Wouldn’t surprise me. They’re full of dirty tricks…why would they limit themselves to the lab…

Oliver

Thanks for reading and commenting. For those confused by the comment above it refers to the following statement made in another post on the Landis Tour de France debacle: Speaking about the disastrous stage, Floyd said something which I found to be very telling. In fact, I believe, and experience dictates that my belief is correct, that what Landis said actually explains everything about what happened the following day.

“I was struggling even on the climbs before that,” Landis said. “I tried to hide it, but I wasn’t good, and then on the last climb there was only a certain speed I could go, which wasn’t very fast.” Floyd Landis following his disastrous finish on the 16th stage of the 2006 Tour de France

As I said, this statement is very telling but what it tells us is not obvious and also probably not what you’d expect….

Okay, here’s why I think this statement is so important:
In cycling going fast (and especially doing so going uphill) requires that your muscles as well as the nerves that control them AND your cardiovascular system are functioning at optimal levels and that you are sufficiently fueled, hydrated and physically recovered.

It is an interesting phenomenon that during a long stage race like the tour you build up so much cumulative fatigue that it become impossible to get your heart rate up nearly as high as you could during the first days of the race or even during an intense effort during a training ride.

Couple this cardiac fatigue (the heart is, after all simply a very specialized muscle) with deep fatigue of muscle tissue and possible depressed levels of key neurotransmitters and you have a unique situation where the athlete is actually so fatigued that even their most maximal sustained effort is so far below their actual capabilities that in spite of the fact that he or she may feel as if they are suffering terribly they are actually riding at a tempo that allows a certain degree of recovery.

So when Landis said that there was “only one speed he could go and it wasn’t very fast” I believe that the above scenario is what happened. As a result Floyd had a chance to recoup some of his ability due to his bad day on stage 16.

Conversely, the other riders that took time out of Floyd on 16 now found themselves in the same state that Floyd was in the prior day. Add to this a course that was ideal for a long solo break, the heat making hydration a critical issue (and which further favored a lone rider having unlimited access to water without additional effort and I contend that this all conspired to give Floyd all the benefit necessary to explain his performances on both the s16 and / 17th stages.

Does that answer your question? Make sense? let me know.

Oliver

As an observation on fair process..the Lab SHOULD NEVER KNOW whos samples they have - it should be impossible for the lab to announce a poistive. The link between names and numbers should be kept away from the test lab.

So to the point of the comment

I too would like to know why it is you feel landis statement conceals a hidden truth about day 17 - cant see the connection. Other than to say anyone can have a bad day.

Since it is obvious that you have access to reports and information that the public doesn’t have, and since I have given you an open platform to state your views and contradict my own, I think it is only fair that you divulge your particular affiliation and the basis for your contradictions.

It seems pretty clear to me that you are associated with some facet of the French anti-doping community, be it the lab at Mawbray or the press, but it is unreasonable for your statements to be accepted without you providing some background information so that we are able to balance our opinion given full knowledge of your particular bias and why you might have same.

Oliver

After you can try to answer to those questions:

About 1999 EPO retrotesting:
Was it a normal testing or study testing? Should they follow the normal procedure or just a scientic procedure?

Who leaked the names asssociated to the key samples? Wasn’t it Armstrong himself with the UCI help?

What are the relation between Verbbruggen and Armstrong? Why Armstrong testified to have given 500.000dollars to UCI for blood testing equipment? Where are that equipment? Where are the moneys?

What are the relation between Verbruggen and Vrijman? Why chose a close friend to conduct an “independent” inquiry involving UCI?
Why Vrijman, the lawye, was not able to respect french law, and pretend to be unallowed to enter LNDD when he didn’t requested an authorization?

What were the conclusions of WADA about the UCI and Vrijman’s report?

About hematocrit:
Of course, hct level can vary linked to dehydrated state, to avoid that error riders are tested during the morning, and they are not dehydrated before the race. If they were they could only have bad results because a small dehydration is cutting performance by 10%… So none hemathologists have disputed the values of Floyd…Even Damsgaard who knows exactly how are done the tests!

In cycling Testosterone is used commonly for a better recovering, especially because it was easy to beat the screening test (the ratio T/E).
To pretend that the lab and other people are monkeys without serious proofs is more abject than the eventuality of a lab error.
You should read more different sources… there is a lot of people working with GCMS. Why Landis’team was just able to provide just one expert who was payed a lot? Why not request 2 or 3 more experts who would have come for 10 times less pay?

And why Landis topped the 4th best time in last pass after ridden alone along the whole stage?

Best regards.
Jean

Thanks for your comments. Please understand that I am not writing about Lance here - only about Landis and only in regards to the charges that he used synthetic testosterone during the seventeenth stage of the Tour.

I see that Beltran has gotten himself in trouble just the other day and that is unfortunate. It is equally unfortunate, however, that when athletes, in good faith put themselves at risk (by providing samples that they were not required to provide) under the assurance that this act - which was requested solely for research purposes - would not come back to haunt the riders ends up doing exactly that in the form of attacks on them by the media, challenges to the validity of their results, and ultimately untold damage to the athlete’s names and reputations.

The fact that Mawbray violated their word to the riders by failing to completely anonymize samples, and then, in spite of not having a valid and provable chain of custody as well as any proof that the samples were analyzed correctly, they leaked their supposed “results” to the press to attempt to pillory Lance and others? Why don’t the folks that run the lab get penalized when THEY break the rules.

I’m sorry but this really pisses me off. Why is it that the folks running WADA and USADA and the Lab Anti Dopage Mawbray in France can break their own rules any time they feel like it. Can assault rider’s reputations using flawed tests and miscalibrated equipment and yet when it is proven that they’ve broken their own rules, violated their own procedures and for all intents and purposes made up their own test results they these damnable miscreants aren’t themselves hung out to dry for being charlatans that hide behind the white lab coat of their profession?

Like the riders that benefited from Floyd’s misfortune are hypocrites since we know that they’re all on the same program, the peers of the technicians at Mawbray are equally to blame for not stepping forward and taking a stand against the sort of dishonest practices and shoddy analysis that this team of lab rats has done.

Personally I think that is as much a question and as great a travesty as anything else here. The UCI report on the lab found something like 47 different procedural and technical deficiencies with their processes of analysis - why was this lab still testing anything related to athletes or sports? They had already proven beyond a doubt that they were ethically incapable of doing the job and technically incapable of doing the job as well.

If I take my car to a mechanic and he screws it up and then I see a news special where this same mechanic has made 47 mistakes on another car just like mine, how smart would I be to take the car back to the same guy? But that is exactly what the TDF and WADA and USADA and even the UCI did.

The fact that they even tested urine at all gives me pause. I have to doubt every single result they’ve ever generated and so should the public. In every case where the proper questions were asked, the lab was found wanting. Why is it that they weren’t forced to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their methods were beyond question?

Further, and specific to your questions about hematocrit, testing hematocrit is a notoriously bad way to gauge if a rider is doing something illegal or not. Hematocrit can vary enormously just based upon how well hydrated or how badly dehydrated the athlete is. In fact that variation for that factor is far greater than the variation from manipulation of the blood either with rEPO or by removing and reinfusing RBCs to boost O2 carrying capacity of the blood.

Besides that, among all the tricky things that drug docs can do, playing with hematocrit with fluid volume and exogenous RBCs is childs play compared to the really serious stuff that they do these days.

With regards to Landis in particular, I don’t know if he used rEPO or reinfused his own RBCs or trained low and slept high… or none of the above. I don’t know if any of the other riders in the tour did either.

My articles weren’t addressing this issue and I don’t intend to I don’t have sufficient information in the way that I did for the series I did on Floyd’s seventeenth stage win, which, incidentally, does answer your question about his bonking on the 16th stage then winning on the 17th.

Hopefully you have found my answers useful in helping you see more clearly what I see and why I see it that way.

Regards,

Oliver Starr

There is numerous errors here…

In the same time, ex-Lance team mate Manuel Beltran tested positive for EPO… We have spoken a lot about 1999 Lance’s urine EPO but Beltran was one who has EPO in his 1999 urines… he tested positive for corticoid too that same year, but cleared by a anti dated TUE … like Lance!

When you write about the GCMS, did you know there were 2? And you are refering to the unused in Landis testing!

What about Landis’ hematocrit values which are showing anormal values like blood manipulation?

What about the so strange bonk followed by an extraordinary recovery? How can you explain that as former pro rider?

How is it possible for Landis to ride in front of peloton with EPO doped riders who have an enormous advantage (20% of increased power)? There is only 5% of difference between a pro tour rider and a continental rider?

Thanks for your explanation about the myths!