This is making me absolutely sick. Everywhere you look Landis' picture is on the cover of a newspaper with the "doping" headline. Most people don't pay enough attention to know what is going on so even if he is totally cleared this week, the stain remains. For someone as squeaky clean as him, it is terrible. I just hope they catch the creep that released the results from the A sample. Regardless of how this all turns out, that was unconscionable!
That's what's driving me now. Somebody in that lab is unethical beyond belief. Lance Armstrong told The Associated Press in a phone interview Friday defending Floyd: "I can't help but be aware the lab that found this suspicious reading is the same one that was at the center of the 'L'Equipe affair." [The French newspaper, L'Equipe, said samples taken from Armstrong during the 1999 Tour de France and then frozen tested positive for the blood-booster EPO. The International Cycling Union commissioned a report that later cleared Armstrong of the doping allegations.]
"When an independent investigator contacted the lab, they wouldn't answer the simplest of questions, wouldn't go into their testing ethics, who did the tests, etc., etc.," Armstrong said. "I don't personally have a ton of faith in that lab. I think they should lose their authorization and the report pretty much supports that."
This lab at Chatenay-Malabry (France) has already raised a boatload of serious suspicions about it's ethical integrity with regard to the steady stream of leaks coming out of there to their friends at L'Equipe. It's already demonstrated it has an agenda beyond that of scientific inquiry with that alone. And it fails to conform to even fundamental internationally recognized standards of professional accountability. That much is irrefutable. That the TdF & UCI continue to use a lab surrounded by so much controversy for so many years to analyze their atheletes' samples seriously undermines their so-called "Anti-Doping" campaign and indeed the legitimacy of the entire Tour itself.No matter what happens to Floyd this week, these guys have to be put out of business.How can anybody trust any results, no matter what they are coming out of a place that seems so much more obviously concerned about what's in the next issue of L'Equipe than what's on their spectrometers?