Free Floyd!

The professional cycling season is already underway, but this year's races are still suffering from the specter of doping that has carried over from last year. Perhaps the greatest cyclist of the last few years whose name is not Lance Armstrong recently announced his retirement. After being a winner and runner-up five times in the Tour de France, Jan Ullrich has decided to call it quits while still in the midst of unfounded accusations stemming from the doping investigations of "Operation Puerto" in Spain that shook up the entire field last year. Ivan Basso, an Italian rider who is the heir apparent to the Tour de France throne, switched teams after being dropped from CSC due to the allegations and now rides with Lance Armstrong's old Discovery Channel Team this year. He, too, has had to defend himself from the "Operation Puerto" fall-out after being named in the scandal. Yet despite being cleared by his own country's athletic governing body and never actually being proven to be guilty of doping by anyone, rumor has it that the organizers of the Tour de France may still elect to ban him from the race later this summer.

I'm not quite sure what the governing bodies of professional cycling are trying to accomplish with this "guilty until proven innocent" stance they've taken on the problem of illegal performance enhancements. Some of the best riders who may very well be innocent are being pushed out of the sport, leaving a field of relative mediocrity instead to watch. Last year's Tour de France was a prime example of a legendary race being whittled down to a group of obscure riders all on the basis of unproven accusations. And even when the race gets interesting and tries to create new heroes, the sloppy systems of doping accusations and detection manage to screw it up. This brings me to last year's Tour de France champion, Floyd Landis.

As you may recall, Floyd Landis was reported to have had relatively large amounts of testosterone found in his urine samples following a dramatic ride in the Alps where he essentially won the Tour. Further radioisotope testing seemed to put the nail in the coffin by showing that the testosterone in the urine sample was synthetic in nature. Floyd adamantly denied the accusations, but his defense looked pretty paper thin by this time.

But not so fast. In the offseason, Floyd Landis and his defense team have come up with some interesting findings, and what seemed to be insurmountable evidence proving he was using performance enhancing drugs, definitely seems to have some holes. A summary of their defense case can be found on the Floyd Fairness website, but the major points as I understand them are as follows:

1. Floyd's urine sample was mislabeled more than once. Although possibly just a technical issue, this raises some doubt as to whether the "positive" sample was even his at all.
   
2. There is evidence that the urine sample was either contaminated or underwent a significant amount of degradation. As such, any testing resulting from those samples were spurious, and the sample probably shouldn't have undergone further testing at all.
   
3. The lab which ran the tests reported extreme variability in the results obtained from Floyd's urine with one being within the range of normal, and the other raising the suspicion for doping. Since their results on the same sample were so different, the ability of this lab to produce reliable lab results is suspect.
   
4. With carbon isotope testing, a sample must test postive for four testosterone metabolites to be considered a true positive test. However, Floyd's sample only came up positive for one, meaning he didn't even test positive for synthetic testosterone.

I have remained in the Landis camp since the accusations started, and this defense case only strengthens my stance that Floyd Landis is clean and is the true champion of the 2006 Tour de France.

Another American cyclist, Tyler Hamilton, will return to the cycling arena this season after serving a two year suspension on grounds of blood doping that he's vehemently denied to this day. His case has some similarities to Floyd's, as the timing of his supposed use of a performance boost didn't seem to make any logical sense, and he, too, has extreme doubts about the laboratory methods used. I can only hope that Floyd doesn't fall to a similar fate as Tyler. Two years can be a long time.