It may be too late for Zach Lund, but WADA has agreed to relax anti-doping sanctions that result in suspensions for athletes who inadvertantly ingested (or ingested trivial amounts of) stimulants tangentially found to improve performance. The group also hinted at possibly reducing the punishment for positive tests for cannabis, a drug with no known performance-enhancing characteristics in Olympic sports, but which has been tested at the strong urging of American representatives.

Michael Hiltzik follows up his superb series on sports labs (and the bogus science they practice) with a piece on Floyd Landis' innovative approach to charges he was doped when he won the Tour de France last summer:

Landis' team has posted online the laboratory reports on which the charge is based. This step, unprecedented in an anti-doping case, has allowed independent scientists to study the evidence against Landis — 370 pages of technical documentation.

The result is a vigorous debate on Internet message forums and bulletin boards about the science underlying the charge and whether Landis, successor to Lance Armstrong as America's leading competitive cyclist, has been unjustly accused.

Landis' representatives say they have gleaned a wealth of clues about how to attack the evidence when the case goes before an arbitration panel, probably this spring.

(snip)

Landis' defense team calls its decision to publicize the evidence against him the "wiki defense," referring to an online application allowing members of the public to collaborate on encyclopedias, dictionaries, computer programs and other services.

The idea is to counteract the advantages that anti-doping agencies have in bringing cases against athletes. As The Times reported this month, WADA uses a zero-tolerance standard, punishing athletes for unintentional or inconsequential violations of doping rules.

(snip)

With the wiki defense, Landis's team can subject the prosecution's scientific evidence to global scrutiny.

"There has been a tremendous amount of knowledge-sharing among the folks online, even among those who disagree about what the tests say," says Kevin Dykstra, 47, an amateur cyclist and professional chemist who has posted extensive analyses of the lab reports under the online alias "Duckstrap."

Dykstra's posts criticize the Paris lab for failing to demonstrate that it measured Landis' testosterone and epitestosterone accurately and that it could reach consistent results with multiple tests.

"To make the kind of accusations they made as publicly as they did, this has to be a slam-dunk," he says. "And this was not a slam-dunk. The data that's here leaves ample room for doubt."

Read the whole thing; it's the kind of investigative piece that wins Pulitzer Prizes.

[UPDATE: For more on all things Floyd Landis, both pro and con, check out this site.]

Since his demotion as a columnist/blogger, Michael Hiltzik has been earning his paycheck, with a series on the scientific fraud masquerading as "performance enhancing drug tests," here and here. His findings:

"Athletes are presumed guilty and denied routine access to lab data potentially relevant to their defense.

Trivial and accidental violations draw penalties similar to those for intentional use of illicit performance-enhancing substances.

Anti-doping authorities or sports federations have leaked details of cases against athletes or made public assertions of their guilt before tests were confirmed or appeals resolved.

Arbitrators, theoretically neutral judges, are bound by rules drafted and enforced by the World Anti-Doping Agency and its affiliates, including the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. They have almost no discretion to adjust penalties to fit individual circumstances."

One sad case involved Zach Lund, an athlete cheated out of a chance to compete in the last Winter Olympics:

Accused athletes find that challenging a system stacked against them can be extraordinarily costly, prompting some to abandon any effort at defense.

"It wiped out my life savings and my college savings," Zach Lund, 27, a world-class skeleton sled racer from Salt Lake City, said of his effort to clear himself of doping charges.

In 2005, a drug test found traces of finasteride, an ingredient in anti-baldness medication, in his urine. The substance had been banned only that year over concerns that it might mask the presence of steroids in urine samples. That concern, however, was based on a single study by a WADA lab that had not been peer-reviewed by a medical journal. And Lund had been taking the hair restoration prescription for five years.

"I lost all my sponsorships and my funding" from the U.S. Olympic Committee, Lund said in an interview. "I even had to get money from my family and friends. The system is broken. Right now, it's catching people who make mistakes."

An arbitration panel acknowledged that the finasteride came from Lund's medication. In upholding a one-year suspension that deprived him of a chance to compete in the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, which opened on the very day of the ruling, arbitrators called him "an honest athlete" and acknowledged that the substance had no performance-enhancing effect.

They conceded that they had reached their decision "with a heavy heart": Although Lund had faithfully disclosed his medication on anti-doping forms at every event, no official had ever alerted him to the change in finasteride's status.

Moreover, the conflicts of interest abound: scientists who work for the labs in question are forbidden from giving expert testimony in favor of an athlete who challenges the tests, and the arbitrators who hear appeals have professional and pecuniary relationships with the anti-doping agencies, making it nearly impossible to find an impartial judge.

In other words, it's a racket, the exposure of which should give Mr. Hiltzik a shot at another well-deserved Pulitzer Prize.

The report, released today, exonerating Lance Armstrong for blood doping before his 1999 Tour de France victory, also takes a long-overdue crack at the unethical conduct of the World Anti-doping Agency (WADA) and the autocratic martinet who runs it, Dick Pound. Among its findings are that the tests conducted on the urine samples tied to Armstrong did not satisfy even the minimum standards for a finding of a positive result, and that WADA, the laboratory that conducted the test, and the French ministry in charge of the lab all refused to provide evidence and fully cooperate with the investigation.

The worst person in sports, and perhaps in a whole realm of endeavors, is Dick Pound, the autocrat charged with running the World Anti-Doping Agency. Case in point: yesterday's one-year suspension of American medal hopeful in the skeleton, Zach Lund. Mr. Lund was booted out of the Olympics following detection of the anti-baldness medication, Propecia, after a blood test last November. Propecia has an ingredient that can be used to mask steroid use, although it would take an intake of massive proportions for it to have that intended effect.

And Lund, 26, is clearly an individual who has reason to take the drug, a conclusion reflected in the Court for the Arbitration of Sports, which upheld the penalty in spite of issuing a finding Lund to "be an honest athlete, who was open and frank about his failures", and ruling that "it was entirely satisfied that Mr Lund was not a cheat". In fact, Lund had disclosed his use of the drug for some five years before the hammed came down this time, and it took more than a year for the drug screeners to even find the trace amounts of the masking ingredient in his system.

Enter Mr. Pound, whose previous notoriety on this site came last summer, in his role in backing a fraudulent attempt to "test" Lance Armstrong, as well as his frequent attacks on the sports of baseball, soccer, and ice hockey for not dishing out lifetime bans to first-offenders. Pound, exulting over his ability to crush the dreams of an athlete over a technicality, stated that whether or not Lund was a cheat was beside the point:

There have to be other treatments for hair loss, for hair replacement, than stuff that is a masking agent — that are on the prohibited list. I think he was lucky to get one year, frankly. (emphasis mine)

Damned lucky, I'd say; now he won't miss any big competitions in 2007.

In addition to being a clueless asshole, Pound may have done more than anyone to completely discredit his movement for the public to take performance-enhancing drugs in sports seriously. If Lund is not a cheat, if he's taking Propecia to stop male-pattern baldness, without the high blood pressure side effects that other drugs (like Rogaine) have, and not to mask the use of anabolic steroids, which is what the regulation is designed to stop, he shouldn't receive any suspension, much less one that will take him out of a competition he's spent his lifetime gearing for. And he shouldn't have some smug little hitler suggesting that he should have gotten a hair transplant instead.