Floyd Launches His Media Attack

In an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today Show (click on the video link to the right), with his wife sitting beside him, Floyd reconfirmed his innocence, explained why it seemed that he and his lawyers came up with a new excuse every other day, and outlined his plan of attack on the positive results.  First, his plan of attack centers on the ratios involved in the T/E test.  According to WADA regulations, this test is only supposed to be a preliminary test to point toward banned substances.  Synthetic testosterone's presence (which is not even synthetic, it has to be collected from living organisms, such as plants) can account for a rise in the T/E ratio, but human growth hormone inhibits epitestosterone, which also makes the ratio higher.  As I've written here, the Swiss ADA published a study which calls into question the validity of the test because individual variation, even day to day, makes the test unusable with the arbitrary 4:1 ratio.  The second stage of Floyd's defense is on the carbon ratio isotope test.  I had speculated earlier that the weakness in the isotope test is that it is based on  the ratio of human 12C carbon on the testosterone molecule to its isotope of 13C carbon.  Testosterone collected from plants (semi-synthetic) has a statistically lower ratio of 13C to 12C, but again, individual body chemistries may differ.  In the abstract of the research paper I linked to earlier, they claim that metabolized semi-synthetic testosterone had only a "statistically similar" 13C/12C ratio.  When scientists say there is a statistical difference between samples, they mean it's so damn close to being the same, that they had to test different samples hundreds, if not thousands, of times to find a difference.  Any individual test of the endogenous testosterone could be exactly the same as the semi-synthetic.

The final stage of the legal attack will be going after the UCI and WADA for not following their rules and protocols for notification of the athlete.  It certainly appears as if this is easy to prove.  In defense of the media, there was intense scrutiny around the Tour winner, and any absence from the one-day races immediately following would bring questions.  The media just added the pieces together: Floyd cancels appearances, there's a leak that tour rider tested positive, who could it be?  The problem for the doping agency is that there should not have been that second part, the leak.  The athlete should have been notified first, brought it to the attention of his team, and get suspended during the investigation.  Here's where the ADA messed up: they get a hit on the T/E ratio, which is not a sanctionable offense, because that test is only to point to the presence of exogenous steroids.  That was leaked before they did the isotope test.  It's the isotope test that is actionable, because it confirms the illegal substance.  The media found out about the isotope test a couple of days after Floyd's press conference on Friday, July 28th, again, before Landis did.  Floyd should have been suspended after the A sample results showed synthetic testosterone.

I am so sick of the french testing labs, Dick Pound of WADA, and Greg Lemond who thinks everybody started doping after he quit.  Bitter old man.  That neuropathy must be starting to affect his brain.  One thing I hope that comes out of all of this, is that the lid over the doping in cycling gets ripped off and the junk science used in the doping controls gets exposed so that we can concentrate on good, clean riding.