sad day for justice - landis loses CAS appeal
June 30, 2008 – 10:11 amI totally expected Floyd Landis to lose his anti-doping appeal to the Court for the Arbitration of Sport, but not for the reasons most of you would likely expect. I am biased to think Landis didn’t use testosterone but from a legal jurispudence perspective that’s irrelevant. What should matter is that one’s guilt and innocence can be proven with fairness and beyond reasonable reproach. And for anyone who has bothered to pay attention to the evidence and facts of Landis’s appeal knows, neither was found here. For full details, source documents, commentary and amazingly detailed analysis I refer all to Trust But Verify - an amazing resource.
I used to think all accussed “dopers” were guilty SOB’s, but after reading the literature and background - I am convinced that most anti-doping exercises are witch hunts led by sloppy labs with questionable motives and purposes. If I were a professional athlete that had their livlihood at the hands and mercy of the French lab that produced the “positive” result in Floyd Landis’s case, then I would shudder with fear every day I gave a sample that today I would be branded a cheat - rightly or wrongly. With a guilty until proven innocent appeals process with no credence given to outside independent experts there is little hope of overturning “guilty” rulings. With no checks on procedural errors, omissions, and independence, one’s livlihood is in the hands of a group of people who make McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings look reasonable.
My only hope is that there is a legal path for Landis to pursue this in federal courts where he can contest his lack of justice and expose the anti-doping corrupt jihad for what it is.
