Editor’s Note: Denver-based attorney Antonio Gallegos is in Malibu,California, this week to observe the Floyd Landis arbitration hearing.Gallegos works for the firm of Holland and Hart, concentrating in commerciallitigation and government investigation. He is also an avid cyclist andis developing a sports law practice. At the end of each day Gallegos willbe providing VeloNews.com with analysis on what happened and why. Here’shis take on day one of the arbitration hearing that is expected to lastup to 10 days.

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There were three key points during the cross-examination of USADA witness Dr. J. Thomas Brenna on Monday. First, the Cornell professor testified that some of the significant differences between the results of Landis’s A and B samples from stage 17 of the Tour would concern him if the testing had been done in his own laboratory.

Second, Brenna testified that some of the stage 17 test results fell outside the applicable measure of uncertainty and disagreed with USADA as to whether this measurement should be taken into account.

I don’t have enough background to comment on this from a scientific perspective, but from a legal and evidentiary perspective, it is definitely interesting to see USADA’s own witness disagreeing with the anti-doping agency on certain aspects of the testing that was done in this case. Clearly, Landis’s team hopes that this evidence will undermine the prosecution.

Third, Landis’s team attacked USADA’s testing of B Samples from other stages of the Tour. Landis introduced evidence that the French laboratory reran each of these samples several times, but only saved one test result for each sample.

According to Brenna all of the results could have been saved. Landis’s team seems to want the arbitrators to be pondering questions like, What did the unsaved results show? and Did the French laboratory rerun the samples until it got the results USADA wanted?

USADA used the testimony of its next witness, Cynthia Mongongu, to help meet its burden proving that Landis committed a doping offense. She is good witness for this purpose because she had a direct role in the testing of Landis’s A and B samples from Stage 17 of the Tour and Landis’s B samples from other stages. USADA also used Mongongu to counter the arguments that Landis’s team made about the reprocessing of Landis’s B samples from other stages of the Tour. According to Mongongu, any time a sample was run without saving results, it was done for reasons like prepping the machinery.

As is almost always the case in legal proceedings, we saw a few momentum swings. The Landis side came out with evidence trying to undermine USADA’s test result, and USADA came back with evidence trying to counter Landis’s attacks. The job of the arbitrators is to ride out all of these momentum swings and piece together all of the evidence at the end of the hearing.