The LA Times article.

Oz Report forum.

Implications that Tour de France winner Floyd Landis may have used testosterone to bolster his endurance or add a shot of aggressiveness late in the race were dismissed by an expert Monday.

John K. Amory, an expert in testosterone therapy at the University of Washington in Seattle who was testifying for the American cyclist, said that no known pattern of doping was consistent with the urine test results reported by a French lab.

"I don't know of a physiological process" that could account for the lab's results, Amory said.

Amory said he found the French lab's test results contradictory and scientifically implausible. He testified that the lab's documentation didn't "make a lot of sense."

Dr. Wolfram Meier-Augenstein of Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, an expert in the carbon isotope ratio test with which LNDD analyzed Landis' sample, precisely outlined a raft of errors and false assumptions he said were made by the lab. He asserted that LNDD's work was so poor that its findings amounted to "speculation."

Most critically, he stated that LNDD's measurement of certain key metabolic ratios in the Landis sample violated standards of accuracy appearing in technical specifications issued by the World Anti-Doping Agency. If Landis can show that LNDD's work violated WADA standards, the arbitrators will be required to assume the violations caused the positive reading unless USADA can prove otherwise.

Meier-Augenstein testified that LNDD's analytical work, as demonstrated by its chromatograms — which depict the chemical components of Landis' urine as peaks on a chart — was so sloppy that "I have no confidence in the data."

Meier-Augenstein also observed that LNDD's readings on Landis' urine were so far out of line with results found in the clinical literature, even in studies of known testosterone users, that they raised more questions about the lab's technique than about Landis' actions.

"If I were running this lab and got this result," he said, "before I was on the phone to say this guy's a positive, I would run the test again to make sure the results stand up to scrutiny."

Amory said he volunteered to testify for Landis without pay after concluding that LNDD's documentation of test results was so inadequate.

He told the arbitration panel that patterns of testosterone readings found in Landis' urine samples, taken at various race stages, were inconsistent with one other. They also were inconsistent, he said, with any conceivable pattern of testosterone doping, whether by injection, oral administration or topical gel.

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