Landis: Doping or Just a Dope?

Former cyclist Greg LeMond's revelation that he was sexually abused as a child was powerful, but it was irrelevant to the Floyd Landis case -- until the misconduct of Landis's manager made it relevant.

The hearing will continue, with lab technicians murmuring in French about carbon-isotope ratios, mass spectrometers and troubling time gaps, but one verdict is already in: Whether Landis is guilty of doping, he is a dumbbell who belongs in the same category of people who take chainsaws to tree limbs they're standing on.

LeMond's testimony was a dramatic moment in the Landis hearing, the only one likely in this tedious case. It seriously undermined Landis's posture of innocence and possibly his entire defense against accusations that he doped in last year's Tour de France. For this he can blame no one but himself and his pal Will Geoghegan.

Previously, the case revolved around arcane science. Now it revolves around the question of character. Was Geoghegan just making a drunken crank call to LeMond when he threatened to unveil his childhood trauma? Or did he and Landis try to coerce LeMond into not testifying?

It's impossible to say what effect LeMond's appearance will have on the three arbitrators hearing the case in Malibu, Calif., where the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency is making its case that Landis used synthetic testosterone. But in the court of public opinion, he looks guilty of incredibly bad judgment at a minimum. Landis, who was raised Mennonite, has tried to argue he is a luckless rube caught in an unfair system. He claims the USADA and the World Anti-Doping Agency used flawed or rigged testing methods and intimidating tactics to prosecute him. Now Geoghegan seems to have tried to intimidate LeMond, with information he could only have gotten from Landis. It makes it harder to view Landis as a bullied victim.

Prior to LeMond's appearance, Landis's lawyers had actually made some headway in his case. They had successfully framed the hearing as an inquiry into the science and testing methods used at the Chatenay-Malabry lab outside Paris. It wasn't Landis on trial, but the lab technicians.

Analytical chemist Claire Frelat testified that she knew she was working on Landis's positive doping test, a major violation of procedure since confidentiality is the only way to ensure fair testing results. Also, she acknowledged that she had just six months of experience in carbon-isotope ratio testing -- a highly complex system of analysis -- when she was assigned to work on Landis's case.

Frelat also admitted to making mistakes that caused time gaps and overwritten test results in the computer logs, and conceded that some of her manually analyzed data differed from automatic readings provided by a machine.

These things were more suggestive than conclusive, and most of the time couched in so much laborious scientific explanation and WADA technical jargon that their impact was lost on the lay observer.

Still, one had the sense that it was going better than expected for Landis, and that if his lawyers kept it up over the entire nine days of hearings, if they continued to produce a steady drip-drip-drip of small admissions and inconsistencies, they just might establish reasonable doubt about the standards at the lab. If even one of Landis's four samples judged to have "abnormal testosterone profiles" was compromised, his defense will have successfully sowed doubt as to whether any of the results are reliable.

It would be hard to overstate the significance of a Landis victory in the hearing. The French lab has been notorious for leaks that violate WADA's own procedural rules, not to mention basic fairness. For that reason Landis had proclaimed that this hearing was about more than just him. It was about exposing a flawed process, and seeking reforms of the judicial drug-testing system.

But LeMond's testimony swamped any discussion of science and procedure. The emotional nature of the subject made it devastating, and put the focus squarely back on Landis's personal comportment.

LeMond maintained that during an intense conversation, Landis half-confessed to doping after LeMond had confided his own "secret" of child abuse and urged Landis to come clean. Much of what LeMond said was hearsay and also not conclusive. But what's beyond dispute is that Geoghegan placed an anonymous call to LeMond on the night before he was to testify and jibed at him.

What started as a needed hearing about the integrity and judgement of the Chatenay-Malabry lab has now become a hearing about Landis's integrity and judgment. The case is supposed to be about pure science, but the arbitrators are human, and at some point, they may ask themselves, which is the more reliable and believable, the French lab results or Landis's character?