The Floyd Landis doping scandal is a mess, and a stain on
cycling. But what if it's a scandal not caused by Landis? What if
Landis is telling the truth? What if Landis has been set-up? Clutching
at straws? Maybe. But this situation is not as cut and dried as the
mass media likes to portray it.
Floyd Landis may or may not be guilty of administering testosterone
at the 2006 Tour de France. But until he's been allowed to present
his defence to sanctioning authorities there's still plenty of room
for doubt. For a start, his A and B samples did not contain excessive
amounts of testosterone. His testosterone levels were 'normal', it's
his epitestosterone levels that were skewed.(1)
Innocent until proven guilty. Any lawyer would state
that, yes? Not this one: Dick Pound. Pound is the head of the World
Anti-doping Authority. Like the mass media, Pound is quick on the
attack. In a column in the Ottawa Citizen (2), Pound sarcastically
wondered whether Landis had been "ambushed by a roving squad
of Nazi frogmen" and injected against his will.
This seems fanciful and Pound gives it a jokey treatment. But is it
so fanciful? Could there be a problem with the single lab that did
both the A and B tests of Landis' urine? The French lab at the centre
of this doping scandal is the same lab that leaked Lance Armstrong's
test results to the media last year. As cycling commentator Phil Liggett
says in a fascinating and eye-opening audio interview on YouTube,
Châtenay-Malabry is NOT a "scrupulous lab." (3)
This is not mud-slinging. In September last year, Denis Oswald, president
of the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF),
and Sergei Bubka, the IOC's athlete's commission chief, wrote to the
World Anti Doping Authority asking for an investigation into the handling
of aged urine samples by the Châtenay-Malabry lab. (4)
Oswald and Bubka's joint letter accused the lab of violating "confidentiality
regulations". As a WADA-accredited lab why hasn't it been sanctioned
for the media leaks? If the individual, or individuals, guilty of
the leaking still work at the lab what does this say about the lab's
scientific credibility? How can athletes have faith in a system where
their test results could be handled by a lab that will leak the results
to the media?
The president of the UCI is no fan of Landis or Pound but he doesn't
have much faith in the lab. Of the Landis leak, Pat McQuaid said:
"...we know that the French laboratory...has a close connection
with [French sports daily] L'Équipe, and we did not want this
news to come through the press, because we are sure they would have
leaked it."
A breach of information security ought to be jumped upon by the accreditation
authority. Landis' lawyers will surely point out that if one protocol
is broken, the integrity of others is open to question.
Before Floyd Landis continues to be condemned for an offence he may
not have committed, we the undersigned believe there needs to be:
(a) Transparent and independent scrutiny of the staff and
working practices at the Chatenay-Malabry laboratory.
Could it be the Landis scandal isn't about a rogue rider but a rogue
lab technician? No need for a "roving squad of Nazi frogmen",
one disaffected lab technician can cause untold damage.
(b) A switch from Châtenay-Malabry.
Any further testing of samples in this case should be handed to a
lab outside of France and double-blind testing protocols need to be
seen enforced. This second lab must be able to reproduce the results
of the Châtenay-Malabry lab. Come to that, ALL drug tests ought
to be carried out by two labs or, at the very least, the B samples
should be tested by a different lab. This is good science and plain
common sense.
(c) An internal WADA inquiry into the conduct of Richard W
Pound.
The organisation's president may have the best of intentions but his
attacks on athletes, before due process has been carried out, often
fall far short of the standards you would expect of the head of a
body aiming to eradicate drugs in sport. Pound has form: Danish Minister
of Culture Brian Mikkelsen - vice president of WADA - has criticised
Pound in the past. Last year Mikkelsen said the L'Equipe story about
Lance Armstrong's aged urine tests lacked hard evidence and as such
should have been handled with caution. "Such a statement should
only be made if there is a legal basis for it. That's why
I think Dick Pound's statement was unwise." (5)
The world of competitive cycling - and sport in general - needs
to be free of performance-enhancing drugs but if the three issues
above are not fully explored, and the results put into the public
domain, question marks will remain over the credibility of WADA
and the Châtenay-Malabry lab.
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