The Tour de France was thrown into its biggest crisis since the 1998 drugs scandal following the suspension of three of its biggest names on Friday.

Germany's Jan Ullrich, Spain's Francisco Mancebo and Italy's Ivan Basso were all dropped after being implicated in a doping investigation in Spain. Organizers suggested even more riders could also be suspended from their teams.

dasher:
I saw an ad in VeloNews that was unintentionally funny. It shows Jan Ullrich -- one of the favorites suspended for doping (a written doping regimen from 2005 was published this week) -- promoting Giant brand bikes. The tag line says: \"It's all about the winning formula.\" The copy reads: \"Take one part T-Mobile Team, two parts Tour de France, and add a healthy dose of advanced engineering....\" Unfortunately, that \"advanced engineering\" has now all but ended his career.

Tour de France champion Floyd Landis said Monday he hopes to have his ailing right hip replaced within the next month so he can return to the sport with the possibility of defending his title next July.

Speaking with American reporters in a conference call from his hotel room in Paris, Landis said he remains confident that he can resume his racing career, despite the fact that he will become the first professional cyclist and only one of a small number of professional athletes to successfully undergo total hip replacement surgery.

\"I haven't made a definite decision,\" Landis said. \"I would like to have it done within the next month, because the recovery period is six to eight weeks and then I should be able to train. Obviously, it won't be at the level I am now, because I'll have had a month-and-a-half off. If things go as they should, without complications, based on what other people have told me... by next spring, I probably won't be in the same shape I was this spring, but I'll be back racing without any trouble.\"

DebW:
After the race, I went back to my Outside magazine with Landis on the cover and read his profile. In it, he jokes about an e-mail he sent to people that shows his scrunched-up face Photoshopped onto, to quote the magazine, \"the heavily muscled body of an ax-wielding maniac.\" The image has a caption: \"I'M A HOMO.\"
That's not the word that comes to mind now.
Deb

After the UCI announced yesterday that one rider had an A sample positive in the 2006 Tour de France, there has been strong speculation about the identity of the rider. The UCI will not confirm the name of the rider until the B sample results come back, but that could be within the week.

Under the Tour de France doping controls, at the end of each stage, the stage winner and yellow jersey wearer are tested, plus at least two random selections, as well as two reserves.

The Times newspaper is reporting that the positive was for testosterone, and occurred after Stage 17 to Morzine, won by Floyd Landis (Phonak). The yellow jersey was retained on that stage by Oscar Pereiro (Caisse d'Epargne-Illes Balears) by a slender 12 seconds, following Landis' phenomenal 130km attack that stunned the field.

On the other hand, La Gazzetta dello Sport reports that the positive was for a stimulant, it happened in the last week, and involved an important rider \"high up in the classification\".

Both newspapers, in addition to several other European news outlets, are drawing on circumstantial events to indicate it could be the Tour's overall winner, Floyd Landis.

Apparently, Landis was supposed to have competed in a post-Tour criterium in Chaam in The Netherlands on Wednesday night, but did not race, citing hip problems. He left the hotel at 4:30pm with team manager John Lelangue, and also cancelled a criterium appointment in Denmark for today (Thursday).

His sudden withdrawal surprised race organisers, as it's understood the regular appearance fee at a post-Tour criterium for the reigning yellow jersey is 60,000 euros.

George Twins fan:
Landis has won it! Pretty amazing stuff. Wonder if he'll get a congratulatory call from Lance Armstrong?

Oooh the Frenchies must be rippin' pissed off!

Floyd Landis says he didn't do it -- didn't inject testosterone, didn't apply a testosterone patch to any part of his body. Floyd Landis just returned my call, and I asked him straight up: \"Did you do it, bro?\"

He said, \"No, c'mon man,\" in what would turn out to be the first of several denials.

* * *

He raised the possibility that the cortisone shots he's been taking for his ravaged right hip -- the hip he'll soon have replaced -- may have had some effect on the test. Then he revealed this: \"I've had a thyroid condition for the last year or so and have been taking small amounts of thyroid hormone. It's an oral dose, once a day.\"

He raised the possibility that that medication may have skewed the test that appears to damn him.

* * *

He was talking about a visit I paid to the team bus a week ago today. The day before -- in what had been his lowest moment in many weeks -- Landis appeared to have ridden himself off the podium and out of the top 10. As the Tour had unfolded, as he'd taken the lead and then relinquished it, then cracked spectacularly, he had not seemed like a rider under the influence of performance-enhancing drugs. In fact, the French were down on him for racing too conservatively, for not attacking or going for stage wins.

The next morning I went by the Phonak team bus (as I wrote in my Tour dispatch a week ago). It was eerily deserted, Landis having already been dubbed irrelevant. He sat on the steps of the bus and we chatted. After his incredible ride that day, I was a little embarrassed by what I'd said: I told him I respected that he'd finished the stage, no matter how long it took. I told him I looked forward to seeing what he did in the final time trial -- something about silver linings.

He smiled, and told me, basically, that he expected to make up some of that time that afternoon. He told me he was feeling better.

He went out rode himself into the lore of the Tour.

What to make of that ride now?

* * *

Then you read what German doctor Kurt Moosburger recently told Cyclingnews.com: \"You can do a hard Alpine stage without doping. But after that, the muscles are exhausted. You need -- depending on your training conditions -- up to three days in order to regenerate.\"

To help recover, testosterone and human growth hormone can be used. \"Both are made by the body and are therefore natural substances,\" he said. \"They help to build muscle as well as in muscle recovery.\"

Dr. Moosburger explained how it was done. \"You put a standard testosterone patch that is used for male hormone-replacement therapy on your scrotum and leave it there for about six hours. The small dose is not sufficient to produce a positive urine result in the doping test, but the body actually recovers faster.\"

It would be funny -- if it weren't heartbreaking -- to think that as he sat outside the team hotel last Wednesday night, explaining his collapse, Landis was already getting a little help from a patch on a tender part of his anatomy.

Andrew Pipe, a physician and medical and scientific adviser to the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sports in Ottawa, says that synthetic testosterone is normally injected, but taking it in the middle of an athletic competition would have little effect in boosting performance.

\"Anabolic steroids, of which testosterone is the granddaddy, can have a central nervous system effect,\" he said. \"But anabolic steroids largely work by increasing the capacity for training and increasing the bulk and tolerance of muscles. That isn't going to happen in a few hours.\"

Pipe cautioned that the initial uproar over the high levels of testosterone detected in Landis's system may prove to be premature, depending on the outcome of additional testing that will have to be carried out before a definitive judgment is made. Taken by itself, he said, an elevated testosterone finding in the rider's A urine sample is enough to raise suspicions, but it does not automatically implicate the athlete as a doping cheat.

\"I think it's very important that people take a deep breath and understand the implications and significance of what's being reported,\" Pipe said last night. He said that some men have naturally high levels of testosterone.

The leading expert on testing for the ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone, and for testing whether the ratio is the result of natural biology or is the result of doping, is Don Catlin -- the director of the WADA-accredited drug-testing laboratory here in the USA.

Catlin has said \"It's possible to have a T/E ratio of over six and still not have taken testosterone. Further, Catlin is aware that the traditional methods of deriving a T/E ratio are notoriously unreliable. With those methods, figuring out whether the ratio was \"natural\" or the result of doping would require that a series of four urine samples be taken over a number of days, and then attempting to guestimate from the pattern of results of four days of testing what the person's natural ratio is. That process is complicated by the fact that drinking alcohol, and taking various medications can easily jump someone's ratio from 4:1 on Monday to 12:1 on Tuesday.

\"He does not have a high level of testosterone. That's not been documented. He has a high ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone in his urine,\" Landis' personal physician, Dr. Brent Kay, said Friday night on CNN's \"Larry King Live.\"

\"Which could be due to an elevated testosterone level. It could be due to a low epitestosterone level. And it could be due to a variety of other factors with handling and specimen contamination and various other things.\"

Kay, speaking from Los Angeles, also said that using testosterone would hurt rather than help a cyclist.

* * *

\"And it's crazy to think that a Tour de France professional cyclist would be using testosterone, particularly in the middle of a race. It's a joke. Every sports medicine expert, physician, trainer, scientist that I've talked to in the last day, have really the same opinion, 'No way. This is a joke.'\"

Triathlete cleared for EPO false positive

The Flemish government's disciplinary commission has cleared Belgian triathlete Rutger Beke of taking EPO, Het Laatste Nieuws has reported. Beke tested positive for the blood-boosting drug at a triathlon in Knokke in September 2004, and was suspended for 18 months in March this year.

Like many athletes, Beke insisted that he was not guilty, even though he returned positive tests from the anti-doping labs in Ghent, Belgium, and Cologne, Germany. He took his case to the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium, where researchers tried to determine whether he was an example of a \"false positive\" - someone who returns a positive result, despite not having taken the drug. That proved to be the case, as Beke was found to naturally excrete proteins that would yield a positive test.

Beke was cleared on Tuesday, August 9, because there was \"no evidence that he took EPO\". His case is a landmark one for triathlon and other endurance sports such as cycling, where EPO has been one of the most commonly abused drugs in the last 15 years. It has now cast doubt on all EPO positives in cycling since the urine test was introduced in 2001.

The tests performed on Landis' A sample included an Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry (IRMS) procedure, used to determine whether the testosterone is exogenous (contained within, but originating from outside the body) or endogenous (produced by the body itself). In the case of Landis, L'Equipe reported that the analysis found testosterone of artificial origin. It's understood the French newspaper received this information from a source within Chatenay-Malabry labortory that conducted the test on Landis' sample.

At the top of the Col des Saissies, Halgand claimed first-place points. Landis was 3'10 behind; and the peloton was a further 3'25 back. Halgand attacked the lead group on the descent. He led the 10 others by 20 at the feedzone (97.5km), Landis by 55 and the yellow jersey's peloton by 4'50. Landis caught the 10 others at the 102.5km mark. Halgand led until the 122km mark and claimed first place at the 1st sprint. Landis was second and moments later caught up with the stage leader.

LarryC:
The other sample gets tested Saturday. But what is Floyd's excuse going to be for the synthetic testosterone? It sounds like he's not only a cheat but a bald-faced liar, and a disgrace to his family and to cycling. If the B sample tests the same, he's gone from hero of the year to scumbag of the year. Barry Bond's pantheon of iniquity is getting crowded.

swiminbuff:
Thats where the Jack Daniels excuse comes into play :rolleyes [/QB]

gmginsfo:
I find it incomprehensible that a guy from his background would do anything like this.

Bill W:
sorry I missed that, gmginsfo -- I would've realized it's members of organized religions you're saying are more moral than everybody else.

gmginsfo:
To spell it out so even you might understand it - if it makes it past your several tiers of baggage - it's this one member of the Mennonites, a group noted for their piety, simplicity and rejection of worldly things, whom I wanted to believe was above using drugs in his sport. Versteh?