I’m in the camp that this was a natural spike after utter depletion of the Wednesday stage and refueling Wednesday night.  As David points out testosterone isn’t something you would dope up on to improve endurance necessary at Le Tour.  Let’s stop condemning Floyd and instead look at the science behind it all.  (Or has the Bush regime completely killed any belief in the scientific method?)

Re: comment by caseyjones

That’s MS C Quil to you, sir. Raising my testosterone level doesn’t really appeal to me.

I am always surprised by how people admire someone who has injured themselves by doing something the human body is not intended to do, and then, after expensive surgery and treatment, go back to doing precisely the same thing. Tons of joggers and runners with wrecked knees and hips are having surgery that was once only for elders. The young hip and knee patients face having at least one, and probably two, replacements in their lifetimes, as they last at most twenty years. A body wears out. You can destroy it by overusing it as well as underusing it.

But I did wonder about the testicular cancer that Armstrong had. I know that it is the most common cancer in young men, mainly because cancer is uncommon in the young and targets rapidly changing tissue - testicles, bones in their rapid period of growth etc. If he was taking something to enhance his performance, whatever it was, he might have triggered it himself. Also, since testicles are supposed to be cooler than the rest of the body, hence their air-cooled position, riding at high speed in a tight suit that holds them close to the body might not have been too healthy.

Athletes taking steroids often end up with odd cancers, brain tumors in particular, and have you noticed how many have young children with peculiar conditions and diseases? Steroids make things grow, muscles AND tumors.

Floyd Landis had pinned hips or knees, didn’t he? Were they injured by his cycling activity?

Exercise does induce well-being, though, mainly by endorphin released from the brain as a natural opiod to counteract the pain of long periods of exercise, the “runner’s high”. But do you have to rip your body to shreds to do it?

RE: comment by C Quil;
Yup.
Riding bicycle for hundreds of miles for 17 days at near maximum exertion does a lot of pretty cool things for the human body.
I can personaly attest to that.
Try even moderate riding for say, 100 miles a day for 3 days Mr. C Q and c how u feel.
az

This positive test doesn’t seem to make sense, biologically speaking.  He had been tested on several previous days and it would appear that none of those is positive.  Thus, this positive test would be either (a) an outlier, (b) the result of Landis’s normal metabolism after a huge effort or (c) incredibly stupid doping rght before the day of the test.  Why stupid?  Because androgens have little to no immediate effect.  They take weeks to exert their muscle-builidng properties.  Why would one test be positive and not the others if he were doping according to any regiment that would make a difference in his performance?

Riding bicycles increases your testosterone levels? A new cure for male menopause, perhaps, or a medication-free Viagra substitute.

“Just going for a ride, my dear. Back in twenty minutes. It’ll give you time to slip into something comfortable.”

floyd’s my hero—he’s restored my faith in human nature

one can see that he kept jabbering about his hip because he was setting it up as his medical excuse

what’s cool is that amateurs will be encouraged to shoot up the same shit

professional athletes are performing seals: they ought to be allowed to destroy themselves if they wish