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 | 2006 Tour de France Landis finishes first in race that had heroics, crashes and a drug scandal that rocked the race even before it began. |
The fact is, while the latest leak did not necessarily come from Chatenay-Malabry, information somehow makes its way from the French lab to L'Equipe with metronomic regularity, which is as worrisome as it is convincing. We depend on arbiters of justice to be beyond reproach. When WADA and USADA officials can't properly control the evidence, or their own mouths, it shakes our confidence in their control of the entire process.
The Landis case has followed a familiar WADA pattern: a high-profile athlete's supposedly confidential test results wind up identified by name in the newspapers, sometimes prematurely. This pattern has been seen at other WADA-accredited labs, not just France's, as in the case of Marion Jones, whose initial positive test for the endurance-boosting drug EPO made the American papers, but was not confirmed by subsequent results at a California lab.
The WADA has long had a fixation on the absoluteness of a positive drug test. It insists on the infallibility of its lab work, no matter how iffy, and on the sacrosanct infallibility of its rules, no matter how harsh. There is little room in its code for the inadvertent, the accidental, or the extenuating circumstance. No matter how an athlete wound up with a banned substance in his or her system, he or she is presumed guilty. There is simply no room for the mistake.
But Landis, whatever you think of him, has jabbed his finger at a central flaw and hypocrisy in the doping system: The WADA accepts all kinds of sloppy mistakes from the Chatenay-Malabry lab that it would never accept from an athlete. Drink from the wrong bottle, take the wrong allergy remedy, make a mistake on a form or forget to show up for a drug test, and you face a two-year ban, maybe worse, regardless of the innocence of your mistake or legitimacy of your excuse.
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The WADA and the USADA are as ethically flawed as the dopers they pursue. It's time to rework the anti-doping code into a more just and merciful one, one that takes into account the possibility of a mistake, and which allows for repentance. Why should athletes be held to an iron, inflexible standard, while doping agencies and accredited labs are permitted mistakes, indiscretions, and lapses?
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