As I write this, noone knows how the test of the Floyd Landis B sample will turn out. However, having served as an official for a sporting organization since 1992 (SCCA Motor Racing), I am rather disturbed at how things seem to be done "over there".

I have no opinion about whether or not Floyd has done something he shouldn't have. I hope he didn't, but my officiating sensibilities are such that I tend not to express opinions about these sorts of things when I'm not fully informed.

What I see coming from cycling officials scares me. It's not supposed to be done this way. You don't leak. You keep things private until you actually need to go public. You never DQ until you're quite certain as to what you're dealing with.

To provide a concrete example: after most races, we bring in the top 3 finishers and check to make sure that they make the minimum weight as specified in the rule book. As experienced officials, we know that scales act up, wires get disconnected, and as such if a car comes in underweight, the first assumption is that we screwed up -- and so we check connections, we take the car back off the scales and recertify, and we put the car back on and weight it again. 7 times out of 10, it turns out to be our goof. We never start filling out the paperwork until we have made a major effort to make sure we haven't screwed up.

So cycling officials leaking test results when they apparently haven't finished the full testing regime strikes me as unprofessional, ethically questionable practice. But then, these are the same officials who were leaking highly questionable experimental results from Lance Armstrong's old 1999 tour samples 6 years later.

Which brings me to another point -- once we release a car from impound without filing paperwork, as far as we're concerned, it's over. Nobodys numbers from 7 years ago, or even last weekend, matter if we didn't write it up in a timely manner. There comes a point when things need to be over.