Floyd Landis’ Case Gets Sillier and Sillier

Recent developments in the Floyd Landis case seem to throw the whole process in question.

It’s been more than two years since the close of the Floyd Landis doping case, and he has been back racing since last season, but one would be hard pressed to find a better example of the tangled web of testing, trying and suspending athletes for peformance enhancing drugs. We all know by know that Floyd Landis tested positive for testosterone during the 2006 Tour de France. The subsequent trial and the highly detailed analysis of the test results was a long and drawn out process and exposed missteps in the handling of samples, wildly divergent test results and more.

Things got a little weirder in the last week when news of an arrest warrant for Floyd Landis and his attorney Arnie Baker issued by a French judge came to light. The warrant alleges that Landis and Baker (or someone in their employ) hacked into the computers of France’s Chatenay-Malabry doping laboratory to get documents and data about the case. Landis denied any knowledge of the warrant, but if I trust my translation, L’Equipe seems to indicate that is not true.

Adding to questions about the validity of the entire process, news comes today that Joe Papp, one of the witnesses that was called by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in the Landis case, will plead guilty today to conspiring to distribute human growth hormone and another drug. to testify about the effects of testosterone will plead guilty today to conspiracy to distribute human growth hormone and another performance-enhancing drug. In the Landis case, Joe Papp acknowledged his long pattern of drug use and testified about the ways synthetic testosterone helped him recover after races.

I’m not a lawyer, but I am a big fan of “Law and Order”. If I were Landis and Baker, I’d be thinking “appeal”.

In addition to the acknowledged chain of ownership issues with the samples that were discussed during the trial, we now have clear evidence (from the hacking) that the AFLD’s laboratory was not able to protect evidence stored on their computers that was crucial to the trial. In the computer age, data is evidence and if that data can be freely accessed and manipulated by outside parties, I would think it would have to be deemed inadmissable.

In Papp, we have a witness that at the time was said to be a “confessed sinner”, but now seems to have been actively involved in the distribution of performance enhancing drugs. Whether he was distributing drugs at the time is not known, and trials have certainly called witnesses with questionable character, but it certainly puts his testimony in a bad light.

It’ll be interesting to see where all of this goes.

Tags: AFLD, ASO, cycling, doping, floyd landis, joe papp, L'Equipe, performance enhancing, U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, UCI