The science of doping : commentary / Donald A. Berry. – (Nature (2008) 454 (7 August) : p. 692-693) doi:10.1038/454692a
Recently, the international Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld doping charges against cyclist Floyd Landis, stripping him of his title as winner of the 2006 Tour de France and suspending him from competition for two years. The court agreed with the majority opinion of a divided three-member American Arbitration Association (AAA) panel and essentially placed a stamp of approval on a laboratory test indicating that Landis had taken synthetic testosterone. Although Landis asserts his innocence, his options for recourse have all but dried up.
In my opinion, close scrutiny of quantitative evidence used in Landis’s case show it to be non-informative. This says nothing about Landis’s guilt or innocence. It rather reveals that the evidence and inferential procedures used to judge guilt in such cases don’t address the question correctly. The situation in drugtesting labs worldwide must be remedied. Cheaters evade detection, innocents are falsely accused and sport is ultimately suffering.
Related article:
Doping: a paradigm shift has taken place in testing
Doping: probability that testing doesn’t tell us anything new
Doping: ignorance of basic statistics is all too common
/ Pierre-Edouard Sottas, Christophe Saudan, Marial Saugy; Geoffrey Baird; Matthew Fero. – (Nature (2008) 455 (11 September) : p. 166)
