No, this isn’t anything about the Bush administration, it’s about the United States’ Anti-Doping Agency which is entrusting the retesting of some of Floyd Landis’ B samples to the French lab that by any account is grossly incompetent.
Bonnie DeSimone (the best American writer on cycling in the mainstream press) covers the story for ESPN.
The panel hearing doping accusations against Tour de France winner Floyd Landis has granted the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s request to have a French lab test backup urine samples taken during the race, even though the “A” samples collected simultaneously tested negative for performance-enhancing drugs.
USADA wants the testing done because results could possibly corroborate other evidence in the case — even though under international anti-doping protocol, the results cannot be considered a positive test, according to an arbitrators’ March 17 ruling obtained by ESPN.com on Wednesday.
Both the A and B samples, which are divided from one sample provided by the athlete, must test positive before an athlete can be sanctioned. B samples are not normally tested if A samples come back negative.
Landis and his legal and public relations team are vehemently protesting the B sample testing, saying it violates his rights and standard laboratory and anti-doping procedures, and contending that the French lab is unfit to conduct the tests.
The French lab is horribly incompetent having mislabeled samples involved in the investigation already. More troubling is that if the samples already came back negative, why would additional samples add evidence other than of the unreliability of the lab in question?
No court in the United States would accept a positive finding now or perhaps declare any positive finding as evidence of reasonable doubt. Of course, no court in the United States would accept the practices and chain of custody mistakes the French lab made in the first case.
And for the record, I don’t know if Floyd doped and that’s the problem. I never will. The practices or mispractices by the French lab will never offer a clear valid answer to that question and that is what is most infuriating about the case. As a fan, I won’t be able to know if Floyd Landis rode one of the most incredible rides ever in the sport, or if he cheated. I have lost my ability to celebrate the race or mourn the race. I just do not know and cannot know given the scientific malpractice by the lab, WADA, and USADA.
But the decision also raises another question in my mind. Testosterone stays in the body for some time and Landis would have had it in his system for other tests he took during the days around the positive test–yet those came back negative. This is dismissed by WADA and USADA for some reason that I simply cannot follow.
There is an obvious thing to do here–have an outside laboratory test the results that does not have an interest in finding evidence. The continued reliance on the French lab demonstrates a lack of concern for fairness and reasonable due process for Landis.