King Kaufman's Sports Daily

"The dog ate my homework" vs. "There is an agenda here." Floyd Landis' drug-test results are a question of faith.

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Aug. 8, 2006 | The Floyd Landis case has moved, as these things always do, to the realm of religion.

You either believe the drug testers, who say that Landis' urine contained an elevated testosterone level and evidence of a synthetic version of the hormone, and that there is no explanation other than Landis' guilt, or you believe the Tour de France champion, who says, "There are possibly hundreds of reasons why this test could be this way."

Landis also says UCI, the international cycling federation, has stacked the deck against him by divulging test results before he'd seen them, "forcing me to try and defend myself when I had no idea what was going on," and by misrepresenting the quality of the evidence against him.

"It appears as though there is more of an agenda here than just enforcing the rules," he said.

Whichever way you believe, there's probably very little anyone can do to bring you to the other side.

There are still people out there, I'm told, who believe Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire are innocent victims, just as there are those who believe the Earth is flat, dinosaurs never existed and Dennis Rodman was a more valuable basketball player than Michael Jordan.

Those of us in the typing classes like to grant ourselves medical degrees at times like this, chatting confidently about epitestosterone levels and hematocrit counts and rates of synthesis. Most of us don't know what we're talking about.

Or, well, I should only speak for myself. I don't know what I'm talking about. I had to look up that testosterone is a hormone. I didn't even take biology and I had to go to summer school for chemistry, forgetting most of what I learned by Labor Day. The rest I had wrong in the first place.

But I believe, my friends, that most of us don't know what we're talking about. Our keys are like rosaries. We believe or don't, and we finger them accordingly.

We like the cut of Floyd Landis' jib or think the anti-drug people are corrupt and agenda-driven, or we figure that all of Landis' "hundreds of reasons" can be summed up the way USA Today columnist Christine Brennan did: "We have entered 'The Dog Ate My Homework' phase of the sports world's Steroid Era."

Next page: The only anti-drug measure ever tried is one that doesn't work. Plus: Annoying quote of the week