Friday, May 18, 2007

To catch a bicycle doper

The case for Landis is starting to remind me of the Hindenburg disaster.

First of all, according to LeMond, Floyd calls Greg LeMond, as LeMond has been sounding off about doping in cycling. Landis allegedly admits to doping. Then Greg says to come clean as he could single handedly save the sport. Then Greg discloses child/ sex abuse in his past and talks about an uncle that wants to look at his...well you know what. And Landis says something like what good would it do (if he admitted he doped) and that it would hurt a lot of people.

And then before LeMond testifies at this hearing, he gets a call from Landis's "manager" and ex-mountain bike team mate, Will Geoghegan who brings up this uncle and the sex abuse on the phone and hangs up. But LeMond calls back and then goes to the police and they find out it was Geoghegan.

The prosecution points out that witness tampering is a felony in California. They call Geoghegan to the stand, and the Landis defense gets him off of the stand saying they want more time to prepare. And then they fire him on the spot! That's Pathetic.

Before all of that drama, they did deal with the real facts of the case. As reported by VeloNews, the Landis team tried to discredit the credentials of the person who conducted the testing, Claire Frelat, saying she was fresh out of college in 2001, and didn't have enough experience on the equipment that did the carbon isotope test, 6 months.
Also pathetic. Landis should fire his attorney too.

And then the gal who runs another lab in Montreal, Christiane Ayotle, and who signed off on the test and the methods said when asked if the samples would have been positive in her lab she said "Yes, it's so very clear." and "A no doubt situation." according to VeloNews.

And lastly, Eddy Merckx is not going to testify. "I know nothing about the case." Merckx said, and as I thought. Good man Eddy. Just the facts. And while LeMond testified Landis wore a black suit tie and shirt. How childish is that?

Perhaps instead of the blood testing at this year's Tour de France they should just have Dateline NBC and set up a sting. To catch a bicycle doper.

***
Update: Geoghegan admitted calling LeMond (because he got drunk on a few beers and got angry!). Shame, shame, shame!

Well, I think it's safe to say that too much beer and too much testosterone can be an ugly combination sometimes.


And get this; If they take the yellow jersey away from Landis the number 2 man in line to get it, Oscar Pereiro is now under suspicion in the Operacion Puerto blood doping investigation. But this case isn't over yet even if they find against Landis in California, as it goes on to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. And that decision will be final.

2 comments:

Diane Lowe said...

Wow.

This is worse than reality TV.

And yet, we. can't. stop. watching!

don said...

Exactly.

It's a great sport though. It's just too bad.