By now I'm sure you know that Floyd Landis was found guilty of using performance enhancing drugs and had his Tour de France titled stripped away along with all of the money and perhaps fame.
He now has the dubious distinction of being the first Tour winner to have his titled stripped and given to somebody else.
I guess that's something.
Basically, he and his defense team tried to discredit the testing lab used to test his blood sample by pointing out numerous sloppy mistakes in the testing procedure.
The arbitration panel ruled that while some t's were not crossed and some i's were not dotted in the testing procedure, this did not change the fact that his blood sample came back positive for steroid use.
Floyd, like almost every athlete caught with his hand in the steroid cookie jar, maintains his innocence. He and his team of lawyers now have three weeks to appeal the ruling to an international arbitration panel in Switzerland.
Good Luck with that Floyd as I really don't care anymore.
To me you are just another athlete in a long line of dopers who used every advantage possible to win. I found this great story about the history of doping on the NPR's web site.
Below is a short excerpt:
"Seeking an edge in sports is as old as the noble Olympiads. During the Greek games, athletes caught cheating paid fines. The money was used to erect statues of Zeus. These statues were placed along the passageway that led to the stadium, with the name of the cheater inscribed on their bases — a public humiliation, the precursor to bad press.
Some of the ancient Greek athletes were known to ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms — as well as animals' hearts and testicles — all to enhance performance, according to Charles Yesalis, professor of health and human development at Penn State, quoted in The Washington Post.
World's First Dopers
In other words, the ancient Greeks, fathers of democracy and Western culture, were also the world's first dopers. The Romans weren't much better. Gladiators used stimulants in the famed Circus Maximus (circa 600 B.C.) to overcome fatigue and injury.
In modern times, runners doped themselves with strychnine as early 1904.
Today's technology is, of course, more sophisticated. But the underlying problem remains the same: some athletes are willing to cheat to win, by doping or other means."
In the world of triathlon, it was very refreshing to see the 2004 women's Ironman winner Nina "the Machina" Kraft say, "Yup...you got me. I sure did use EPO. I screwed up" after she tested positive for EPO.
But instead of thanking her for her courage to admit the truth, most people vilified her as a doper.
I think that we missed a great opportunity to change the doping culture in our sport. It was such a breath of fresh air to have an athlete admit the truth. We should have used this opportunity to build and enforce a culture of clean racing in the sport of triathlon.
It could have been the cornerstone of a new movement of pride in clean performance that would have gone a long way toward helping to keep the sport of triathlon free of doping by an honest code of pride and personal race conduct.
Instead, I'm willing to bet that the next person to get caught doping at Kona will follow Floyd's example and come up with an imaginative tale of woe.
I'm guessing they'll insist that they just happened to get drunk the night before the test (and by accident of course) wonder into a steroid factory instead of their hotel, were they tripped and fell into an open box of unwrapped steroid patches.
Or perhaps they'll just just swear to God that they are clean, and point their finger at everybody and everything under the Hawaiian sun...while getting all lawyered up.
