Landis experts criticize lab results
Implications that Tour de France winner Floyd Landis may have used testosterone to bolster his endurance or add a shot of aggressiveness late in the race were dismissed by an expert Monday.
John K. Amory, an expert in testosterone therapy at the University of Washington in Seattle who was testifying for the American cyclist, said that no known pattern of doping was consistent with the urine test results reported by a French lab.
“I don’t know of a physiological process” that could account for the lab’s results, Amory said.
Amory said he found the French lab’s test results contradictory and scientifically implausible. He testified that the lab’s documentation didn’t “make a lot of sense.”
Amory was one of two scientific witnesses appearing for Landis on the seventh day of public hearings into the cyclist’s challenge of doping accusations. Their testimony delayed the eagerly anticipated Landis cross-examination by U.S. Anti-Doping Agency attorneys. Landis, 31, denied ever doping in testimony Saturday.
The two witnesses took direct aim at the reliability of Paris’ Laboratoire Nationale de Depistage du Dopage, or LNDD, which tested his urine sample after Stage 17 of last summer’s Tour and ruled it positive for the presence of synthetic testosterone.
Dr. Wolfram Meier-Augenstein of Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, an expert in the carbon isotope ratio test with which LNDD analyzed Landis’ sample, precisely outlined a raft of errors and false assumptions he said were made by the lab. He asserted that LNDD’s work was so poor that its findings amounted to “speculation.”
Most critically, he stated that LNDD’s measurement of certain key metabolic ratios in the Landis sample violated standards of accuracy appearing in technical specifications issued by the World Anti-Doping Agency. If Landis can show that LNDD’s work violated WADA standards, the arbitrators will be required to assume the violations caused the positive reading unless USADA can prove otherwise.
Meier-Augenstein testified that LNDD’s analytical work, as demonstrated by its chromatograms -- which depict the chemical components of Landis’ urine as peaks on a chart -- was so sloppy that “I have no confidence in the data.”
“Isn’t it ‘close enough?’ ” asked Landis attorney Maurice Suh sarcastically, alluding to USADA’s position that any errors by the lab are insufficient to invalidate its findings.
“No, it is not,” Meier-Augenstein said. “You can’t go by appearances. You have to go by data. If someone’s life or career depends on it, you don’t work on assumptions.”
Meier-Augenstein also observed that LNDD’s readings on Landis’ urine were so far out of line with results found in the clinical literature, even in studies of known testosterone users, that they raised more questions about the lab’s technique than about Landis’ actions.
“If I were running this lab and got this result,” he said, “before I was on the phone to say this guy’s a positive, I would run the test again to make sure the results stand up to scrutiny.”
Amory said he volunteered to testify for Landis without pay after concluding that LNDD’s documentation of test results was so inadequate.
He told the arbitration panel that patterns of testosterone readings found in Landis’ urine samples, taken at various race stages, were inconsistent with one other. They also were inconsistent, he said, with any conceivable pattern of testosterone doping, whether by injection, oral administration or topical gel.
His testimony challenged various USADA theories of Landis’ testosterone use. One is that the cyclist either took small doses of the hormone via a topical gel to aid his endurance or his body’s recovery from the grueling daily exertions demanded by the race. The other is that he took a more significant dose before Stage 17, when he was trying to recover time he had lost the day before, and sought a surge of aggressiveness.
Amory testified that medical studies have found no short-term performance-enhancing benefits. “And we don’t think that administering testosterone to normal men has any effect on behavior,” he said.
As for the possibility of taking small doses over a longer period -- “microdosing,” in athletes’ parlance -- to evade detection, Amory contended that any doses too small to register in urine testing would also be too small to affect performance. “I’m not sure it would be of great utility to a cyclist,” he concluded.
The hearing is scheduled to conclude Wednesday with closing arguments by both sides. Landis faces a two-year suspension from competition and the loss of his 2006 Tour de France title if he loses the arbitration and a subsequent appeal.