Anti-doping show trial is bicyclists' circus
CRAIG MEDRED
OUTDOORS
Published: May 27, 2007
Last Modified: May 27, 2007 at 04:32 AM
Never in decades of interviewing Alaska Olympic athletes have I heard a good word about the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, and after a week of following the saga of Floyd Landis versus the USADA, it's easy to see why.
The USADA went into the Landis affair -- its first-ever public airing of a drug case -- talking about the cold, hard scientific data it would use to show Landis doped in order to win the Tour de France last year.
Then, just to show what kind of scientific data it had, the USADA put three-time tour champ Greg Lemond and professional cyclist Joe Papp on the stand. Lemond claims to nothing about drugs except that every tour winner since him must have used them. Papp is a confessed drug user.
Neither knew much about the science of performance-enhancing drugs. But the USADA didn't call them to testify about science. It called them to the campus of Pepperdine University to smear Landis.
Unfortunately, smearing Landis isn't just about him.
It's about sending a message to every other Olympic-caliber athlete in America:
Don't dare challenge the competence or validity of our drug-testing protocols in public. If you do, watch out.
At least it was nice to see the true nature of the USADA -- the U.S. arm of the World Anti-Doping Association -- exposed. The problem with zealots is, well, they're zealots. Take WADA chief **** Pound, who has proclaimed:
• The only way Landis is innocent is if he was "ambushed by a roving squad of Nazi frogmen and injected against (his) will with the prohibited substances.''
• And my favorite, that Landis' testosterone to epitestosterone (T/E) ratio was so skewed -- this comment to the New York Times mind you -- that "you'd think he'd be violating every virgin within 100 miles. How does he even get on his bicycle?''
Of course, as everyone now knows, Landis' T/E ratio wasn't skewed by megadoses of testosterone pumping through his veins; it was skewed because his epitestosterone level was inexplicably low.
Landis' scientific experts pretty well shot up the work of the French lab that found him positive for testosterone use last year, but the USADA is sticking to its belief in the infallibility of that institution because, well, it's an institution.
The fallibility of science-driven institutions was smeared across the skies of America for all to see when the space shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida. Science is fallible because it is a product of people. People make mistakes.
Sometimes people die because of these mistakes. Sometimes careers are simply ruined. Win or lose at the hearings, Landis will have a black mark next to his name forever.
Papp is a guy for whom you just have to feel sorry. Caught sideways between Landis, the USADA and a U.S. criminal drug investigation, Papp appeared before the Landis hearing to testify he used testosterone patches to speed his recovery after races. Testosterone patches are one of the suspects in the effort to link drugs to Landis' strange urine chemistry during the tour.
No one, mind you, has reported seeing Landis with a patch or any other testosterone product. Nor has anyone connected to a patch or a testosterone dealer, for that matter, been linked to Landis or his team.
So the USADA just put Papp on the stand. He didn't come armed with double-blind studies showing the usefulness of the testosterone patch as a recovery aid for endurance athletes. In fact, one of the world's top authorities on testosterone later seemed to say there are no indications it helps recovery.
No doubt Papp thinks the patch helped. For him, that might even be true. There is a phenomenon called the "placebo affect.''
If you believe it will work; it will work. Papp says it worked for him. OK, great.
But wasn't this whole arbitration hearing supposed to be about science -- not wild, unfounded USADA speculation about how Landis might have doped?
Boys and girls, if you ever decide to cheat, at least be a smarter cheat than this poor sucker. If you're going to cheat by putting chemicals in your body, at least do a little research to find out whether there is any evidence those chemicals will actually help.
Do not listen to that man who tells you that if you grind up Alaska moose nuggets, blend them into a smoothie and drink the mixture you will run faster, jump higher or shoot straighter.
Kasilof biathlete Jay Hakkinen -- the best American athlete no one has ever heard of -- could have used the latter drug. It might have brought him an Olympic medal in Turin; he was that close. But Hakkinen doesn't drug. I don't think any of the Alaska Olympians do, but there's no way to know for certain.
So, I'm just happy none of them has ever been accused of using drugs, because if you are accused of using performance-enhancing drugs these days, there's not much you can do to save yourself -- even if you are innocent.
Should Landis manage to hang onto his tour victory, what will be the enduring memory?
Perhaps the testimony of Lemond, who took the stand to testify not about science but about a blackmail attempt by a supporter of the former Mennonite Landis. An old Landis mountain-biking buddy and sometimes business manager called Lemond to make disgusting statements about how, if Lemond testified, it would be revealed he had been molested as a child.
Lemond saw Landis behind this. He's convinced Landis must have doped to win the tour because Landis is former teammate of Lance Armstrong, and Armstrong's surpassing Lemond's three tour victories must have required drugs.
Lemond is a man with issues.
Landis calls Lemond to ask why the former tour champ keeps making public statements about how he thinks Landis is a drug cheat. Lemond responds by telling Landis to "come clean,'' and then offers up the secret of his molestation as a child.
Over the years, I have been criticized by countless people unhappy with something I've written. Not once have I responded by offering them my deepest, darkest secrets -- as if somehow, in a few short minutes on the telephone, that would form some sort of intimate bond between us.
Landis, of course, told others about this conversation with Lemond. How could you not?
"Geez, you know, I called up Greg Lemond to ask him why he keeps saying bad things about me in the press, and he starts telling me about how he was molested as a child. It was just sort of creepy. I've never had such a strange conversation in my life.''
Landis, however, never made the information public, though many seem to have somehow overlooked that. Columnist Philip Hersch used a statement Landis made about Lemond online -- "If he ever opens his mouth again and the word Floyd comes out, I will tell you all some things you wish you didn't know and unfortunately I will have entered the race to the bottom which is now in progress." -- to argue the shoddy blackmail attempt proves Landis is a drug cheat.
"Now the secret is out about Floyd Landis' principles,'' he wrote in the Chicago Tribune. "We know who he is now. Barry Bonds on a bicycle."
And we can tell how? By the size of Landis' steroid-inflated head?
Just think, if USADA had stuck to science -- as it said it would when the case began -- Lemond wouldn't have been asked to appear in the first place. Nor would Joe Papp.
But let's be real for a moment. This really isn't about science.
This is about a bunch of chemists convinced they've caught a bad guy and, by God, they're going to hang him one way or another.
I don't know whether Floyd Landis is guilty or innocent, but I'm starting to like him.
Anyone willing to subject himself to this public debacle is either innocent or the brashest cheat since Skagway's Soapy Smith, and what Alaskan doesn't love Soapy.