J'accuse!
The accusations brought against Lance Armstrong in L'Equipe
on August 23, 2005, have no scientific or legal merit. In
particular, The protocol of anonymity of samples and the requirement
to test an A and B sample was designed to
1. Maintain scientific correctness
2. Protect the rights of athletes
In this case, the protocol was not followed which means that the test
reported by L'Equipe has no scientific validity and that the
disclosure of the results violates the rights of the athlete in
question. Everyone agrees with this, since it has been acknowledged
that no legal or sporting sanction can be pursued. Therefore, the
L'Equipe article and its general acceptance in the French press is
simply a precedent for disregarding scientific principles as well as
disregarding athletes' rights. An in depth look at the ethical
consequences of this incident is given in this article by Tim Maloney
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news.php?id=features/2005/privacy_and_ethics
Therefore, there are no facts to discuss here, only illegal methods
used to tarnish the reputation of the most dominant Tour de France
rider of all time.
Since no charges can be brought against Armstrong, it is clear that he
has no need to defend himself against these spurious accusations.
However, one can surely believe in his complete innocence. For
example, it would be very stupid to use EPO during the post Festina
Affair Tour de France, when police raids were considered inevitable,
as was expressed by his team mate Jonathan Vaughters
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news.php?id=features/2005/vaughters_1999
and as he has shown in his Tour de France victories, Lance Armstrong
has never been stupid. Another reason was given by Armstrong himself:
After beating cancer and making cancer research and recovery his
number one goal in life, it would be ridiculous to once again put his
health in danger.
If one does believe in Armstrong's innocence, then what is one to make
of the positive EPO tests reported in L'Equipe? After some thought,
the O.J. Simpson case comes to mind, in which the possibility of
tampering with evidence was a key point leading to acquittal.
However, in the O.J. Simpson case, there was so much evidence that a
large number of otherwise trustworthy individuals would have had to
independently decide to frame O.J. Simpson. In this case, the number
of people required to tamper with the evidence is much smaller, and
the possibility of wrong doing much greater, since the procedure by
which L'Equipe obtained their evidence was itself fraudulent. In
particular, the informant who gave them the correspondence between
anonymous samples at the Chatenay Malabry laboratory is already guilty
of serious breach of ethics, as is the person who allowed them to
examine the Chatenay Malabry documentation, which was guaranteed
anonymity for all scientific and legal purposes. Therefore, there are
two people who are already guilty of serious misconduct and either one
could have easily tampered with evidence in order to frame Lance
Armstrong.
My suspicions about tampering in order to frame Armstrong were first
raised by purely phenomelogical issues: The L'Equipe article was
immediately accepted as fact by the French media, indicating to me
that the climate was ripe for this information to be believed without
further scrutiny. As every forger knows, one sells fakes to people who
desperately want to believe them real. The second element is that the
revelations happened just after Armstrong's retirement, considerably
decreasing the possibility of legal action on his part or by other
organisations finding fault with the articles. Finally, the
publication of the articles just a month after Armstrong's retirement
assured that the object of the attack would not be a faded memory. In
other words, the article came at a time when it would get the most
attention with the least amount of formal scrutiny.
If one believes that tampering occured then the natural question
is the identity of the perpetrator or perpetrators. In my opinion,
there is one outstanding candidate, the person who has shown the least
amount of professional ethics in a profession requiring the highest
standard of ethics, that is, Jacques de Ceaurriz, director of the Anti
Doping laboratory of Chatenay Malabry. Indeed, he has never expressed
any objection that confidential research material from his institute
was surreptitiously examined by newspaper reporters. Nor has he
brought up any objection that the scientific and legal protocol for
proving a doping offence, in which his institute plays the central
role, was totally violated. On the contrary, he provided a statement
to L'Equipe that was published alongside their original articles,
confirming their findings. Even this statement runs contrary to
scientific ethics -- he gives a subjective opinion about the validity
of the institute's EPO test on frozen samples, without having any
scientific basis (no study of the validity of EPO testing on long term
frozen samples exists) and without qualifying his opinion as being
devoid of empirical basis. Such qualification is important in order to
maintain a scientific standard of rigour and also to communicate
uncertainty to laymen who might otherwise take a scientist's word as
fact. However, any such qualification would completely negate the
impact of his assertion that his EPO test is 100% reliable even on
long frozen samples. Note that a scientist can be reasonably expected
to give his opinion on matters which he does not fully understand, if
the issues are innocuous, but not when his opinion directly harms a
public personality and is stated as if it had full scientific value.
As the previous paragraph shows, Jacques de Ceaurriz has validated a
newspaper article which violates the very principles on which the
institute's research is based and has passed off his personal opinion
as scientific fact. Therefore, I do not find it such a stretch of the
imagination that he was somehow involved in tampering with samples.
At the very least, I now believe it quite likely that he gave personal
permission to the L'Equipe reporters to examine the privileged
documents belonging to his institute. Already, this would be such a
breach of ethics that it would require his immediate dismissal as
director (I believe that his lack of interest in the misconduct that
has occured at his laboratory should already be grounds for his
dismissal). It also seems possible that he is aware of the person who
gave the correspondence between the anonymous sample numbers and the
athletes, probably someone at the French Cycling Federation, which is
one of the only places where the correspondence between the anonymous
samples and the athletes could be known.
If any one of the above conjectures is correct, then one must wonder
how the director of a respected institute could get involved in such
mischief. I believe that the answer, as usual, comes down to human
weakness, and that the director fell victim to exactly the same
temptations as the dopers he has made his living trying to catch. In
particular, the director of a French research institute does not make
a lot of money, somewhere in the vicinity of $100,000 a year, so on
the order of one hundred times less than Lance Armstrong. Surely this
difference in finances can bear heavily on someone coming close to
retirement and an investigation into his private life might provide
some surprises and clues. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the
Institute's EPO test has been his life's work, even though he himself
did not do the research, and his laboratory gained world wide
notoriety with the acceptance of its test as the standard for finding
EPO doping as these articles attest
http://www.humanite.presse.fr/journal/2000-07-01/2000-07-01-227887
http://www.humanite.presse.fr/journal/2003-12-31/2003-12-31-385348
(English translation)
http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/pro/art.php?artid=199
However, even here his ethical standards are found wanting. Indeed,
another laboratory in Lyon has accused Jacques de Ceaurriz and his
laboratory of illegally appropriating the EPO test for themselves. The
research leading to the EPO test was done by Francoise Lasne at the
Hopitaux de Lyon which applied for the patent in 1998 before she went
to work in Chatenay Malabry. Christian Collombel, the director of the
Laboratoire des Hospice Civils de Lyon, has accused Jacques de
Ceaurriz of appropriating the test for himself by manipulating the
media. A full article is given here:
http://www.inapg.inra.fr/ens_rech/bio/biotech/textes/techniqu/dopage/EPO.html
Manipulation of the media in order to steal an EPO test along with the
his unethical stance in the L'Equipe affair (and subsequent media
attention) certainly opens the door to even more serious misconduct.
I hope that Jacques de Ceaurriz reads this article. I am certain that
his reaction would be outrage at being accused without there being any
tangible proof. At the very least, if he is innocent of the more
serious
charges I bring up, he would realise the difficult position Armstrong
has been put in as a result of the L'Equipe articles, which de
Ceaurriz has supported against all the principles of his profession.
When I first saw the L'Equipe article, my reaction was that France
needed a new Dreyfus. What it actually needs is a new Zola.
-Ilan Vardi