Former bike racer strongly defends county native in doping case.
John Eustice (courtesy cyclingnews.com)
By By Bernard Harris
Updated Feb 19, 2007 15:40
Outside of stalwarts such as Mike Farrington, his longtime friend and Ephrata bike shop owner, and his family in Farmersville, few have spoken in Landis’ defense.
Yet, one cycling expert is backing him without reservation.
ESPN commentator John Eustice, a former racer and cycling Hall of Fame inductee, doesn’t believe for an instant that Landis cheated.
“I am firmly standing up in his defense — firmly, wholeheartedly,” Eustice said from his New York home this week.
Landis has offered a myriad of possible explanations for the high testosterone-epitestosterone ratio a French lab says it found in a sample of his urine taken during last month’s Tour de France.
Those have ranged from cortisone shots taken for pain in his degenerating hip, drinking beer and whiskey the night before the test, medication for a thyroid condition, dehydration, or his own naturally high levels of the hormone.
His stumbling, Eustice says, makes Landis that much more believable. If Landis had taken testosterone to enhance his performance during the grueling Alpine stage, he would have known he would be tested and would have had a story ready, Eustice said.
“Taking the dope is easy. Getting away with it is hard,” he said.
In rapid-fire fashion, Eustice shoots holes in the case against Landis. He believes:
It is not in Landis’ character to have doped.
Eustice is familiar with Mennonites in the Souderton area, where Landis’ father was raised, and said: “I have a sense of the stock of people he came from.”
He believes Landis has an inner strength, a belief in overcoming through hard work and an uncomplaining, stoic disposition that has helped him in the gritty, endurance sport. He said Landis has a “19th century toughness.”
“There is a brutal strength and an innocent honesty about him,” Eustice said.
Unlike other riders who have been caught for doping, Landis showed none of the red flags.
“You can always connect the dots,” Eustice said of other riders who have been caught. They train in out-of-the-way mountain areas where doping control regulators have trouble locating them. They fail or have dubious prior tests and are associated with others who have been in similar trouble.
Landis has been tested at least 20 times already this year — eight times during the Tour — and only this one test failed.
And, Eustice said: “You judge people by the company they keep. He surrounds himself with clean people.”
Landis has the power to win — without drugs.
Landis is one of the only professional bicycle racers to regularly publish his daily wattage numbers from the power meter on his bike.
On Tour stage 17 — when Landis climbed four Alpine peaks and retook eight minutes from his rivals — he averaged 280 watts for five hours. Rather than being skeptical of his performance, Eustice said, cycling insiders were not surprised. Landis had done it before in training. That was the day the failed urine sample was taken.
“Despite the media hype, they knew he was the strongest going in,” Eustice said of cycling analysts.
Testosterone has a half-life of only two to four hours.
A normal testosterone-epitestosterone ratio is 1:1. Cycling officials allow as much as a 4:1 ratio. For Landis to have an 11:1 ratio at the end of the five-hour stage, as reported, he would have had to be gulping testosterone-laced water during the race.
“If he had that much testosterone in his system, he would have to be ingesting an enormous amount of testosterone,” Eustice said.
Testosterone doesn’t make sense.
The hormone is an archaic drug not used in modern cycling, Eustice said. When it has been used by athletes, they did so over long periods for a cumulative addition of muscle mass. It would have little or no benefit in the short term.
“It’s not a one-dose wonder,” Eustice said.
The ratio could be skewed.
Eustice has repeated claims, first citing unnamed sources, then made by Landis himself, that Landis’ testosterone level was not really high. Rather, he said, the epitestosterone level was so low as to be barely readable. Since the test is a ratio of the two, the low epitestosterone pushes the testosterone level artificially high.
The level of synthetic testosterone doesn’t add up.
With the seemingly damning revelation that synthetic testosterone was found in Landis’ urine, Eustice contends that there would have to be a lot of the synthetic in Landis’ system to give him an 11:1 ratio. According to Eustice’s sources, there wasn’t. There was only a very small amount of synthetic testosterone found.
If there is a “super-high reading of testosterone, there should be a super-high reading of synthetic,” Eustice argues.
His recovery after bonking was not remarkable.
Much has been made of the fact that Landis’ dramatic ride came a day after he suffered on the climbs and lost 10 minutes. Eustice said it is not unusual to have bad days during three weeks of racing. And, speaking from his own experience, Eustice said, it is not unusual to feel good afterward.
“It was normal that he had a great day the next day,” Eustice said.
Landis won because he knows how to win.
Landis played “mind games” with opponents during the Tour about which leading riders to chase and which to let go and where to expend their energy. He employed “old-fashioned bicycle race planning” in having dozens of water bottles ready to dump over his head to cool himself during the now-famous mountain climbing stage on the 100-degree day.
And he honed his tactics earlier in the season with wins in the Tour of California, Paris-Nice stage race and Tour of Georgia.
Landis ran a “brilliant, tactical” Tour de France. “We haven’t seen tactics for 15 years,” Eustice said.
The French lab has a bad reputation.
The Châtenay-Malabry lab where Landis’ urine was tested is the same one cited for violating confidentiality regulations regarding samples from seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong. Doping allegations against Armstrong were never substantiated.
Olympic officials had called for the lab to be suspended, Eustice said.
Eustice doesn’t believe the tests are “bullet-proof.” Rather, they are highly subjective, he said.
Eustice believes Landis should demand that the urine sample be DNA tested to ensure that it is indeed his.
Eustice doesn’t dismiss tampering with the sample, misidentification or foul play.
“Something doesn’t feel right about this entire process,” he said.
Landis’ case is now before the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which investigates doping allegations against Olympic-level American athletes. A ruling of guilt by the agency could strip Landis of the Tour title and ban him from professional cycling for two years. He has already been fired by his Swiss Phonak team.
An appeal by Landis to the international Court of Arbitration for Sport could drag on for six months or more before final resolution.
The legal fight could be expensive for Landis, who no longer has the support of his team or the bonus promised him for winning the Tour. He also no longer has his Tour winnings.
But, Eustice believes anti-doping officials have a fight on their hands. They underestimated Landis, and now they have made him angry — just as his opponents did in the Alps.
“He’s a good man. He’s a moral man and I think he’s been wronged,” Eustice said.
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