Just received the November issue of Outside Mag - they always put a little sticky tag on any cycling-related articles for me. Nice... This month, there is a thought-provoking article called “Who Killed Bob Breedlove? The Haunting Death of a Cycling Legend”. The writer, Alan Prendergast, does an excellent job of presenting the sad and appalling details of Breedlove’s death during the 2005 RAAM.

I really haven’t followed this story, but Breedlove’s family and friends have hired experienced accident-scene investigators, who have reconstructed the scene as best they can from the bungled police investigation reports. These investigators believe that Breedlove’s death from being hit by a 15-year old driver in a pickup truck did not happen the way police reports indicate. Their allegations are met with a cold shoulder by law-enforcement officials in Trinidad, Colorado, who are not open to any thought that they made any errors or omissions in their reports. One of the Breedlove investigators says that the Breedlove case has been “hometowned”. And it sure sounds like it...

I encourage you to have a look at this article in Outside. From what I read, it sounds like another classic case of group-think, CYA, and absolute resistance to consider that errors were made. Which brings me to another example of this with Floyd Landis and the Chatenay-Malabry Cesspool/WADA group-think mess.

Floyd has his defense up on his site www.floydlandis.com - I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. (Hmm - having to prove that you are innocent-Hope you and I are never in that situation.) However, faster than it would take to type in his URL, both LeClerc and Pound have bellowed out the party-line of complete confidence in the Chatenay-Malabry findings.

Does Floyd have any more chance than an ice cube in Hell of getting these idiots to even acknowledge that significant errors were made? If Floyd’s defense team found (as I’ve heard) that somebody used white-out over the code number on a test result and then wrote Floyd’s code number on top of it - is that not a significant, suspicious error? Or is Floyd also getting “hometowned” by the doping authority organizations....

I took the above image of Floyd Landis on the second rest day of the 2004 Tour de France. Floyd's mother and sister are in the background.