....
What, when, who, how, where, why?
What ever makes you feel good Chump...
There are many masking agents. Sometimes guys don't even know what they are getting in injections or pills; they just take what their trainers give them.
I would also say that if Landis actually did cheat it helps Armstrong's Legacy....in the eyes of just about everyone...
Exluding those that judge guilt or innocence on words and no evidence of course.
You don't like the French and you want to have Lance's child.
Therefore I should be slammed.
Something like that...
I agree and have no answers to your questions. Worth noting that the legal testosterone:epi ratio was lowered from 6:1 to 4:1 recently, too.
That said, according to an analyst on ESPNews, John Eustice, "every time an athlete has disputed a testosterone test, they have won, so the test itself is not as reliable as you might think." http://broadband.espn.go.com/ivp/splash?ceid=2531350 (Flash 8 required)
Last edited by CubanMustGo; 07-27-2006 at 11:32 AM. Reason: Inserted video link
So you didn't know what you were arguing after all.
Understood.
Like I said earlier...whatever makes you feel good.....Chump.
so his heroics were not so heroic?
Phonak had a doping troubles at last Vuelta, if i recall correctly.
I doubt normal people could ride as hard as this guys, they're probably all doped.
Hootie is going to post an article about the Spanish now.
Last edited by ChumpDumper; 07-27-2006 at 12:52 PM. Reason: spelling
Its nothing new...i bet at least a quarter or the participants were doing the same thing.
http://eurosport.com/cycling/tour-de...to933039.shtml
Tour de France winner Floyd Landis has given a positive drugs test for the male sex hormone testosterone, his Phonak team said on Thursday. The failed test was returned following last Thursday's Alpine Stage 17 to Morzine, won by the American in breath-taking fashion after a 130-km solo run.
"The Phonak Cycling Team was notified yesterday by the UCI of an unusual level of testosterone / epitestosterone ratio in the test made on Floyd Landis after Stage 17 of the Tour de France," Phonak said in a team statement.
The team said that Landis would be removed from compe ive races until the situation was clarified and stressed that, if the B sample analysis confirmed the A sample test, the rider would be sacked.
Landis, a 30-year-old Mennonite Christian, won the Tour de France on Sunday after an unconventional three-week race that was dubbed by many as the best in years.
The American had lost the yellow jersey in Stage 16 when he cracked in sensational style, losing ten minutes to his principal rivals on the ascent to La Toussuire.
But a day later, at Morzine, Landis performed the impossible in what was seen as one of the Tour's most staggering comebacks in history after he moved back into GC contention with his first ever career stage victory.
"Worst case scenario"
Speculation started to spread of Landis's involvement in the failed test after the Pennsylvanian failed to turn up to two scheduled criterium races in the Netherlands and in Denmark this week.
Following the UCI declaration on Wednesday night that one rider had tested positive, president Pat McQuaid said: "I will say that I am extremely angry and feel very let down by this. The credibility of the sport is at stake. The rider, his federation and his team have been informed of the situation."
The Irishman refused to divulge the iden y of the rider in question but was quoted as saying: "It's the worst case scenario."
McQuaid was right: Landis's positive test is the final blow for a Tour hampered by drug allegations before it had even started.
Following the suspension of nine Tour riders in the Spanish doping affair, Operacion Puerto, in the build up to the race - including race favourites Ivan Basso and Jan Ullrich - Landis's implication is an indictment to the wishful claims that the 2006 race would be wholly "clean".
The latest uproar now means that the last event of each major Tour has been blighted by scandal.
The 2005 Vuelta A Espana "winner" Roberto Heras tested positive for EPO and had his le taken away, while May's Giro d'Italia winner Basso was suspended from this year's Tour following his reported involvement with Dr Eufemiano Fuentes's Madrid-based doping ring. As nothing has yet to be proven against the Italian, his maiden le remains.
It is not the first time that Landis's team Phonak have been dragged through the mud of doping: in 2004, American Tyler Hamilton, the Olympic time-trial champion, was banned for two years for blood doping. More recently, Colombian veteran Santiago Botero and Spaniard Jose Gutierrez, second in the Giro, were dismissed for drug use.
Phonak, a Swiss hearing aid company, had already decided to pull their sponsorship from the team due to the negative image of the sport in general, and their team in particular.
Both the team and Landis, who is due a hip-replacement operation, are said to be shocked at the result of the test. The statement read: "The team management and the rider were both totally surprised of this physiological result.
"The rider will ask in the upcoming days for the counter analysis to prove either that this result is coming from a natural process or that this is resulting from a mistake in the confirmation."
What a dissgrace to the sport, Armstrong and the USA.
APOLOGY ACCEPTED.
I wouldn't put it past the French to have set him up.
Surprise: Landis denies doping allegations
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/200...x.html?cnn=yes
Floyd Landis says he didn't do it -- didn't inject testosterone, didn't apply a testosterone patch to any part of his body. Floyd Landis just returned my call, and I asked him straight up: "Did you do it, bro?"
He said, "No, c'mon man," in what would turn out to be the first of several denials.
I want very badly to believe him.
Landis had been crying. Not for himself -- he'd just gotten off the phone with his mother, Arlene, who has been driven from the family home in Farmersville, Pa., by reporters scavenging for quotes. "I know it's their job," he said, sadly, "but they need to leave her out of this."
The A sample from the urine test to which he submitted after Stage 17 shows "an unusual level of testosterone/epitestosterone." Landis told me he "can't be hopeful" that the B sample will be any different than the A. "I'm a realist," he said.
Landis says that an elevated level of testosterone is different from a positive test. He says this is a fairly common problem among pro cyclists. He's retaining the services of a Spanish doctor named Luis Hernandez, who has helped other riders shown by tests to have elevated levels of testosterone. "In hundreds of cases," Landis told me, "no one's ever lost one."
It's too early to tell if he's going to be on solid footing or if he's clutching at straws. The next step, he says, is to submit to an endocrine test that may help him prove that he just happens to be a guy walking around with an inordinate amount of testosterone in his blood.
He raised the possibility that the cortisone shots he's been taking for his ravaged right hip -- the hip he'll soon have replaced -- may have had some effect on the test. Then he revealed this: "I've had a thyroid condition for the last year or so and have been taking small amounts of thyroid hormone. It's an oral dose, once a day."
He raised the possibility that that medication may have skewed the test that appears to damn him.
He knows how bad this looks, and told me, "I wouldn't hold it against somebody if they don't believe me."
I don't know what to believe. I was surprised he returned my call.
"You were there when nobody else was," he told me, "so I thought I'd better call you back."
He was talking about a visit I paid to the team bus a week ago today. The day before -- in what had been his lowest moment in many weeks -- Landis appeared to have ridden himself off the podium and out of the top 10. As the Tour had unfolded, as he'd taken the lead and then relinquished it, then cracked spectacularly, he had not seemed like a rider under the influence of performance-enhancing drugs. In fact, the French were down on him for racing too conservatively, for not attacking or going for stage wins.
The next morning I went by the Phonak team bus (as I wrote in my Tour dispatch a week ago). It was eerily deserted, Landis having already been dubbed irrelevant. He sat on the steps of the bus and we chatted. After his incredible ride that day, I was a little embarrassed by what I'd said: I told him I respected that he'd finished the stage, no matter how long it took. I told him I looked forward to seeing what he did in the final time trial -- something about silver linings.
He smiled, and told me, basically, that he expected to make up some of that time that afternoon. He told me he was feeling better.
He went out rode himself into the lore of the Tour.
What to make of that ride now?
Anyone who follows this sport and professes to be blindsided by allegations of this nature risks sounding like Captain Renault in Casablanca ("I'm shocked -- shocked! -- to find that gambling is going on in here!"). You wonder sometimes if, in cycling, the clean riders are not, in fact, the minority. The purge that marked the start of this race -- 13 riders were ejected after being implicated in a Spanish doping investigation called Operación Puerto -- confirmed cycling's status as one of the dirtiest sports in the world.
But there was this hope -- was it naive, Floyd? -- that les coureurs that they didn't kick out were riding clean. And Landis had such a wholesome, heroic story: the rebel from Pennsylvania Dutch country who carved a career for himself despite tall odds -- the disapproving parents; the three teams that folded beneath him, felled by bankruptcy; the bum hip, which caused him so much pain that after some stages last year, he came close to vomiting.
Even before Landis finished Stage 17, when he pulled back most of the time he had lost the previous day, the whispers had begun. Allen Lim, Landis' trainer, took pains in the days that followed to point out that the effort put forth by Landis in that heroic, Tour-saving stage was generally in line with "what he's done in training." The anomaly had been the bonk the previous day.
Then you read what German doctor Kurt Moosburger recently told Cyclingnews.com: "You can do a hard Alpine stage without doping. But after that, the muscles are exhausted. You need -- depending on your training conditions -- up to three days in order to regenerate."
To help recover, testosterone and human growth hormone can be used. "Both are made by the body and are therefore natural substances," he said. "They help to build muscle as well as in muscle recovery."
Dr. Moosburger explained how it was done. "You put a standard testosterone patch that is used for male hormone-replacement therapy on your scrotum and leave it there for about six hours. The small dose is not sufficient to produce a positive urine result in the doping test, but the body actually recovers faster."
It would be funny -- if it weren't heartbreaking -- to think that as he sat outside the team hotel last Wednesday night, explaining his collapse, Landis was already getting a little help from a patch on a tender part of his anatomy.
So I flat-out asked him if he'd done the patch thing, and he told me he hadn't. All he can do now is wait for the B sample and, after that, hope another test proves that he's in a very elevated percentile of men, who go through life with more than their share of testosterone.
Meanwhile, I've got this passage in my Tour story in this week's Sports Illustrated: "Landis' epic ride on July 19 did not just succeed beyond all expectations, putting him in striking distance of the lead, which he seized for good in the Tour's final time trial two days later. It provided a gleaming counterweight to the doping scandal that had overshadowed this Tour since the day before it began."
Gleaming counterweight. That phrase will mock me for months, if not longer, unless Landis is able to convince us that it's all a great misunderstanding.
Floyd says he didn't do it, and I want very badly to believe him.
ROFL
whottt your owner dumped on you yet again
Yeah, one uva DOPE ass ride by Landis.That was an absolutely sick ride. I hope he can finish it off and win the damn thing.
That has to be one of the gutsiest single stage rides of all time.
And here's to an American sticking it to the French, again!
Dude just has HUGE BALLS that explains why he had too much testosterone.
You'd find life easier if you'd just go ahead and get your lips surgically attatched to Chump's butt.
Exactly!the americian hero, a cheater.
what else is new?
Sincerely,
Ben Johnson
This was my first thought as well. They did everything they could to taint Armstrong's name. You just know that another American winning the tour had many smelly Frenchies (and a lot of other Europeans for that matter) ready to jump off the nearest bridge. They just can't stand the fact that Americans find the sport of cycling boring, yet still manage to dominate its biggest event.
ESPN's cycling reporter was on the radio a couple of days ago. According to his report, Landis' testosterone was not high at all. It was the ratio of his testosterone to his epitestosterone. The guy said if that is all it was, it would probably go to the world doping court and Landis would probably be vindicated. He said this because this test is highly controversial and really shows no evidence of drugs or wrong doing.
If his testosterone level was high that is another story but it was completely normal and actually a bit low. The day of his collapse he said he drank beer which can cause a jump in the ratios. Anyway, he said this test is nothing like testing positive for a banned drug. Completely different.
Just repeating what I heard. Don't know if what he said is 100% correct or not. He thought Landis would keep the le.
Last edited by IceColdBrewski; 07-28-2006 at 11:05 AM.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
