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As far as I know august 5th...
Apologies Accepted.
As far as I know august 5th...
When I say that it was a hair drug test, it was without looking at an article but from my memories.
It was a piss test but it's just a detail.
The fact that it was hair or piss that was analysed isn't the core of the debate.
You don't fit the "well read Americans" description.
The fact that you point french people in a argument about cycling is a proof of that.
I owned you badly on Armstrong's thread and you say that I'm clueless. Your only point is that I say hair instead of piss while I owned you on every aspects.
Synthetic testosterone... it wouldn't surprise me if one of the lab punks dropped some into his sample. We're still talking about the same lab that tried to frame Lance.
August 2, 2006
Experts Say Case Against Landis Is Tough to Beat
By JULIET MACUR and GINA KOLATA
After spending several days in New York, Floyd Landis has returned home to Southern California, where he will await his fate as Tour de France champion. But antidoping officials working on his case already have evidence that some experts say is convincing enough to show that Landis cheated to win the Tour, regardless of further testing or appeals.
Landis, 30, provided a urine sample after winning Stage 17 in the Alps with a long solo attack. That day, he climbed back into contention for the victory after a miserable performance a day earlier.
The results of two types of tests have thrown Landis’s status into doubt. One of them, a sophisticated measure called a carbon isotope ratio test, will be difficult, if not impossible, for Landis to refute. The test examines the atomic makeup of testosterone in the urine and can determine if it is natural or synthetic.
Landis failed that test, according to a person inside the International Cycling Union with knowledge of the results. Landis’s personal doctor, Brent Kay, confirmed the finding.
The cycling union said it expected the results of a test on Landis’s backup urine sample by Saturday morning, Paris time. If that test comes back positive, Landis would be stripped of his Tour le and would probably be suspended from cycling for two years. If the test comes back negative, the case would be dropped.
A screening on the backup sample will also aim to confirm the ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone in the urine, which is the other type of test used in the case. The initial testing found a level of 11 to 1, well above the World Anti-Doping Agency’s limit of 4 to 1.
Several experts said the carbon isotope test ultimately mattered more than the T/E test because it shows that some of the testosterone found in the sample came from an outside source, not from a natural process in Landis’s body.
“It’s powerful evidence that’s pretty definitive,” said David Cowan, a professor at King’s College London and the director of the Drug Control Center in London, which is accredited by WADA. “That in itself is enough to pursue a case.”
In Landis’s case, the French national antidoping laboratory in Châtenay-Malabry performed the testing — not Cowan’s lab.
Still, Cowan said, most lab directors are careful to build a case against an athlete on much more than just one positive test, no matter how definitive a single test might be. A doping case in sports is treated like a criminal case, he said, with carefully gathered and do ented evidence. He said the scientists at his laboratory retested a sample several times before announcing their results to the athlete and the authorities involved. He said they wanted to make sure their positive result was correct before moving on to the backup sample.
Landis said last week that he was expecting the worst because backup samples, or B samples, almost always confirm the initial result. But Kay said the B sample could come back negative.
“The carbon isotope was only mildly elevated,” he said. “We know, from a statistical standpoint, that the first result could have been a false positive.”
Testosterone can be administered by injection, pill, gel or time-released patch, like those mentioned in the Spanish doping scandal that implicated nearly 60 cyclists and others in the sport before this year’s Tour. Landis has denied using testosterone or any performance-enhancing drugs.
Nonetheless, Dr. Gary I. Wadler, an antidoping expert and associate professor at the New York University School of Medicine, said the evidence against Landis, taken as a whole, “would be hard to beat.”
He added: “Phase 1 was finding evidence from his body fluid that a doping violation occurred, and we have that. I don’t know how he will get around that.”
The carbon isotope test is used to look for testosterone abuse, and it came into use about six years ago, when companies produced equipment sensitive enough to do the test in urine samples.
It can cost about $300 more to test an athlete’s urine sample, but antidoping labs routinely use it when they have reason to suspect that an athlete was taking testosterone.
The test starts with an isolation of testosterone from the athlete’s urine. Then chemists determine the makeup of the carbon atoms that form the backbone of testosterone.
Ordinarily, carbon atoms are made up of six protons and six neutrons, giving them an atomic weight of 12. But occasionally, they have an extra neutron, giving them an atomic weight of 13.
By chance, soy plants are the source of most pharmaceutical testosterone. They tend to have slightly less carbon-13 than other plants that are more abundant in the human diet. Humans make testosterone from the food they eat, so their testosterone typically has more carbon-13 than the testosterone that drug companies synthesize from soy.
But these differences are tiny.
The test determines whether the testosterone in the athlete’s urine has less carbon-13 than another naturally occurring hormone in the urine, like cholesterol. The test is considered positive when the carbon isotope ratio — the amount of carbon-13 compared to carbon-12 — is three or more units higher in the athlete’s testosterone than it is in the comparison hormone. It is evidence that the testosterone in the urine was not made by the athlete’s body. Landis’s difference was 3.99, according to his own doctor.
“For me, that would be it,” said Donald H. Catlin, who runs the Olympic drug-testing laboratory at U.C.L.A.
The test could not, however, determine if someone had tampered with the urine sample or was negligent.
The lab that conducted the testing on Landis’s samples has previously been criticized for its handling of samples.
L’Équipe, a French sports newspaper, reported that samples taken from Lance Armstrong during the 1999 Tour de France were analyzed at the lab. Several of those samples, which were supposed to be used for research purposes only, later tested positive for EPO, an endurance-boosting drug.
The International Cycling Union commissioned a report that later cleared Armstrong of the doping allegations, partly because of the way the lab had handled the results. Armstrong lashed out at the lab, too.
But Christiane Ayotte, director of an antidoping lab in Montreal, said that the standards were lower for handling samples for research.
“It’s not fair to criticize them because of that,” she said. “When we’re talking about a routine analysis, the lab in Paris does high-quality work.”
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Landis returns positive B sample
Floyd Landis is set to lose his Tour de France le and faces a two-year ban after returning a positive B sample for excessive levels of testosterone.
The American's Phonak team dismissed Landis on Saturday when it was confirmed he produced levels more than twice the legal limit after stage 17.
Landis, 30, has said the high levels detected were a "natural occurrence".
He would be the first Tour winner to lose his le, with Spaniard Oscar Pereiro set to be declared the winner.
Pereiro was second overall behind Landis in the race, which finished in Paris on 23 July, and would become the first Spaniard to win the Tour since Miguel Indurain in 1995.
Landis said in a statement: "I have never taken any banned substance, including testosterone.
"I was the strongest man at the Tour de France, and that is why I am the champion."
A Phonak statement said: "Landis will be dismissed without notice for violating the teams internal Code of Ethics.
"Landis will continue to have legal options to contest the findings. However, this will be his personal affair and the Phonak team will no longer be involved in that."
The analysis of Landis' B sample took place at France's national laboratory at Chatenay-Malabry in the presence of the American's Spanish lawyer, Jose Maria Buxeda, and experts from the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and the International Cycling Union (UCI).
"In accordance to the anti-doping rules, the Anti-Doping Commission of the UCI will request that the USA Cycling Federation open a disciplinary procedure against the rider," the UCI said in a statement.
According to the good behaviour charter of professional cycling, Landis would not be allowed into a Pro Tour team for a further two years.
He now has 10 days to respond to the do ents that are provided, according to USADA rules.
Landis' lawyers could then take the matter to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
Those do ents, Landis's response and any do ents USADA would provide will go to a review panel some time after the 10 days.
The review panel will make a recommendation whether or not there is a case. USADA, based on that recommendation, will then decide whether to charge Landis.
If USADA does charge him, he will have an opportunity to contest that decision and the recommended sanction before a US panel of judges.
The American's future was already uncertain given he is due to have a hip replacement operation shortly.
Speaking in Madrid last week, he said the testosterone was "absolutely natural and produced by my own organism".
Landis was expecting the second sample to return a similar result to the first but last week insisted he was innocent.
"We will explain to the world why this is not a doping case but a natural occurrence," he said.
"I would like to (make it) absolutely clear that I'm not in any doping process. In this particular case, nobody can talk about doping."
Landis produced one of the most memorable displays in Tour history when he stormed to victory on the 17th stage of the Tour into Morzine by almost six minutes.
The win put him back into contention for the yellow jersey a day after his chances looked to have evaporated when he cracked on the final climb of stage 16.
But a two-year ban could spell the end of his career.
Story from BBC SPORT:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/spo...ng/5233476.stm
Published: 2006/08/05 08:44:42 GMT
geez. he may win the appeal.
damn you floyd
ing French - the French are responsible for all the wars in the world.
Oh, and
Don't worry, Floyd. I believe your Jack Daniel's excuse and your dehydration excuse. Maybe it was a massage gone wrong?
I'm sure he wasn't just a juiced up scrub.
Breaking News:
Landis declares war on France for ing his urine samples. France promptly surrenders; agrees to change its name from France to "Those wine drinking, cheese eating surrender monkeys in Europe." Also agrees to change the name of the Tour de France to "Americans own this race es!" No word on whether or not they'll agree to finally start using deodorant. Stay tuned.
god damn u floyd
Excuses won't mask the truth about Landis
Kreidler
By Mark Kreidler
Special to ESPN.com
Archive
"I'm going to do my best to defend my dignity and my innocence."
-- Floyd Landis, on CNN.
Oh, sure, it looks like a set-up line now, but back when Landis uttered those words to Larry King, in the heady nostalgia of … well, of last week, Floyd and his "team" had yet to offer up the first in his growing line of explanations for testing red-hot on the Cheat-to-Win scale.
By the time the cyclist's sizzling "B" sample finally came back from the French lab on Saturday, the Landis dog-ate-my-exonerating-evidence excuse list had grown to at least four, each more fantastic than the last.
If it wasn't cortisone shots or thyroid medication, maybe it was beer and whiskey. If it wasn't Landis' natural ability to produce testosterone at, apparently, Clooney-esque levels, maybe it was a combination of dehydration and "maximum effort," as one of Landis' Spanish lawyers suggested hopefully Friday.
I'm no lab coat, but Landis' testosterone-to-epitestosterone level, which has an allowable ratio of up to 4:1 under WADA rules, reportedly came up at 11:1 in his July 20 test. Isn't that sort of like blowing a .22 on ye olde breathalyzer in a state with a .08 legal alcohol limit? That's some serious maximum effort.
Still, a grudging acknowledgement here. A grudging respect for a guy who absolutely won't give it up, a guy willing to grasp at any explanation available -- anything that gives Landis even one more day's reprieve from the full weight of a decided public opinion -- no matter how ludicrous it sounds or how laughably flimsy it proves to be.
I can't help it: There's a part of me that admires the audacity of it all.
Americans still go so big, don't they? They just do. Landis is part of this classic international sport and certainly a multinational cycling team, and yet in his time of crisis he reverts to pure Americana: He's barreling out of the chute with everything he's got.
He is seizing on everything, every little scrap of a possibility. It's just a wild fight for his name. And, significantly, Landis and his people are willing to assume that the U.S. citizenry is absolutely the most willfully ignorant group of sports fans on the face of the earth -- that maybe we'll buy the beer-and-whiskey explanation because, , why not? It isn't as though we haven't swallowed some whoppers before.
That much, of itself, is resolutely American. From Barry Bonds' flaxseed oil to Justin Gatlin's evil masseuse, we've had just about every possible explanation for cheating thrown our way. Don't think Landis' advisers aren't aware of how often it seems to work, even if only well enough to buy a little time.
I'm old school, in the sense that I've been writing about sports for more than 18 months and I actually report from time to time. My favorite drug-excuse memory dates to the Sydney Olympics in 2000, when shot-putter C.J. Hunter sat before a roomful of reporters alongside his then-wife, Marion Jones, and fought back tears as he said he couldn't explain how he had tested positive for steroids -- four times -- that summer.
His "nutritionist," though, had a very good idea. This heretofore unknown man, on hand for the news conference, explained that Hunter's iron supplements must have been ed, which is how Hunter came to have in his system levels of the steroid nandrolone that were 1,000 times the allowable limit.
That nutritionist? Why, it was our good friend Victor Conte, who would go on to star in his own sports production, "BALCO, Barry and Me: The Destruction of a Superstar." In the end, the Hunter deal was a total fraud, a dog and pony show. But I'll tell you what: C.J. Hunter's tears that day looked real all the same.
They also planted at least a few seeds of doubt -- you know, sort of like just needing one juror to vote for acquittal -- and there was a lesson there, too. All these years later, Floyd Landis and his crew are chipping away at that same lesson.
Go for the tiny shards of doubt. In this case, seize upon the fact that the other Landis tests during the race -- Landis says there were eight of them -- all came back negative. You start down that road, and the doubt creeps in: Does it really make sense that Landis' readings suddenly would go flying off the chart in the middle of the Tour de France? Are we being held captive to the limits of what information Landis and WADA have made public? Is it simply a Landis smokescreen, or does he have a legitimate basis for challenging a single abnormal result?
No matter. To Landis and his folks, the important thing is that Americans, as a sports group, have become so immersed in the drug-excuse culture that nothing is going to strike them as too stupidly impossible to proffer as a semi-explanation of what, in the end, might have happened. And that's enough. That is where the possibility lies, the shadow of a doubt.
It lies in our willingness. We'll consider pretty much anything, evidently, which means anything is worth a shot. Maybe even a shot and a beer
Anyone has high testosterone in the presence of the french!
Kidding.
Idiotic thing to do. Might as well be honest and say you cheated instead of lying for weeks, months, and eventaully years before confessing it on your death bed 40 years later.
End of the story :
Arbitrators find Landis guilty of doping, rule he must forfeit 2006 Tour le
By EDDIE PELLS, AP National Writer
September 20, 2007
PARIS (AP) -- Floyd Landis lost his expensive and explosive doping case Thursday when arbitrators upheld the results of a test that showed the 2006 Tour de France champion used synthetic testosterone to fuel his spectacular comeback victory.
The decision means Landis, who repeatedly has denied using performance-enhancing drugs, must forfeit his Tour de France le and is subject to a two-year ban, retroactive to Jan. 30, 2007.
The ruling, handed down nearly four months after a bizarre and bitterly fought hearing, leaves the American with one final way to possibly salvage his le -- an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
If Landis doesn't appeal, he'll be the first person in the 105-year history of the race to lose the le because of a doping offense.
According to do ents obtained by AP, the vote was 2-1 to uphold the results, with lead arbitrator Patrice Brunet and Richard McLaren in the majority and Christopher Campbell dissenting.
"Today's ruling is a victory for all clean athletes and everyone who values fair and honest compe ion," U.S. Anti-Doping Agency CEO Travis Tygart said.
It's a devastating loss for Landis, who steadfastly has insisted that cheating went against everything he was about and said he was merely a pawn in the anti-doping system's all-consuming effort to find cheaters and keep money flowing to its labs and agencies.
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. This comes after the initial positive test, then a guilty finding by a USADA panel, then the long leadup to the arbitration hearing, and now finally, this decision.
Landis has a month to file his appeal. He is still weighing his legal options, according to a statement released by his legal team.
"This ruling is a blow to athletes and cyclists everywhere" Landis said. "For the Panel to find in favor of USADA when, with respect to so many issues, USADA did not manage to prove even the most basic parts of their case shows that this system is fundamentally flawed. I am innocent, and we proved I am innocent."
Despite the result, it's hard to see this as a total victory for USADA, which prosecuted the case. This was a costly affair for the agency, and it exposed flaws in the system.
In its 84-page decision, the majority found the initial screening test to measure Landis' testosterone levels -- the testosterone-to-epitestosterone test -- was not done according to World Anti-Doping Agency rules.
But the more precise and expensive carbon-isotope ratio analysis (IRMS), performed after a positive T-E test is recorded, was accurate, the arbitrators said, meaning "an anti-doping rule violation is established."
"As has been held in several cases, even where the T-E ratio has been held to be unreliable ... the IRMS analysis may still be applied," the majority wrote. "It has also been held that the IRMS analysis may stand alone as the basis" of a positive test for steroids.
The decision comes more than a year after Landis' stunning comeback in Stage 17 of the 2006 Tour, one that many people said couldn't be done without some kind of outside help.
"It's not a great surprise considering how events have evolved," Pat McQuaid, leader of cycling's world governing body, told the AP by telephone. "He got a highly qualified legal team who tried to baffle everybody with science and public relations. And in the end the facts stood up."
McQuaid said Spanish rider Oscar Pereiro, who finished second to Landis in the 2006 Tour, would be declared the Tour de France winner, as called for by UCI rules.
"You never want to win a compe ion like that," Pereiro said. "But after a year and a half of all of this I'm just glad it's over."
Landis insisted on a public hearing not only to prove his innocence, but to shine a spotlight on USADA and the rules it enforces and also establish a pattern of incompetence at the French lab where his urine was tested.
Although the panel rejected Landis' argument of a "conspiracy" at the Chatenay-Malabry lab, it did find areas of concern. They dealt with chain of command in controlling the urine sample, the way the tests were run on the machine, the way the machine was prepared and the "forensic corrections" done on the lab paperwork.
"... the Panel finds that the practises of the Lab in training its employees appears to lack the vigor the Panel would expect in the cir stances given the enormous consequences to athletes" of an adverse analytical finding, the decision said.
The majority repeatedly wrote that any mistakes made at the lab were not enough to dismiss the positive test, but also sent a warning.
"If such practises continue, it may well be that in the future, an error like this could result in the dismissal" of a positive finding by the lab.
In Campbell's opinion, Landis' case should have been one of those cases.
"The do ents supplied by LNDD are so filled with errors that they do not support an Adverse Analytical Finding," Campbell wrote. "Mr. Landis should be found innocent."
And in at least one respect, Landis, who spent an estimated $2 million on his defense, was exonerated because the panel dismissed the T-E test. But in the arbitration process, a procedural flaw in the first test doesn't negate a positive result in follow-up tests.
In his dissent, Campbell latched onto the T-E ratio test, among other things, as proof that the French lab couldn't be trusted. He said the T-E test is much more simple to run than the IRMS test.
"If the LNDD couldn't get the T-E ratio test right, how can a person have any confidence that LNDD got the much more complicated IRMS test correct?" he wrote.
It was confusion like this that led to the system receiving the harsh review Landis was hoping for during his nine-day hearing in May.
But Landis also took his share of abuse, and ultimately, USADA still improved to 35-0 in cases it has brought before arbitration panels since it was founded in 2000.
This was a nasty contest waged on both sides, with USADA attorneys going after Landis' character and taking liberties in evidence discovery that wouldn't be permitted in a regular court of law. Landis accused USADA of using a win-at-all-costs strategy and prosecuting him only to get him to turn on seven-time winner Lance Armstrong, who has long fought doping allegations that have never been proven.
More than the complex, turgid scientific evidence, the May hearing will be remembered for the Greg LeMond brouhaha.
The hearing turned into a soap opera when the former Tour de France winner showed up and told of being sexually abused as a child, confiding that to Landis, then receiving a call from Landis' manager the night before his testimony threatening to disclose LeMond's secret to the world if LeMond showed up.
LeMond not only showed up, he also claimed Landis had admitted to him that he doped. That was the only aspect of the LeMond testimony the panel cared about.
"The panel concludes that the respondent's comment to Mr. LeMond did not amount to an admission of guilt or doping," the majority wrote.
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