free floyd?

I wrote a post Thursday night about Floyd Landis, the rider who won the Tour de France and has been subsequently revealed to have failed a testosterone test. The post was written with a presumption that Landis was guilty, and was mainly a forum for me to work out my longstanding I-know-many-folks-have-found-inspiration-in-Lance-Armstrong-but-can't-we-just-stop-and-think-for-a-moment-about-how-unlikely-it-is-he-wasn't-cheating-as-dirty-as-cycling-otherwise-is-and-as-dominant-a-performer-he-was issues. Then I took the post down, mostly because I was still getting comments on my Animals and Society post.

I've decided to leave it down. I've been reading more about this today (note to Eszter: while doing analyses on my other monitor), and it seems extremely plausible that he's not guilty, or at least that the evidence presently against him is not good evidence (even if the other sample comes back with the same result).

So, um, provisional apologies, Floyd.

I would suggest that maybe Floyd had high testosterone because he had recently challenged the Nielsen people to give him more money, but one puzzle in the Landis test is that apparently he's tested positive for high testosterone not by actually having high testosterone but having a weirdly low value of the non-performance-enhancing substance used to benchmark testosterone measures.

Incidentally, I follow the Tour de France with mild-to-moderate fervor every year. It's the perfect sport for the Jeremy lifestyle: (1) boring to watch on television, but fun to follow in the form of online summaries and (2) since it's taking place many time zones ahead, following it makes for a delightful morning diversion (note to all: while working on my other monitor).

P.S. I just saw the CNN.com video of Landis on Larry King Live. I certainly want him to be innocent. I even changed this post to strike through the "provisional" as an act of faith.