NEWS FLASH
Cycling News Flash for September 21, 2007
Edited by Laura Weislo
Landis' appeal denied, two year suspension levied
By Mark Zalewski, North American Editor
Landis will likely appeal to CAS
Photo ©: AFP
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The long awaited decision is in, and Floyd Landis has lost his appeal to the American Arbitration Association to overturn the sanction for his positive drug
test from the 2006 Tour de France. The three member arbitration panel,
led by president Patrice Brunet along with Christopher Campbell and
Richard McLaren, was split 2-1 in the guilty verdict, with Campbell
dissenting.
The decision will likely have some instant effects, with the ASO chomping at the bit
to remove Landis as the 2006 winner. The next possible steps in the
case involve either Landis accepting his sanction from USADA or
appealing the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in
Switzerland -- with the second much more likely.
Landis is
still weighing his legal options, but released a statement calling the
decision "a blow to athletes and cyclists everywhere". The statement
continued, "For the Panel to find in favor of USADA when, with respect
to so many issues, USADA did not manage to prove even the most basic
parts of their case shows that this system is fundamentally flawed. I
am innocent, and we proved I am innocent."
UCI president Pat McQuaid spoke with Cyclingnews
about the decision Thursday afternoon. "It is true, we have been on to
USADA and others about it," McQuaid said. "We can confirm that Pereiro
will be the winner of the 2006 Tour de France, and that Floyd Landis
will get a two year ban." There has been no official statement on the
start date of the ban, but McQuaid speculated it would run from the end
of the 2006 Tour.
Landis positive drugs test came after his seemingly superhuman comeback in stage 17
of the 2006 Tour. Three days after the Tour finished the news of a
presumptive positive by Landis was leaked to the media. Faced with the
prematurely leaked information before he could even wrap his own head
around the situation, Landis fired off a variety of possible explanations.
The findings indicated that Landis' testosterone ratio was well above
the acceptable limit, which prompted the testing lab to look for
exogenous testosterone. The French LNDD lab (Laboratoire de
Chatenay-Malabry) found synthetic testosterone in Landis' samples.
The arbitration panel
Photo ©: AFP Photo
 |
Over the next several months Landis
surrounded himself with a team of lawyers, experts and public relations
professionals to mount a wiki-defense, calling into question that
called into question the tests, testing procedures, the French
laboratory, as well as the United States and World Anti-Doping Agencies
(WADA.) This all culminated in May at Pepperdine University when the
AAA preceedings of Landis vs. USADA began.
Both sides presented cases that focused on the science behind the
testing, with the Landis side plainly saying that the LNDD lab was
incompetent, the tests were flawed and that the results should not even
be admissible. The USADA side began its defence of the ADRB findings by
presenting expert testimony, which were matched by Landis' experts
saying the inverse. However, the proceedings were turned upside-down
when the USADA side took a different tack and brought former Tour de
France winner Greg LeMond and former racer Joe Papp to the stand.
LeMond testified
about conversations he had with Landis that seemingly implied Landis
was hiding something. In the course of this testimony it was revealed
that Landis' business manager, Will Geoghegan, had made threatening
phone calls to LeMond to dissuade him from testifying.
The testimony by Joe Papp for USADA, a former low-level elite cyclist, revealed how he himself had used testosterone,
as well as many other illegal drugs, to gain a performance advantage.
Even though he plainly said that using testosterone "definitely
improves your recovery and help you get back to whatever your best
threshold power is," Landis' lawyers called the veracity of his
testimony into question, citing a deal he had with USADA regarding his
suspension.
Still, in the end, the case was about the science -- for both
the Landis and the USADA sides -- with the arbitration panel
determining that the facts were not enough to call the findings of the
tests into question.
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