The Floyd Landis affair is finally over, now that the CAS has ruled against him and effectively stripped him of his 2006 Tour de France title for using performance-enhancing drugs.
There were a lot of red herrings thrown up throughout this case. In the last couple of years, I've done plenty of reading and listening to podcasts during long rides and runs and have always tried to cut through the BS and clutter to what is really going on in sport these days. Some thoughts:
- Labs are not biased, and are not out to get any particular athlete. Listen to Dr. Michael Ashendon explain it.
- Our initial reaction is nearly always with the athlete, whom we have just spent the better part of 3 weeks watching on TV. We are athletes ourselves, and positive in nature, so seemingly-heroic comebacks feed into our desire to believe in the good side of sports.
- The athletes themselves feed on this "need to believe" with their public pronouncements about their impeccable character/ethics/background. Remember Tyler Hamilton's dog who passed away? Landis's straight-laced Amish upbringing? Listen to reporter Mark Zeigler if you want the BS-free scoop from someone who has covered drugs in sports since 1988 and has been taken in by all the boy scout-type athletes who later turned out to have a dark side.
- The athletes' side of the story is the only one the public hears while the case is prepared for trial. Defense lawyers do their best to sway the court of public opinion and can talk freely to the press (unlike the prosecution), which serves to distort the picture of what really occurred and paint the athlete in a more sympathetic light. This is exacerbated by (or exacerbates) the public's "need to believe."
- Do I think cycling is the dirtiest sport out there? Hell, no - they just test more. There isn't a single drug test in the major US sports immediately after a game, unlike in cycling; the only "testing" is a handful of offseason tests, not the 24/7 unannounced on-demand testing anywhere in the world to which cyclists must submit. Plus, without any sort of testing for HGH it is hard to take mainstream sports seriously - take a look at videos of football, baseball and basketball players from 20 years ago as compared to today's players. Advances in nutrition and weightlifting can't explain everything.
Cycling has a long road to recovery if it wants to regain its good name in the public eye, and this will likely take a generation or more. While the questions raised about the effectiveness of current EPO tests makes you wonder if we are in for more of the same this year, the "need to believe" in me says that the public anti-doping stances adopted by Slipstream-Chipotle and Team High Road are a step in the right direction, as are the recent team sponsorship announcements by Garmin (now Garmin-Chipotle), Columbia Sportswear (replacing the High Road name) and Saxo Bank (taking over for CSC at year's end).
