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This article was submitted and written by J.T. Fisher. He is a reader of Bicycle.net and sent us he very well written piece. We welcome your content and you never know, it might get posted just like J.T’s.

Having listened (read) attentively, whenever the boss wasn’t looking, of course, I’ve followed the Landis trial closely, but admittedly not to such extent as to come close to understanding the science in question. Not that it wasn’t interesting to hear about how one heats up and atomizes urine, then swirls the resulting vapors around a magnet until particles separate based on their atomic weight, and then from somehow from sorting and counting just the right group of molecules, one should be able to determine whether Floyd may have partaken of a bit of testosterone cream during the 2006 Tour.

With all due respect to the scientific community, this type of work seems to suited to a rather odd flock of ducks, which seems to be one of the few incontrovertible findings from the testimony we’ve witnessed.

Troubling about all this, is that one expects these expensive test machines and elaborate scientific methods to generate consistent, reliable, and trustworthy results that stand up well to a bit of critical questioning. But based on the testimony offered, if doping were a hanging crime, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable stringing Mr. Landis up based on this “science.” [His ex-manager, on the other hand, clearly earned a length of rope over a tree branch, and wouldn’t we all love to see Landis and LeMond race to kick the chair?].

Perhaps through all this science and complexity we’ve drifted away from the core issue - what the sport of cycling says it’s concerned about - which is athletes using drugs to improve their performances. Clearly it would serve little purpose to test all athletes for any types of substances. Fundamentally, we shouldn’t care what they eat or drink, or whether they ingest a bit of Vitamin C to ward off a cold, or a bit of Lotrimin to relieve jock-itch – so long as there’s no reason to think what they’re doing will give them an unearned advantaged getting up the mountain or sprinting for the line.

So, back to Floyd and the question of whether he employed testosterone to improve his overall results, and especially to generate that “amazing” and now notorious Stage 17 performance in last year’s Tour.

First, there seemed to be little debate in the trial about whether testosterone would have aided that performance — because nobody had any evidence to purport that. The experts seemed in general agreement that it wouldn’t have been helpful for an endurance event. So even if Floyd did as charged, it might as well have been jock itch lotion he lathered on for all it might have benefited him.

Secondly, did anyone actually watch that stage – and I mean really watch it, with the sound turned off and all the excited voices muted, to observe what actually transpired? Sure, Floyd was strong, but for most of the stage he wasn’t even close to leading. There were riders out there for much of that day going even stronger than he was, and we’re not talking about big engines like Hincapie or Periero or Sastre. We’re talking about riders whose names nobody will ever remember — and these guys were riding faster than Floyd for all but the last few kilometers. So perhaps we wax a bit nostalgic in claiming Floyd’s ride “superhuman,” and so easy to dismiss as invariably fueled by some illicit means.

What Floyd did that day was far more of a mental or emotional feat than it was a physical one – jumping out alone so early in the stage that the peloton simply dismissed the effort as fatalistic, and didn’t bother giving chase until he’d accumulated too much time. The same error only days earlier had allowed Periero and a small group to run up a crucial and irrecoverable half hour lead.

Then there’s the question of his rebounding so well on stage 17 after having clearly “bonked” the day before on stage 16. In reality, it’s absolutely normal, and even predictable, that these athletes encounter bad days following good, and good ones after bad. We recall watching LA lose a minute and a half, and risk his second tour win in his infamous bonk on stage 16 of the 2000 Tour, while climbing up the Col de Joux-Plane. Yet he battled back to secure his title. The body recovers. And again, even if Floyd had entire spent the night after Stage 16 in a bathtub filled with Testosterone cream, it wouldn’t have made any difference in how he rode the next day.

On that basis, you can love Floyd or hate him, trust the French lab and WADA and USADA, or not, but neither view should matter in determining whether Floyd used artificial substances to fuel his Stage 17 win, and position himself to contend to win the Tour. He either didn’t use testosterone, or he did do it, and in neither case was it helpful to his results, and the case should end there.

Now that the trial has ended, and the facts have been presented, I’d happily wager on the outcome, which I believe will find 2 for 1 in Landis’ favor, largely along the lines of the arguments above, since the “science” proved amply debatable. I wouldn’t wager, however, on what happens next: Whether there will be an appeal, and if so, how that will turn out, and, longer term, whether Floyd can have a life back in the sport of cycling. Unfortunately, the court of public opinion is unlikely to have been swayed during these proceedings from the verdicts that had already been reached long before the first piece of evidence was offered, and Floyd’s story is set against a backdrop of almost daily confessions of guilt by more riders, doctors, and team staff who suddenly find themselves compelled to reverse their previous denials of misbehavior. Whether or not Floyd’s ship is rising, one can’t help notice that the tide is certainly not.