In Your Travels

My Rant on Floyd Landis

So I've been wasting a whole frickin' ton of time following this Floyd Landis drug scandal thing. I multi-task at work on www.bikeforums.net, trying to keep up on all the gossip. So let me spread the rumor - the rumor is that his T/E ratio in the A test was 11-1. So if you were hoping he could say it was the Jack and beer, uh, no, that isn't going to fly any better than me in Reston in turn five, in the rain this year.

There is this one cat there who posts as "EURO" and he is a Floyd hater from the get go. Finding out that Floyd's A test came back positive was like somebody asking him if he wants fries with that. I mean, it was like Christmas morning for him. He had been trying to argue that the only way Floyd could have made that move work was becuase 'they let him go.' Whatever. Of course the let him go, they were sure he would crack, and they needed to isolate Oscar Pereiro, so they left his team on the front. Floyd himself said that he counted on them being 'disorganized'. Kloden was evidently really bad that day so he didn't want his team to set tempo (like they did on stage 11, when all the T-mobiles were dropped) only to see him lose out at the end. CSC had two Americans of the six left in the race, one of them the roommate of Landis. Those guys had, just two days before, killed everybody on Alpe d'Huez, so they didn't have a lot of matches to burn. In the end only Jens Voight could really do much to chase. Vandevelde did a bit of work too, I think. EURO said that two of those climbs were big ringers and that if those guys had given chase there, they could have limited the damage. In the end, the argument falls flat with the counterpoint that if they had worked so hard early, then they would have been hating life on the Joux Plane, and lost a lot more than 2 mintes to Sastre, and even more to FLANDIS.

Anyway getting back to the whole doper stuff. Did you check Larry King live? If you dig around cycling news dot com there is a transcript of the interview. In addition to sounding like a very well paid dufus, Larry King, um, sat there and asked questions that someone wrote down for him. Floyd seemed to struggle a bit with his tone. He was clearly trying to sound optomistic, but that is hard to do at 3AM local European time, especially when WADA is tugging on your favorite yellow shirt. Call me naive, but I believe FLANDIS. First of all the guy clearly eats and breathes two wheels, it's just his aura. Second, the numbers on his powertap were reachable, and his has reportedly done those number for eight hours in training, that he pulled for five hours in the race, so what's the big deal? Not like he needed dope to do that in an absolute sense. Lets take a page out of my own life shall we? At Poolesville this year I was suffering like a dog on the climby parts, but killing it on the dirt, and rode 3 guys off my wheel bridging to the break. One of my absolute favorite moments on the bike in my whole life, that bridge. But then I fell apart, started cramping, had zilch power on the last climb and got dropped, and came in 13th. I was dehydrated, that was all. I drank like 64 ounces of gatorade, came back the next day and for a field sprint, walked away with the race at Bunny Hop. So nobody says you can't have a great day after a disappointing day. As Floyd's mom said, that is part of the message of Jesus, taking disappointment and turning it to joy. Maybe you don't need Jesus to see that, but anyway, I'm just putting that out there, take it or leave it. If you don't give up, but keep fighting, there is happiness to be grasped.

Kind of got off on a tangent there...so we have 1)the guy is a killer, 2)it is natural to rise from the dead, you don't need drugs to do it, just faith, whether it is in God or just in yourself. 3) Testosterone wouldn't have been the drug of choice for that ride anyway. I'm holding out hope that there is some reason why his epitestosterone (the E in the T/E ratio) was low, and that his testosterone was just normal. And also, hopefully the Carbon Isotope Test will prove that he didn't take any synthetic testosterone.

I believe Floyd, just like I believed Tyler until it because clear that he was probably lying. That probably says more about me than it says about this situation. Whether or not he turns out to have cheated, that Stage 17 ride was inspirational, and I hope it doesn't become tainted. We shall see. In the meantime I will respect FLANDIS's wishes not to judge him until he has a chance to defend himself.

posted by Mark @ 3:58 PM