The Landis Scenarios…
By frank booth 29 July 2006
I’ve conferred with my resident medical expert and have learned two salient facts regarding the pending B test of Landis’s urine. First, alcohol is rapidly metabolized in the human body; it’s metabolized essentially first. So all the talk about testing Landis’s sample for alcohol is bullshit. If he still had alcohol in his urine after the first pee of the day, let alone after a six hour ride and 70 bidons later, then he was drinking jack daniels during the stage. Second, there is no known immediate physiological benefit to taking testosterone if one is concerned about recovery. However, there is a slight chance that enough excess testosterone would be taken up to increase the systemic level of anger in a person. So…now we have three scenarios by which to judge pretty body Floyd.
(1) The conspiracy theory. Landis is clean. The French can’t stand that an American won the Tour again and somebody spikes the sample after it is collected.
(2) The pragmatic acceptance theory. Everybody in the sport of cycling is dirty. Witness Boonen’s near confession in the NY Times today where he blames the Tour itself for doping. Too hard…of course everybody is on the juice when “they” make the parcourse so difficult. So in that climate…Landis’s rather eloquent statement about not being happy about Basso and Ullrich’s ejection and his decision to eat testosterone gummi bears (like Calci Bears for those of you with small children who hate milk) are both part of Landis’s clear conscience about his role in the sport. The short form is this: We are all doping. This is a level playing field. Another name for this is the Greg Lemond thesis which, I have to say, carries more weight than it might because a three-time tour champion believes that it is impossible to be a pro cyclist today without being on a doping program. (This is also the reason that CSC hasn’t dumped Basso. Believe me, Bjarne understands….)
(3) The crestfallen nightmare theory. This is the ugly one, the Shakespearean tragedy. And it goes like this: Post-bonk and utterly devastated, Floyd asks celebrity chef Michael Chiarello (oops, I mean Robbie Ventura) what he can do to recover for the next day and go on the attack. Ventura recommends an osso buco recipe that includes a testosterone froth. Then he explains to Floyd that some Swedish scientists mis-used some government money to buy a lot of aquavit and then designed a study to show that alcohol consumption screws with the T/ET ratio as a way to justify the expenditure. Ventura instructs Floyd to cook up a story about drinking beer and to keep mentioning that he had a few/several/more than he could count beers until columnists at velonews starting writing about his beer drinking as a way to create a cover story. Ventura knows enough to know that the testosterone won’t help Floyd physically but he doesn’t tell Floyd that. He says merely, “this shit will make you so fucking angry that you’ll eat the tape off your handle bars while on the joux tomorrow!” And then Floyd spends the rest of the night listening to “Alice’s Restaurant” and eating titanium screws.
Where’s the tragedy? Floyd could have done what he did anyway without the drugs…all he needed was for someone to find a way to arrange for a mennonite minister to call him a “weak pussy shit” in the few minutes before Stage 17.
Off-the-main-pack cycling gossip that we can’t publish on the front page.
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fausto
Posted 30 Jul 2006 at 12:03 pm | Permalink
At least Frank managed to find the humor in this fiasco. I hope Floyd has half as good a sense of humor; he’s going to need it.
I agree: the Jack Daniels defense is about as good as Dan White’s Twinkie Defense. I’m not buying it.
And here’s another thought. Floyd has been tested how many dozen times this year? And last year? In competition and out of competition. And he signed a contract that subjected him to suspension if under investigation for doping. But neither he nor his handlers (or lawyers) ever thought to hire professionals to test him to set a baseline for his testosterone, hematocrit, and all other levels that matter in modern doping and testing?
I find it more than a little naive–almost shocking, but not quite–that a guy who pees in a cup after every race can say “I think I have a higher than normal testosterone level,” or “I’m taking some drugs that might interact with other drugs and cause a false positive.” Might?
I remember listening to a French cycling fan argue in 1989 (pretty convincingly, as I recall) that Laurent Fignon was not a bike shop mechanic. That he didn’t care a damn about aerodynamics; he just got on whatever bike you gave hime and rode his heart out. He trained in the Alpes, not in the wind tunnel. My point is that that speech would have fallen flat in 1990 or thereafter. After some point you are just being naive and behind the times.
That’s how I feel about Floyd now. A few years ago I might have just believed Floyd. Now, after all that’s gone on with Armstrong and others, I think it’s up to Floyd to know what the truth is about his body, and to be able to tell us. Naive just isn’t an option. I like the Landis back-story–easygoing guy from Mennonite Pennsylvania, etc.–but it’s not going to help him through this crisis. My gut feeling is that he’s guilty and he’s cooked.
frank booth
Posted 30 Jul 2006 at 12:40 pm | Permalink
I agree entirely. Landis’s statements in his press interviews strike me as the hopeful trial balloon lies of a guy who, in the end, shouldn’t be allowed to take the stand. He’d crack like an egg.
So here it goes: I guess I’ve finally moved all the way into the legalize-it camp. Let’s just acknowledge that the future of sports is the 9 second 100 meter dash, the tour at 35 mph, the mile in close to three minutes. What will be lost will be any sense that the athletes performing these feats have any physiological denominators that mere humans can relate to but I’m tired of being the sucker. I’d much rather watch the sport, admire the efforts on an enhanced but level playing field, and then pour over the published drug regimens of each athlete the way I used to look at batting averages on the back of baseball cards.
And while we are at it: let’s legalize non-performance enhancing drugs too.
fausto
Posted 30 Jul 2006 at 3:38 pm | Permalink
i could have been a world class cyclist myself; however, my devotion to performance un-hancing drugs made this impossible. in my medicine chest you will find only ibuprofen, but in my freezer there’s a weekender-size bottle of tanqueray.
meanwhile, cycling news reports:
But, much more important than this seems to be that the tests performed on Landis’ A sample included an Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry (IRMS) procedure, used to determine whether the testosterone is exogenous (contained within, but originating from outside the body) or endogenous (produced by the body itself). In the case of the American, L’Equipe reported that the analysis found testosterone of artificial origin. http://www.cyclingnews.com/news.php?id=news/2006/jul06/jul31news
oops! if that’s true, game over for poor floyd.
my only disagreement with frank’s legalize it theory is that it would mean athletes unwilling to put themselves at risk would probably never be competitive. that would be sad. but we are getting used to a lot of sad things in this brave new world.
i’m so depressed, i’m heading for the freezer.
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