Submitted by Alexander Klein, Jun 10, 2007 17:37

It's interesting how hard it seems to be to evaluate the facts in Landis's case dispassionately. Suppose I were a manufacturer and I needed to check whether a subcontractor—call him William—produced the proper ratio of chemicals in a batch of cleaning solution. Nobody would insist that before I evaluate the solution, I must first attend to the style, the pizzazz, or the grit and gusto with which William mixed that solution.

But this is what some of my disgruntled readers say about Landis's urine sample. One writes that I should "watch the 2006 tour" before I form an opinion about whether Landis is guilty. Another says that had I actually watched the race, I would have seen what "can be viewed from tapes of the entire stage": that "only Floyd pedaled his bike on Stage 17."

These comments are telling. Having watched the 2006 Tour is irrelevant to whether one can give a fair evaluation of the results of Landis's urine samples. This is obvious when we are evaluating tests in less dramatic circumstances—e.g., in the case of William the cleaning-solution-producer. But apparently, it is less obvious in more emotionally-charged cases like this one. (As it happens, I did watch every stage of the 2006 Tour—I'm a fan of the sport. But again, this is irrelevant.)

Other comments present a more serious accusation—that I used "downright false information" about Floyd Landis in my essay. This would be troubling if true. But it is difficult to reply because none of these commenters identify a piece of "false information" actually used in the essay.

As best as I can figure, the claim is that I am "uninformed" because I have written as though the evidence really establishes Landis's guilt, when in fact there is another side of the story. This is presumably the point of repeating the claims of Landis's own lawyers.

But this is just the old journalistic yarn that there are two sides to every story, and somehow objectivity requires that one should never form an opinion. Particularly in an opinion piece, I think this faux form of objectivity has no place.

In my view, Landis's defense team is trying to acquit him on technicalities, and commenters here merely parrot the team's (weak) case. The lawyers (and some readers) claim that there were mistakes in the doping report from Laboratoire Nationale de Dépistage du Dopage (LNDD), that one lab technician was responsible for "rechecking her [own] work", that the Carbon Isotope Ratio (CIR) test is either unreliable or was badly administered, etc. In fact, the doping report was 370 pages long—it doesn't take a team of high-priced lawyers to find a few typos in a document of that length. The claim that "Operator 18" (to whom one commenter alludes) was involved in testing both the first and second samples of Landis's urine is also a red herring—she was only directly involved with testing the first, and not the second sample. And the griping about CIR tests is unfounded. The only people who think CIR tests are unreliable are defense lawyers, accused athletes, and emotional fans. LNDD, like all WADA labs, is itself tested five times every year to ensure that they are running their lab (including their CIR tests) properly. That's why they are an accredited lab—because they are accountable (Nota Bene) to the World Anti-Doping Agency.

In any case, the point of this editorial is not to comment on the empirical evidence against Landis—many, many others have taken on that task, and I only enter into those tired details here to rebut the suggestion that I am "uninformed." Instead, my editorial comments on the believability of the scenario anti-doping officials ask us to imagine—a scenario in which Landis would have had to have cheated though he would have known that the chances of getting caught were extremely high. On the surface, that seems an implausible scenario. All I argue in the essay is that the scenario is actually more common than one might suspect. In fact, similar cases of brazen cheating unfortunately appear regularly in day to day life. To me, that's a tragic fact worth commenting on.

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