Floyd Landis Is A Con
Lance Armstrong
In making explosive accusations that Lance Armstrong doped, Floyd Landis distracted attention from the ugly truth that he himself left a tornado-like trail of victims by lying and cheating for years before belatedly coming clean about his own use of banned drugs.
Toward the top of the very long list of people whom Landis conned, betrayed, soiled and wronged are the scientists and technicians at the anti-doping laboratory in France who first proved that the now disgraced cyclist was a drug cheat.
Landis and his defence dragged the laboratory and its staff through the mud after it found synthetic testosterone in one of the eight urine samples he gave at the 2006 Tour de France.
Not only did the Landis camp accuse the Chatenay-Malabry lab of botching the tests, of sloppy science and misconduct, but – far worse and more damaging – of dishonesty, too. Lab technicians who tested his urine were flown to California to be grilled by Landis’ lawyers in a hearing that eventually determined his guilt and nullified his 2006 Tour victory.
Landis sought to put the whole anti-doping system on trial, turning the tables on people who were simply doing their jobs.
“The people doing the testing, the people accusing the athletes, are far more unethical than the athletes,” Landis said back then, when he was still living his lie. It is one of many Landis statements that now seem outrageous, even sickening, considering his sudden about-face last week.
It’s a shame that Landis’ confession that he doped at the peak of his professional career, as a support rider on three of Armstrong’s seven winning Tours and after, came too late for Jacques de Ceaurriz. The director at Chatenay-Malabry died this January.
It bothered de Ceaurriz that his lab employees had been hurt and smeared. Had he been alive, the gravel-voiced anti-doping pioneer surely would have joined the celebrations that erupted at the Paris lab last week when Landis confessed, telling ESPN.com that he had used performance-enhancing drugs “in every Tour de France I ever did.”
“There were cries of joy,” says Francoise Lasne, de Ceaurriz’s longtime colleague who took over as testing director after his death.
The Landis case “was quite a traumatising experience for the laboratory,” she told The Associated Press.
“The number of questions, the justifications we were asked to supply, were incredible. They really tried to dirty the laboratory. … For some people, it was very tough.”
Among Landis’ other victims are those who shelled out US$24.95 for his 2007 book, “Positively False, The Real Story of How I Won the Tour de France.”
“I have nothing to hide,” the first chapter begins.
What a con
Victims Of His Deceit
Then there are all those who donated money for his legal defence. A US$75 donation to the Floyd Fairness Fund earned a signed “thank you” note from Landis, US$250 got a “Winning Fair and Square” poster, and a signed yellow jersey was promised for coughing up more than US$1000.
What a scam.
Those who worked for the fund are now keeping their heads low. One of them who doesn’t want to be named because “I want to move on with my life beyond Floyd Landis” said that what bothers him most now “is that we were out there publicly stumping to raise money for him.” The person says Landis has not called to apologise.
Nor, says Lasne, has he phoned the French lab. Perhaps that is not surprising: Landis would still be dialing years from now if he apologised to all of those he deceived, including the millions of spectators who watched him race in France and the other riders – some of them might even have been clean – who Landis beat.
Ultimately and saddest of all for cycling, Landis’ biggest victim may be the truth.
Had he confessed immediately in 2006 and not strung everyone along for years, then it might have been possible to believe his new story that Armstrong and others doped, too.
Telling the truth, Landis says, has lifted a weight off.
“I couldn’t believe how much better I felt,” he told ESPN.com.
But he is a crowd of one, the only person who feels any better. Because considering his long history of deceit, his word is now worth nothing on its own.
Courtesy of stuff.co.nz
Landis Armstrong Doping Saga Continues
Lance Armstrong
Presumably Floyd Landis believes that he has finally supplied the smoking gun – or, to employ a more appropriate metaphor, the dripping syringe – awaited for the past decade.
The piece of evidence, to be more precise, calculated to topple the reputation of a man who achieved the impossible by coming back from radical cancer surgery not just to compete in the Tour de France but to win it an unprecedented seven times.
Several years ago a book attempting to nail Lance Armstrong as a doper borrowed the title of a Hollywood crime thriller: LA Confidential.
It would be no great stretch to interpret the motive behind Landis’s testimony against his former team-mate via the appropriation of another movie title: LA Takedown.
Landis Lied Before
In his smoking email, as it may come to be called, Landis has spoken out at last, finally dropping the pretence of defending himself against the positive dope test that saw him stripped of victory in the 2006 Tour.
Like almost all dopers, Landis lied and lied and lied again, all the way to the court of arbitration for sport – which, like the United States Anti-Doping Agency before it, refused to believe his claims of innocence.
Now Landis has come clean, so to speak, implicating many former associates, principally Armstrong, in the process of admitting his own guilt.
Until he explains himself, analysis of his motives will be divided between those concluding that he is simply seeking personal revenge and others choosing to believe that this is a man, raised in a Pennsylvania community of Mennonites, who is confessing everything in the hope of receiving absolution.
The allegations against Armstrong date from 2002 to 2004, when they rode together in the US Postal squad under the direction of Johan Bruyneel, a former rider who won stages of the Tours of France and Spain during his 10-year career.
Armstrong and Bruyneel first teamed up in 1998 and stayed together until his retirement in 2005. They were reunited last year, returning to competition with the Kazakh-owned Astana team, in whose colours Armstrong finished third in the Tour. This year they launched their own squad, Team RadioShack, in search of Armstrong’s eighth Tour win.
It was Armstrong who personally recruited Landis to US Postal, seeking to make use of the strength and competitiveness developed during the younger man’s days as a mountain bike champion.
Now Landis claims that it was during his years with US Postal that he learned the techniques of performance enhancement, including blood doping and the use of erythropoietin (EPO).
Armstrong Refutes Claim
Armstrong has pointed out time and time again that, despite being probably the most frequently tested athlete in the history of sport, he has never given a positive result in a legitimately conducted test.
But when the book LA Confidentiel, by David Walsh and Pierre Ballester, was published in France in 2004, its accumulation of circumstantial evidence – including the testimony of a former soigneuse, Emma O’Reilly – left readers in no doubt of the authors’ conclusion.
After the Sunday Times had repeated some of the book’s allegations, Armstrong won damages and an apology.
But his threat to sue the authors in a Paris court was dropped a few days before the hearings were due to begin.
“Mr Armstrong considers that his honour and reputation have been re-established for all people who examine the facts in good faith and that no further purpose is served now in pursuing other actions in defamation,” his lawyers announced.
A year after the publication of LA Confidentiel, the French daily sports paper L’Equipe published the findings of new tests on urine samples given by Armstrong during the 1999 Tour, the first of his sequence of victories, which revealed the presence of EPO.
The “B” samples from the tests, however, had been destroyed, meaning that the statutory testing requirements could not be completed in order to corroborate the initial results.
In 2006 a former US Postal team-mate, Frankie Andreu, came forward to claim that he had heard Armstrong admitting the use of EPO, human growth hormone and steroids. Andreu’s testimony was supported by that of his wife, Betsy.
Armstrong denied the claims and a settlement was reached which enabled him to collect an outstanding payment of $7.5m (£5.2m) from an insurance policy that would otherwise have been invalidated. Andreu also admitted using EPO in order to win a place alongside Armstrong on the 1999 Tour.
By coincidence, Landis’s latest revelations appear in the same week as the UK publication of Le Métier, a strikingly vivid account of a rider’s life by Michael Barry, another former US Postal rider who now wears the colours of Team Sky.
Without specifically incriminating himself, Barry recalls how he discovered, on his arrival in the peloton in the mid-1990s, that doping was little short of de rigueur.
“Directors, doctors and soigneurs told their riders that to race they needed to be professional,” he writes, “and to take care of themselves: ‘Il faut se soigner.’
Drugs were called les soins, which made something wrong seem like a necessity for health … [The sport] had reached a point that no matter how talented a rider was, how much training he did, how fit he was, or how motivated he was, he could not compete with the medicine when the racing reached the extreme. The difference in endurance and power between a doped and a clean rider was too significant. Cycling went from sport to black science.”
Like Armstrong, Barry has been competing this week in the Tour of California, where they and other riders faced questions.
Armstrong has predictably responded by asking why anyone should believe a proven liar, before abandoning the race after a crash near the start of yesterday’s stage.
It would be more interesting to hear the seven-times Tour winner’s honest reaction to Barry’s eloquent description of the ethics of an era whose dying sparks continue to start fresh fires.
Courtesy of The Guardian
Armstrong’s response to Landis Claims
Awkward Doping Scandal For La Shawn Merritt
La Shawn Merritt
Bucking the trend for putting the blame on cough medicine or inhalers, the American said that he had failed three out-of-competition tests because of a male enhancement product.
Merritt, 23, has accepted a provisional suspension after claiming that he did not know that the over-the-counter product, ExtenZe, contained a banned substance, DHEA.
“I hope my sponsors, family, friends and the sport itself will forgive me for making such a foolish, immature and egotistical mistake,” he said. “I am deeply sorry and hope that other athletes who take these types of over-the-counter products will be even more cautious and read the fine print, because if it can happen to me, it could happen to you.
“Any penalty I may receive for my action will not overshadow the embarrassment and humiliation I feel.”
He may beg to differ if given a two-year ban. Foolishness or egotism are not defences and while some will smirk and believe that a penile product does not merit a penal colony, the suspicion will remain for ever.
Certainly, Doug Logan, the chief executive of USA Track & Field, was not in any way amused. Logan has taken a firm stance against drugs and said that Merritt had sullied his career.
While acknowledging that the case was continuing with the US AntiDoping Agency, Logan said: “Any professional athlete in the sport knows that they are solely responsible for anything that goes into their bodies.
“For Mr Merritt to claim inadvertent use of a banned substance due to the ingestion of over-the-counter supplements brings shame to himself and team-mates. Mr Merritt has been an integral part of Team USA and the sport in this country. He has now put his entire career under a cloud and in the process made himself the object of jokes.
“Thanks to his selfish actions he has done damage to our efforts to fight the plague of performance-enhancing drugs in our sport. Personally I am disgusted by the entire episode.”
Merritt will miss the summer season but his lawyer said that he would appeal under the “exceptional circumstances rule”. However, even accepting his version of events, it seems unlikely that he will be competing for a significant period. Merritt failed the tests for DHEA, a steroid, between October last year and January after he started using the enhancement product at the end of last season.
After impressing as a junior athlete Merritt began his rise to prominence with a silver medal in the 400 metres and gold in the 4×400 metres at the 2007 World Championships in Osaka.
His career highlight came at the 2008 Beijing Olympics where he left his compatriot and reigning Olympic champion, Jeremy Wariner, trailing in his wake to win the 400 metres title. He was also part of the US team that took gold in the 4×400 metres. Last year he continued his dominance over Wariner by winning the 400 metres at the World Championships in Berlin, with another gold earned in the 4×400 metres.
Courtesy of The TimesOnline
Olympic Flops
Speedskating was not without incidents.
We look back at the Olympics and realise it will be remembered for all the wrong reasons.
For every golden moment, there was a glitch. Opening day of an electrifying hockey tournament in Vancouver was also the day 20,000 tickets had to be canceled for Cypress Mountain.
Even the games’ emotional high point – a figure-skating bronze for Canada’s Joannie Rochette, whose mother had died four days earlier – was tinged with sorrow.
And it all began, of course, with the worst news imaginable.
Son of a Soviet-era slider, pride of a spruce-nestled ski town half a world away, member of an almost laughably small Olympic delegation, Nodar Kumaritashvili shot down the luge track at nearly 90 mph.
Athletes had suggested the course at Whistler was so fast it tempted fate, and Kumaritashvili himself was terrified of it. He raced anyway. “I will either win or die,” he told his father.
He lasted 49 seconds before the track claimed his life. The start of a star-crossed Olympics.
The Vancouver Games opened with grief, and they end under a shadow as everlasting as those cast by the hooded assassins of Munich and the midnight thunder of Atlanta.
Kumaritashvili came to rest on a metal walkway that runs along the track, one foot awkwardly propped on the wall of the course. His sled skidded to the finish line. It was a death in the Olympic family.
“May you carry his Olympic dream on your shoulders, and compete with his spirit in your hearts,” Vancouver organizing committee chief John Furlong said at the opening ceremony.
First Glitch
It wasn’t much later that the games suffered their first glitch – nothing compared with the luge tragedy, but also a lasting symbol of these Olympics. The indoor cauldron at BC Place malfunctioned, spoiling perhaps the most climactic moment of any games.
An outdoor cauldron, meanwhile, was blocked by an unsightly chain-link fence. Complaints that it made for lousy photographs led organizers to open a rooftop viewing plaza and replace part of the fence with clear plastic.
Weather played havoc with the schedule. It was alternately too mild, too wet, too foggy or too snowy, forcing one postponement after another. “Wouldn’t mind racing already,” tweeted ticked-off American skier Ted Ligety.
Human error marred the games, too. On a single day at the biathlon, a Swedish woman was held up at her start gate for 14 seconds, and two of the men went off too early. Officials later corrected for the errors.
“It is embarrassing,” said Norbert Baier, the technical delegate of the International Biathlon Union. “Why do we have this incompetence?”
Speedskating
And in men’s speedskating, a gaffe of historic proportion: Sven Kramer of the Netherlands cruised to what would have been easy gold and an Olympic record time in the 10,000 meters – but was disqualifed because his coach sent him into the wrong lane at the end of the back straightaway.
If Kramer needs consolation, all he has to do is look at the gold he won in the 5,000. He managed an Olympic record there, too – one that actually stuck.
Elsewhere, competition provided a welcome distraction.
Lindsey Vonn, she of the most famous shin at the Olympics, skied to gold in her signature event, the downhill, and picked up a bronze in the super-G. She failed to finish three of her five races, but the haul was fine by her.
“I have the gold medal that I came here for, and I couldn’t be happier,” she said.
At the speedskating oval, Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick shared the podium – Davis with a gold and a silver, Hedrick with a silver and a bronze. This time, unlike in Turin, they actually looked like they could stand each other.
If you wanted drama, you had to look to the figure skating rink. American Evan Lysacek won gold, but without even attempting the celebrated quadruple jump – drawing open contempt from Russia’s defending champion Evgeni Plushenko, who took the silver.
In fact, Russia went home without a figure-skating gold of any kind, the first time that’s happened since 1960. Russia’s overall Olympic performance was so dismal that members of parliament back home were calling for sports officials to resign.
Not exactly a happy family for a nation that hosts the next Winter Games, in the Black Sea resort of Sochi in 2014.
Doping Allegations
There were two doping violations – hockey players, a Russian woman and a Slovakian man, both for stimulants contained in cold medication, neither deemed worthy of more than a reprimand. That was one more than in Turin.
Organizers praised the people of Vancouver for embracing the games, and suggested the glory of Olympic competition should be considered separately from the tragedy on the games’ first day.
But even IOC chief Jacques Rogge conceded the young luger’s death would forever be linked to the Vancouver Games – just as the massacre in 1972 was to Munich and the park bombing in 1996 was to Atlanta.
The days that followed were not pretty. The international luge federation blamed Kumaritashvili’s tactical handling of the course, not the track itself, for the death. Georgia’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili, saw it differently: “No sports mistake,” he said, “is supposed to lead to a death.”
The luge track was shortened for competition, and the course altered, but officials said the changes were to soothe athletes’ emotions, not make them safer. Later in the games, on the same track, overturned bobsleds became a common sight.
And across the world, in the heartbroken Georgian town of Bakuriani, was another mother of another Olympian. Dodo Kumaritashvili joined the lone other luger on the Georgian team as her son’s body arrived back home.
She threw herself on the flag-draped casket and cried: “Why have I survived you?”
Olympic officials, their hearts heavy and their Vancouver Games now history, could be forgiven for asking the same. But the memories survive, the haunting and the proud.
Courtesy of stuff.co.nz
HAVE YOUR SAY: Was the Olympics a big flop? What were your lowlights and highlights?
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