I bicycle a lot, but don't race. Oh, I've gotten a day license for a cyclo-cross race or two, but I'm much too slow to dream. With 30% below normal lung capacity due to sarcoidosis there's not much hope of competing with my age group.
Nevertheless, I follow racing a bit, and acquaintances ask me what I think happened with Floyd Landis. Here's my theory.
Only a tiny bit separates first from not-first at the top level of competition, and that difference is worth a lot of money. Plus, there are a lot of races, and so there's a lot of need to recover as fast as possible. Under these conditions, there are huge temptations to cheat. It's also hard and expensive to test. The testing protocols are statistical, and even the first level test for the A samples cost $300 each, so the testing is hardly continuous. At low levels of drug, the type that fly below the testing radar, you probably aren't doing much damage to your body (relative to what you are already doing by a career as a professional athlete).
So, temptation$ plus low likelihood of being caught plus little physical risk... that adds up to a high likelihood that there is a lot of cheating. There's evidence posted on this site http://www.cycling4all.com/index.php?content=d_news12.php that cycling and baseball have the highest rates of positive drug results.
Without any evidence whatever, I would guess that Landis was taking a complicated pattern of doping with testosterone (perhaps to improve recovery) and then adding epitestosterone as a masking agent to hide this (since the screener, $300 test, measures whether the ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone is above 4:1). In Landis's disappointment at finishing stage 16 so poorly, and perhaps because he had too much alcohol to drown his sorrows, he did not follow this regime to the letter.
The next day, he may have realized this might have been the case, which is why he drank so much water during the stage (a count of 70 water bottles either drunk or poured over his body was noted). This may have been an attempt to flush. In addition, a rider from the T-Mobile team drafted him during his entire ride, up until the final climb. The T-Mobile rider wasn't helping Floyd because his teammate Kloden was one of Floyd's rivals. The T-Mobile rider was trying to hang on to Floyd in hopes of having morestrength at the end and winning the stage in the final sprint. If so, Floyd would have had only a 1 in 70 chance of being tested (they test the winner, the leader, and two other random individuals) and would probably have gotten away with it. But the T-Mobile rider couldn't hang on and Floyd was tested.
So, my guess is Floyd was moderately doping, but messed up and got caught.
5 comments:
This is a very interesting theory. The part I find weak in you speculation is his drinking water to mask the effect of Landis not followig his regime. Drinking water will dilute the total level of testosterone and epitestosterone in his body but not their ratio.
If he indeed had too much to drink the previous night he was probably somewhat dehydrated. Alcohol causes dehydration. Landis havig too much too drink the previous night, fits perfectly with Landis needing to drink more than normal amounts of water the next day. I thus think that his drinking is a lot more plausible explanation for his water intake than not following his regime.
Hi,
Except for the water, which shouldn't make a difference, this is pretty much the standard "long term doping" theory, and the only one that makes sense from a performance point of view.
Keep in mind that the actual findings have not been formally reported yet, so there isn't even a USADA case against Landis at the moment. And without the values in the formal report, there's really no way but uninformed speculation for him to respond. The uninformed speculation that he has let slip out have just made him look stupid, the lesson of which has been learned by Marion Jones.
If you're interested in keeping up with Landis news, I am keeping a running roundup at http://trustbut.blogspot.com; this discussion will be linked.
TBV
Hi,
Except for the water, which shouldn't make a difference, this is pretty much the standard "long term doping" theory, and the only one that makes sense from a performance point of view.
Keep in mind that the actual findings have not been formally reported yet, so there isn't even a USADA case against Landis at the moment. And without the values in the formal report, there's really no way but uninformed speculation for him to respond. The uninformed speculation that he has let slip out have just made him look stupid, the lesson of which has been learned by Marion Jones.
If you're interested in keeping up with Landis news, I am keeping a running roundup at http://trustbut.blogspot.com; this discussion will be linked.
TBV
Two points:
1. They don't test for synthetic testosterone UNLESS you have already failed the testosterone/epitestoneterone 4:1 ratio test. We don't know if there would have been synthetic testosterone found in any other samples. So far as I know, they haven't tested any of those other samples for synthetic testosterone. From the lab's point of view, they already have enough evidence, so what's the point. From Floyd's point of view, it doesn't do much good to show there were no synthetics days earlier or later, and it creates complications if there is a synthetic suspicion in earlier tests.
2. In terms of the water being a weak point in my theory -- maybe. It's possible, of course, that there was something more than water in some of those bottles that might have been designed to bring things back into balance, but I have no idea what that might have been and haven't seen anyone speculate on this. Floyd might also have had the naive theory that if you just push enough fluids through, you might get rid of everything -- synthetic or non-synthetic.
If I haven't said it enough, this is just a theory and I have no inside information.
Thanks for the great blog on Floyd. With so much negativity surrounding the situation, it is refreshing to see a positive outlook. He is completely innocent, and the truth will come out. Keep the faith... Mike Farrington. Green Mountain Cyclery.
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