Hamilton, WADA and Velonews: We should question the test

Via Velonew's Letters

Trust the system, not Hamilton
Editor:
Please - unless you're a scientist who has worked with the actual samples, spare us your opinions on the validity of the tests. At some point, we've got to trust the system, or it's open season for any cheater with a good public relations crew.

I don't want to hear what a nice guy Hamilton is. No one, to my knowledge, ever accused Lance Armstrong of being a nice guy, but Tex passed all his drug screenings. Hamilton stood to gain millions of dollars. Motive enough.

I hope he has the decency to shut up for the next year, unless it's to come completely clean. I am tired of lying, cheating cyclists.

Gregory Thelen
Fort Collins, Colorado

I respectfully disagree. The whole point of science is that it's not based on trust. Theories, Tests, etc are validated when they can be independently, successfully, replicated. "Trust" in the sense Thelen is using it equates to faith and that is the realm of Religion. It is also irrelevent whether someone has worked with samples; the point again is that the results are either replicatable independently or not.

The bottom line is that the test's results have not, to my knowledge, been replicated successfully by an independent labratory. End of story. While it's possible that the test has and we just don't know about it, I suspect that is not the case because WADA goes to some length to erect the facade of validity by pomoting the reputation of the scientists in question, putting the CAS up as a scientific stamp of approval on it's website, and equating publication in scientific journals per se as Scientific Validation. They are not. Full stop.

I want to make it clear that I don't know if Tyler is guilty or not. If I were a betting man, I would guess he is. But more than cheating in cycling, I dislike the abuse of science to create a facade of "proof" that doesn't exist. Cycling is entertainment for us; Science impacts our lives at a core level.