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An excerpt from Landis's press conference today. First that we have heard that he has been taking a thyroid medicine which is a hormone....

Q: I want to dig a little deeper on the thyroid medicine you were talking about. Who prescribed that, and was the team aware? And have there been any tests to determine if that was going to affect your testosterone/epitestosterone ratio?

Landis: The medicine was prescribed by Brent [Dr. Brent Kay] who is on the other line here. You can talk to him about that. Certainly the team was aware from the beginning. I needed to call them to find out if it was an issue with the UCI as to whether I could take thyroid hormone and as far as I know it is not a performance-enhancing drug.

Dr. Brent Kay: Floyd was diagnosed with hypothyroidism, which is a very common medical condition and is simply treated with thyroid hormone replacement medication, which he has been on now for, like he said, the last couple of years. We followed his levels throughout this time and throughout this year he remained in a normal range. That's all been stable and pretty straightforward. Thyroid is in no way any type of performance-enhancing drug or medication. It is not banned. It is a perfectly straightforward medical therapeutic medication.

Q: Has there been any research at all if that can affect the testosterone/ epitestosterone ratio?

Dr. Brent Kay: We are consulting with a number of the world's experts so that we don't speculate at this point. Particularly since the testing process is not even complete. We are just really stuck here with this elevated testosterone to epitestosterone level. We are getting the experts involved to give us a detailed explanation and to look at all the possible scenarios.

This test has been criticized for years. It has a long documented history in the scientific literature with its problems due to inaccuracy. Even if you go to the WADA [World Anti-Doping Agency] Web site and you pull up their technical document on this test, on page one, even they say we should bear in mind that there are significant variations between individuals and the normal level for one individual may, in another individual, be elevated.

So, that's kind of the route we are taking. We don't want to speculate. We want experts involved to tell us really what's going on here and what potential factors may be playing a role.