Velochimp: Astrochimp on Cycling

(pic from http://newsbusters.org/)

Floyd Landis made the appearance that every celebrity or politician makes when they are in the middle of a scandal. They go on Larry King whose softball questions help to calm frenzied media situations down. No situation needed more of a cool down period (other than all that craziness in the Middle East) than this drug test result. Floyd Landis has been on the cover of websites, magazines, newspapers, on the radio, tv and was the lead story on CBS Evening News ahead of the Isreal Lebanon story. To say that there is a media frenzy would be a bit understated.

Today Floyd Landis came out with guns blazing in almost a mirror image of a week earlier. Last week Floyd lost eight minutes to La Toussiere. This week he was rocked by a positive drug test. Last week Floyd came out to stage 17 and rocked the peloton. This week Floyd is all over the media getting the word out that he is innocent. Stage 17 may be a cake walk compared to what will happen in the following weeks and months.

So Landis was on under the hot lights in Madrid while Larry was in studio in Washington. Most of the basic questions were lobbed for Floyd to answer including if he ever used performance enhancing drugs. Floyd went through fairly smoothly. Lance Armstrong was brought in for the next segment and helped Floyd out big time. Then Brent Kay, Floyd Landis’ doctor came on the get a little bit more in depth on the drug test and help explain some details.

Some notes:

• Lance Armstrong is suspicious of the lab that ran the test. It was the same lab that ran the 1999 test last summer and did not follow all sanction processes.
• Brent Kay explained that the Testosterone test is unreliable and the threshold for declaring positives has gone down in the past few years. East German Body Builder has rations of Testosterone to Epitestosterone of 100 to 1. The current threshold is a very low 4 to 1.
• Brent Kay is also waiting for the result of the B sample. He reminded everyone that the process is not complete and there is still a possibility that all of this is for nothing since the B sample is not yet tested.
• Brent Kay also said that the one time use of testosterone would have no benefits since this is a product that needs to be administered over the course of a few weeks to have a positive influence on cycling performance

From what I’ve read and seen, the test does not seem reliable. If the B Sample test comes back positive then Landis could go to the CAS court and eventually get this overturned in eight months. The test has an almost 100% failure rate when it is challenged in the CAS court. Before anybody speculates on the next move, there could be a small chance that the B sample is negative.