At the risk of beating a dead horse here (ok, no real risk, this horse is dead), and to cover the possiblity that the outcome was announced and that I just plain missed it (very unlikely), can someone update me on the status of the Floyd Landis arbitration hearing?
I mean, the hearing concluded in May, with the initial pronouncement that the outcome would be announced in six weeks. Personally, I thought that was a delaying tactic to allow the 2007 race to go off without major distractions from the prior year. Also, it would be easier to release an unpopular verdict after the hoopla from this years’ race died down. Only, this years’s race didn’t cooperate at all. People were being booted left and right for doping or doping like behavior.
But, shouldn’t that have made it easier for the verdict announcing Landis guilty? Afterall, just one more doper among many, who could question such an outcome after this year?
But, we are now going on three months with no decision. In my mind, I think this reflects the fact that the prosecutions case sucked big time. To boot, if Lemonds’ hearsay testimony (he said/she said) made the cut to take up some of the precious 24 hrs allotted to prosecution testimony, I think there must have been a lack of significant facts for the prosecution to present.
All this leads me to think Landis will be cleared. The delay in the announcement may be due to the powers that be are trying to work on damage control for another “known” American doper getting off the hook, in the eyes of the international community.
Then again, it isn’t very hard to turn that argument around and state that the arbitration board has misgivings about releasing a guilty verdict without plugging up all the holes in the science, which clearly the prosecution failed to do during the hearing.