Until Proven Guilty

T-o-03’s post regarding Iban Mayo could not have been timelier as Velonews reported today that according to L'Equipe, the lab at Châtenay-Malabry has found his "B" sample positive.

Are you surprised?

His series of "B" samples have been bandied about and tested by more labs around the world that you would have thought that Mayo’s urine was something clinically relevant; you know like a vaccine for cancer?

At first glance, you’re probably thinking, “Great, we’ve caught another one. Science has made great strides in testing, so cheaters beware!”

But that’s not the whole story here. As in life, most issues are not completely black or white.

So what can we say for sure about cycling and the doping culture?

• Unequivocally and in unison we, the cycling community, can all say “doping and dopers suck.”
• Doping was pervasive and ubiquitous throughout the elite men’s European peloton and with as many riders, who have either openly confessed or been found to have doped, there are still a great many who have doped but have never come close to being caught.
• Scientific testing has made leaps and bounds to catch the offenders, but it still lags behind [not by much any longer] in its capabilities to catch them.

Gray Matters
I’ll not get into a discussion of the ethics of doping or whether “so and so” is guilty or not, but rather focus in on the science, or rather what many perceive as the infallibility of scientific testing in declaring a rider’s guilt and or innocence.

What gets me most irate is how people have judged riders like [Tyler] Hamilton, [Floyd] Landis, and Mayo in absolutes. A lab turned up a positive so he must be guilty. Perhaps we have been left jaded and cynical from all the years of consistent rider denials [and finally admissions], that we have no other recourse but to deal in absolutes. But by no means is the science infallible.

As a person who has a scientific background and who currently works in research, science’s fallibilities have been a hard concept to grasp.

There are reasons why people of science hinge their results [and other’s] on protocols, regulations, and reproducibility. These are the backbone of science for which we can lean on for certainty in the face of rigorous testing and doubt.

But in each of the above mentioned riders’ cases, one or more of these “backbones” were broken [violated]. So how can anyone say with complete certainty that Mayo, Hamilton, or Landis is completely guilty? With a bit of certainty, perhaps? Maybe not at all?

In Mayo’s case, Paul Giamatti’s character in Cinderella Man said it best, “…If they take this long with the decision, they’re gonna screw someone!”

After the first lab found Iban Mayo’s "B" sample “inconclusive” or “non-positive” did you honestly believe he was going to be ruled innocent? What about when a second lab produced the same “inconclusive” or “non-positive” result?

Perhaps the best deterrent to doping should be the threat to send a rider's samples through the French labs, as they seem to catch 100% of prospective dopers 100% of the time!

As they say in the world of fashion [where Paris is its capital], perhaps gray is the new black...