Is Landis on War Tribunal? One might assume that would be the case. Almost every news headline has accused the tour winner as guilty, before having a chance to defend himself.

The A sample determined Landis’s TE ratio was deemed as suspicious. The suspicion leads experts to believe that Landis has supplemented testosterone in his own body. This practice was common in the eighties with swimmers and other Olympic athletes. Modern day athletes with access to doctors would have an ample supply of epitestosterone to balance the ratio.

Why did Floyd not have a supply of epitestosterone? Did Floyd administer his own drugs that he is being accused of taking? News headlines are riddled with words like “Scandal”. Maybe he took nothing; after all, he has not been accused of drugs but irregular testosterone levels, and he is only human. The legal levels are based on science, but science is founded on the idea that everything must be disprovable, not etched in stone as the final, unyielding word.

Horses are bred and so are dogs. Secretariat was one of the greatest horses of all times. The biopsy of the race horse showed that its heart capacity approached twelve gallons (a ridiculous volume even by equine standards). Some horse experts say that the Triple Crown winner can never be duplicated but it doesn’t stop them from trying to breed another winner.

Many dog owners buy breeds because of their common features, such as behavior. English Mastiffs were bred as guard dogs. Breeders even cross breed them with bulldogs to make them consistently fiercer. A friend told me that it was amazing what people were doing with science when they thought that the world was flat. Through eugenics, we have arrived at a point where we can breed for specific traits. Producing a desired phenotype (physical gene expression) in horses and dogs can be accomplished in a fairly reliable and predictable manner.

Humans, however, are a different story. We experimented with eugenics in the past and we can assume that this occurred in a greater frequency by the Nazis as well. Going back further in time, Tiberius Claudius was not allowed to breed into the normal population, which is ironic as he was the Emperor of Rome. The point is that humans are not bred and therefore there is much we do not know about our genetic potentials and there are still many unknowns of what the body’s limits are. We don’t all conform to neat, concise ratios, grams-per-milliliter, and parts-per-million created by various well-intended organizations. Statistically speaking, the UCI limits account for the vast majority of us, but there are always exceptions. Even sanity is statistical.

My neighbor once told me that in his earlier years he had developed some kind of adrenal gland disorder. He knew not what was taking over his body. His appetite could destroy meat lover’s pizzas from Pizza Hut. The man also said that he could not sleep at night, but would go out and rake leaves in his, and the neighbor’s yard. Later in the story he described his urine as being orange and thick. One would presume he was worried, but in fact, he did not care because he was shedding his extra weight and his sexual appetite was exploding (although I’m not sure if that’s something a guy needs to worry about.) Apparently he had many women that were pleased to help him with his new condition despite his being married. In his view, these infidelities were justified by this adrenal gland problem. The point is that my neighbor had irregular hormone levels at some point in his life that occurred naturally and were grossly out of the normal range of you and I, and it happened without taking drugs.

I witnessed Floyd Landis in ‘99 sail off the front for forty or so miles of the second stage of the Redlands stage race in California. He had on tube socks and raced for the Lords of Dirt mountain bike team. He did not win the stage but made his presence known after exhausting every major pro team. Team Mercury hired him shortly after.

Science can’t explain every freakish bodily function yet they are trying to find universal common ground, like string theory and Quantum Mechanics. While these can only be explained as theories, it may be safe to say that the body of Landis is capable of the unusual.
-SKILES KEITH

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