How Floyd Landis won't be proving his innocence
"I have a new goal, to prove myself innocent," Landis told ABC's Good Morning America.Let's think for a moment about how you prove things, scientifically. You form hypotheses and then test them experimentally. Then you verify that the experiments can be replicated.
By contrast, the kind of proof I'm sure Landis has in mind should strike a chord with the Discovery Institute's "intelligent design" advocates. It will consist of muddying the waters, throwing up isolated "problems" with the theory that the non-human-origin testosterone was in his system because he introduced it there, picking at the testing methods, envisioning meddling that might have occurred but for which there is no evidence, etc.
But whereas what happened over eons is challenging to test experimentally, what happened with Landis could be tested. Landis is still around, with plenty of time on his hands and a stated willingness to clear his name. His bike is still around. France is still around. Jack Daniel's is still around. You see where I'm going with this.
Landis could, if he wanted to, commission an independently monitored reenactment of all or part of the Tour de France, during which he would follow as closely as possible all his routines of the Tour. I'm sure his diet and such are written down in team records. He would be constantly supervised so there was no possibility that he could dose himself with testosterone. In effect, the Tour would have been his original experiment to test the hypothesis "my body produces an unnaturally high ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone, and some of the testosterone in my body is somehow of non-human origin." The Clear-My-Name-Tour would be an attempt to replicate the original experiment.
The reason you will never see this kind of proof—and a similar test result in a simulated Tour would certainly go a long way toward proving that Landis is the freak of nature he claims to be—is that no one has any innocent explanation for the first results except that the very reliable test was somehow wrong or someone tampered with the original "experiment" by dosing Landis with testosterone.
Still, you'd kind of think that if Landis really believed what he was saying, he would be considering a "let's replicate the results" approach. Seems like a simple, common-sense approach and he seems to be a simple common-sense kind of guy. My guess, however, is that he's probably really looking only for plausible deniability or a level of "proof" with which the intelligent design advocates purport to be satisfied. So the only way Landis will ever be vindicated is if someone confesses to dosing him without his knowledge.
Regardless of his guilt, though, what a great P.R. strategy it would be to re-ride the entire Tour route to clear his name (I'm aware that such a solo ride wouldn't truly replicate the Tour, but now we're talking P.R.). By the end, even if the tests showed no elevated levels or synthetic testosterone, all that people would remember was how much Floyd Landis believed in his innocence and how far he went to try to prove it.
But of course this will never happen.
I wonder if he'll risk a polygraph. I doubt it.
posted at 12:11 PM
1 Comments:
Hi, I've linked to this article at my blog on the Landis allegations at trust but verify.
TBV
Post a Comment
<< Home