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After the fall
Landis battles to clear his name
BY WAYNE COFFEY
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
MURRIETA, Calif. - The most renowned yellow shirt in sports hangs in his bedroom closet, a spandex reminder of the greatest day of his competitive life, and also of the worst. The number on it is 71. It is the shirt Floyd Landis wore as he rode down the Champs Elysees last July 23, triumphantly crossing the finish line of the world's most famous bicycle race, then hugging his wife, Amber, and swilling champagne, atop his sport at last.
Someday soon, Landis hopes, the yellow shirt will again come to represent the pinnacle of his pedaling career. He hopes it will be framed and mounted on the wall with the other winning jerseys in his handsome, stucco home, here in the baked brown hills north of San Diego. For that to happen, all Landis has to do is navigate a bureaucratic labyrinth, explain the suspicious spikes in his urine samples last summer and change the mind of most of the world, which views the shirt as something else entirely, an ill-gotten spoil that made Landis a late-night punch line and left his reputation in shreds, the moment word hit four days after the race that he had tested positive for excessive testosterone.
Floyd Landis, outside his home in Murrieta, Calif., has been under attack since doping scandal following his Tour de France win in July, but cyclist still contends he's clean.
"If I did my job as a bicycle racer the way they do theirs, you never would've heard of me," Landis says of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Floyd Landis is 31 years old. It has been almost five months since he found himself in the crosshairs of the world media, a guy who was the feel-good sports story of the season one minute, and just another chemically enhanced biker the next. Since he left public view, Landis has gotten a new hip; found fresh optimism about his prospects of overturning the findings of the French laboratory that analyzed his specimen and taken a unique approach in defending himself, posting the science of his drug test on his Web site, believing that his transparency will show people he is a clean athlete who has been grievously wronged, by both shabby lab work and what he considers a witch hunt by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
"If I did my job as a bicycle racer the way they do theirs, you never would've heard of me," Landis says, sitting at a patio table behind his house. He is less sanguine about his chances of restoring his good name.
"On some level (the infamy) will never go away. I think the best result we could hope for here is that the system will change and no one will have to go through this again."
* * *

If the positive test is upheld, Landis will face a two-year suspension from the sport and lose his Tour title.
If there is an athlete who has had a swifter and harder fall from grace than Floyd Landis, it is hard to imagine who. The tale of his victory in the Tour de France wasn't merely a chronicle of comeback and courage; it was a warm and fuzzy counterpoint to the drug bust that snared two of the top cyclists in the world days before the race, a welcome change in a sport that totes around drug scandal as if it were a fanny pack. The son of Pennsylvania Mennonites, a former foot soldier of a cycling demigod, Lance Armstrong, Landis secured his own glory with an epic ride in the 17th stage of the 20-stage race, surging from an eight-minute deficit into the lead with one of the greatest performances in the annals of the sport.
And then it all changed, faster than you can spell epitestosterone. His sponsor, Phonak, fired him. Tour de France officials can't officially strip him of his title until his appeal process is complete, but they made it plain they consider him a cyclist non grata, and proved it when they didn't invite him back for the unveiling of the 2007 Tour course - an event for which the reigning champ is traditionally the focal point.
The fallout of his "adverse analytical finding" - as positive tests are known in doping parlance - goes far beyond that. Will Geoghegan, Landis' business manager, estimates it has cost Landis between $5 million-$8 million when you factor in bonuses, sponsorship deals and future endorsements. Then there is the $150,000 Landis has spent on his defense to date - a legal meter that isn't close to stopping, with Landis' arbitration hearing still at least two months off.
If the positive test is upheld, Landis will face a two-year suspension from the sport and lose his Tour title.
Still, all of that pales next to the death of Landis' father-in-law, David Witt, a longtime cycling mentor and friend who introduced Landis to his stepdaughter. Witt, 57, committed suicide three weeks after Landis' test result became public.
"It's not remotely like anything that can happen from a bicycle race," Landis says. "I regret that more than anything. I couldn't have prevented it. I didn't cause it. But if I could change one thing, I would change that, for sure."
Chris Fortune, president of Saris, a cycling-industry company, is both a friend and sponsor of Landis.
"The stress that this has put on him and his family is beyond belief," Fortune says.
* * *
The urine sample that yielded Landis' positive test was collected on Thursday, July 20 - after his historic effort during Stage 17. The results of the intial 'A' sample - analyzed in a French lab accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) - showed abnormal levels of testosterone, as manifested by a ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone (a naturally occurring steroid) of 11:1. The subsequent "B" sample confirmed it. (While ratios vary in different individuals, most people have a t/e ratio of 1:1. Anything over 4:1 is considered a positive.) A further test, called the Carbon Isotope Ratio (CIR), showed the presence of a metabolite consistent with the use of synthetic testosterone. The feel-good phase of the Floyd Landis story was over.
Steadfastly maintaining his innocence, Landis initially offered an array of possible causes for the results, ranging from thyroid medication, alcohol consumption, naturally high levels of testosterone and dehydration. His defense these days cites no fewer than 60 reasons why the positive test is invalid, assailing the lab for its sloppiness and WADA for its unfair rules and hidden agenda. He says that WADA has refused to show him the results of his previous 60 to 70 drug tests, including the ones from last year's Tour.
"This system is rigged," Landis says. "It's run by people whose financial interest is in catching or accusing without any basis whatsoever the most high-profile athletes that they can in order to get themselves more money.
"Whether you think I'm innocent or guilty you have to agree that taking an entire year out of someone's life to find out is absurd, especially when it's done intentionally just to waste the person's money and to hope they give up and accept the suspension rather than fighting."
Dick Pound, a Montreal tax lawyer and the chairman of WADA, scoffs at the notion that WADA is going after big names as doping trophies, or trampling on athletes' rights.
"I have no interest whatsoever in having an innocent person convicted of doping," Pound says.
Landis' most zealous advocate might be Dr. Arnie Baker, a retired physician who specializes in cycling medicine. Baker argues that by WADA's own rules, Landis' samples were not even eligible to be tested because they were contaminated, showing 7.7% of so-called "free" testosterone, a substance produced when bacteria loosen the bonds of testosterone molecules. The WADA-specified limit for free testosterone is 5%; anything above that can yield skewed results and thus should not be analyzed, Baker says.
Baker further asserts that Landis' wildly disparate t/e numbers from test to test (in one analysis the ratio was 61.37/5.2 nanograms per milliliter, and in another 172.23/17.59) are far beyond WADA's acceptable differential of 30%, another factor he claims invalidates the results. "If the numbers are all over the place, they don't mean anything, and have to be thrown out," says Baker, who also maintains that he has seen reports from two unrelated tests done by the UCLA Olympic Laboratory showing that samples in which a single metabolite was present were deemed negative. To Baker, the upshot is clear: if Landis' work had been done at UCLA, he would've been in the clear.
"To me the whole thing is appalling," Baker says.
However, a source with in-depth knowledge of WADA's modus operandi and lab protocols disagrees completely with Baker's metabolite interpretation, and doubts the authenticity of his t/e figures. For one thing, Baker's interpretation is based on outdated guidlines, the source says.
"If the numbers are what they say they are, the case wouldn't be going forward. The case is going forward," the source says. Travis Tygart is the senior managing director and general counsel for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. "Our rules don't allow me to comment, and I have to abide by those rules," Tygart says.
Another Landis ally, team physiologist Dr. Allen Lim, attacks a different allegation: that Landis' stunning 17th stage was some sort of drug-fueled, two-wheeled miracle. Landis averaged 281 watts of output for the entire five hour, 23-minute ride in that stage, Lim says - a total that is lower than the 300-310 watts he produces in training.
"It's not like he had a superhuman day," Fortune says. "He was performing within his capabilities."
To WADA's Pound, all of these arguments are unpersuasive. "It sounds like Defense 37B to me," he says of the discussion of contamination, and likens the other arguments to a guy who is pulled over for speeding and says, "Officer, why are you stopping me, when there were a whole bunch of people going faster than I was? And the officer says, 'The fact is, you were going over the speed limit.'" Adds Pound, "He has to find some way to overcome the fact that there is an A and B sample that is up to its eyeballs in testosterone."
* * *
Landis, in many ways, is the anti-Mark McGwire in his handling of his ordeal. Rather than lamely insisting he isn't going to talk about the past, he is seemingly open about everything. There are no ground rules to the questions, nothing off limits. In blue jeans and a green T-shirt, Landis comes across as earnest and credible, though you wonder about his response when you ask how many of the top 25 cyclists in the world he thinks could be on drugs. Landis has had two former Phonak teammates - Tyler Hamilton and Roberto Heras - sanctioned for drug use. Two years ago, Spaniard Jesus Manzano, one of the top cyclists in the world, went public with an array of revelations about the pervasiveness of drug use in cycling, saying that "a cyclist couldn't do the Tour (de France) or Vuelta (Tour of Spain)" without doping.
"I don't have any reason to believe that any of them do it," Landis says. "The sport's getting a bad rap because it's the only professional sport that lets WADA come in and do whatever they want."
Asked if he ever thought about doping to improve his performance, Landis pauses and says, "I don't want to lie and say I don't ever think about it because obviously people talk about it when it's connected to cycling. (But) I wouldn't say that it crossed my mind that maybe I should call this guy, because I know he has it."
Are drugs a problem in cycling? "If one guy does it and it affects the outcome of the race, then yeah, it's a problem," Landis says. "I don't think it's anywhere near as prevalent as they speculate it is."
About 10 days ago in the desert east of here, Landis and a group of friends went on a six-hour, 100-mile ride. Landis climbed a couple of mountains. It was his first extended ride with his new hip, which was replaced three months ago. Being back on his bike was salve for his soul, a big psychological boost. The biggest mountains are ahead, though, and Landis knows it.
If his test is overturned, he'll ride for a couple of more years, and be in a position to recoup the bulk of the millions he has lost, according to business manager Geoghegan. If not, he says he will retire from the sport.
Is Floyd Landis, the son of Mennonites, a big-hearted Everyman with world-class legs and lungs? Or is he a small-minded cheater who traded his morals for wealth and glory?
Says Fortune, "In all of my dealings with Floyd, he has been nothing but a man of integrity and honesty."
Says Pound, "Based on what we know, we think there is a doping offense."
Floyd Landis gets up from the patio table, autographs a poster for a young fan, and heads into his bedroom, reemerging with the famed No. 71 yellow shirt from the 2006 Tour de France. He knows he probably can't clear his name. He just hopes that people will hear him out, and that his adverse analytical finding will be reversed. He walks outside and poses for a photograph against the rugged brown hills, a man and his bicycle, still uncertain if the shirt in his hand will ultimately embody his greatest moment, or his worst.
For more of Jody Gomez's photos, visit her web site, www.JodyGomez.com.
Originally published on December 17, 2006
After the fall
Landis battles to clear his name
BY WAYNE COFFEY
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
MURRIETA, Calif. - The most renowned yellow shirt in sports hangs in his bedroom closet, a spandex reminder of the greatest day of his competitive life, and also of the worst. The number on it is 71. It is the shirt Floyd Landis wore as he rode down the Champs Elysees last July 23, triumphantly crossing the finish line of the world's most famous bicycle race, then hugging his wife, Amber, and swilling champagne, atop his sport at last.
Someday soon, Landis hopes, the yellow shirt will again come to represent the pinnacle of his pedaling career. He hopes it will be framed and mounted on the wall with the other winning jerseys in his handsome, stucco home, here in the baked brown hills north of San Diego. For that to happen, all Landis has to do is navigate a bureaucratic labyrinth, explain the suspicious spikes in his urine samples last summer and change the mind of most of the world, which views the shirt as something else entirely, an ill-gotten spoil that made Landis a late-night punch line and left his reputation in shreds, the moment word hit four days after the race that he had tested positive for excessive testosterone.
Floyd Landis, outside his home in Murrieta, Calif., has been under attack since doping scandal following his Tour de France win in July, but cyclist still contends he's clean.
"If I did my job as a bicycle racer the way they do theirs, you never would've heard of me," Landis says of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Floyd Landis is 31 years old. It has been almost five months since he found himself in the crosshairs of the world media, a guy who was the feel-good sports story of the season one minute, and just another chemically enhanced biker the next. Since he left public view, Landis has gotten a new hip; found fresh optimism about his prospects of overturning the findings of the French laboratory that analyzed his specimen and taken a unique approach in defending himself, posting the science of his drug test on his Web site, believing that his transparency will show people he is a clean athlete who has been grievously wronged, by both shabby lab work and what he considers a witch hunt by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
"If I did my job as a bicycle racer the way they do theirs, you never would've heard of me," Landis says, sitting at a patio table behind his house. He is less sanguine about his chances of restoring his good name.
"On some level (the infamy) will never go away. I think the best result we could hope for here is that the system will change and no one will have to go through this again."
* * *
If the positive test is upheld, Landis will face a two-year suspension from the sport and lose his Tour title.
If there is an athlete who has had a swifter and harder fall from grace than Floyd Landis, it is hard to imagine who. The tale of his victory in the Tour de France wasn't merely a chronicle of comeback and courage; it was a warm and fuzzy counterpoint to the drug bust that snared two of the top cyclists in the world days before the race, a welcome change in a sport that totes around drug scandal as if it were a fanny pack. The son of Pennsylvania Mennonites, a former foot soldier of a cycling demigod, Lance Armstrong, Landis secured his own glory with an epic ride in the 17th stage of the 20-stage race, surging from an eight-minute deficit into the lead with one of the greatest performances in the annals of the sport.
And then it all changed, faster than you can spell epitestosterone. His sponsor, Phonak, fired him. Tour de France officials can't officially strip him of his title until his appeal process is complete, but they made it plain they consider him a cyclist non grata, and proved it when they didn't invite him back for the unveiling of the 2007 Tour course - an event for which the reigning champ is traditionally the focal point.
The fallout of his "adverse analytical finding" - as positive tests are known in doping parlance - goes far beyond that. Will Geoghegan, Landis' business manager, estimates it has cost Landis between $5 million-$8 million when you factor in bonuses, sponsorship deals and future endorsements. Then there is the $150,000 Landis has spent on his defense to date - a legal meter that isn't close to stopping, with Landis' arbitration hearing still at least two months off.
If the positive test is upheld, Landis will face a two-year suspension from the sport and lose his Tour title.
Still, all of that pales next to the death of Landis' father-in-law, David Witt, a longtime cycling mentor and friend who introduced Landis to his stepdaughter. Witt, 57, committed suicide three weeks after Landis' test result became public.
"It's not remotely like anything that can happen from a bicycle race," Landis says. "I regret that more than anything. I couldn't have prevented it. I didn't cause it. But if I could change one thing, I would change that, for sure."
Chris Fortune, president of Saris, a cycling-industry company, is both a friend and sponsor of Landis.
"The stress that this has put on him and his family is beyond belief," Fortune says.
* * *
The urine sample that yielded Landis' positive test was collected on Thursday, July 20 - after his historic effort during Stage 17. The results of the intial 'A' sample - analyzed in a French lab accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) - showed abnormal levels of testosterone, as manifested by a ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone (a naturally occurring steroid) of 11:1. The subsequent "B" sample confirmed it. (While ratios vary in different individuals, most people have a t/e ratio of 1:1. Anything over 4:1 is considered a positive.) A further test, called the Carbon Isotope Ratio (CIR), showed the presence of a metabolite consistent with the use of synthetic testosterone. The feel-good phase of the Floyd Landis story was over.
Steadfastly maintaining his innocence, Landis initially offered an array of possible causes for the results, ranging from thyroid medication, alcohol consumption, naturally high levels of testosterone and dehydration. His defense these days cites no fewer than 60 reasons why the positive test is invalid, assailing the lab for its sloppiness and WADA for its unfair rules and hidden agenda. He says that WADA has refused to show him the results of his previous 60 to 70 drug tests, including the ones from last year's Tour.
"This system is rigged," Landis says. "It's run by people whose financial interest is in catching or accusing without any basis whatsoever the most high-profile athletes that they can in order to get themselves more money.
"Whether you think I'm innocent or guilty you have to agree that taking an entire year out of someone's life to find out is absurd, especially when it's done intentionally just to waste the person's money and to hope they give up and accept the suspension rather than fighting."
Dick Pound, a Montreal tax lawyer and the chairman of WADA, scoffs at the notion that WADA is going after big names as doping trophies, or trampling on athletes' rights.
"I have no interest whatsoever in having an innocent person convicted of doping," Pound says.
Landis' most zealous advocate might be Dr. Arnie Baker, a retired physician who specializes in cycling medicine. Baker argues that by WADA's own rules, Landis' samples were not even eligible to be tested because they were contaminated, showing 7.7% of so-called "free" testosterone, a substance produced when bacteria loosen the bonds of testosterone molecules. The WADA-specified limit for free testosterone is 5%; anything above that can yield skewed results and thus should not be analyzed, Baker says.
Baker further asserts that Landis' wildly disparate t/e numbers from test to test (in one analysis the ratio was 61.37/5.2 nanograms per milliliter, and in another 172.23/17.59) are far beyond WADA's acceptable differential of 30%, another factor he claims invalidates the results. "If the numbers are all over the place, they don't mean anything, and have to be thrown out," says Baker, who also maintains that he has seen reports from two unrelated tests done by the UCLA Olympic Laboratory showing that samples in which a single metabolite was present were deemed negative. To Baker, the upshot is clear: if Landis' work had been done at UCLA, he would've been in the clear.
"To me the whole thing is appalling," Baker says.
However, a source with in-depth knowledge of WADA's modus operandi and lab protocols disagrees completely with Baker's metabolite interpretation, and doubts the authenticity of his t/e figures. For one thing, Baker's interpretation is based on outdated guidlines, the source says.
"If the numbers are what they say they are, the case wouldn't be going forward. The case is going forward," the source says. Travis Tygart is the senior managing director and general counsel for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. "Our rules don't allow me to comment, and I have to abide by those rules," Tygart says.
Another Landis ally, team physiologist Dr. Allen Lim, attacks a different allegation: that Landis' stunning 17th stage was some sort of drug-fueled, two-wheeled miracle. Landis averaged 281 watts of output for the entire five hour, 23-minute ride in that stage, Lim says - a total that is lower than the 300-310 watts he produces in training.
"It's not like he had a superhuman day," Fortune says. "He was performing within his capabilities."
To WADA's Pound, all of these arguments are unpersuasive. "It sounds like Defense 37B to me," he says of the discussion of contamination, and likens the other arguments to a guy who is pulled over for speeding and says, "Officer, why are you stopping me, when there were a whole bunch of people going faster than I was? And the officer says, 'The fact is, you were going over the speed limit.'" Adds Pound, "He has to find some way to overcome the fact that there is an A and B sample that is up to its eyeballs in testosterone."
* * *
Landis, in many ways, is the anti-Mark McGwire in his handling of his ordeal. Rather than lamely insisting he isn't going to talk about the past, he is seemingly open about everything. There are no ground rules to the questions, nothing off limits. In blue jeans and a green T-shirt, Landis comes across as earnest and credible, though you wonder about his response when you ask how many of the top 25 cyclists in the world he thinks could be on drugs. Landis has had two former Phonak teammates - Tyler Hamilton and Roberto Heras - sanctioned for drug use. Two years ago, Spaniard Jesus Manzano, one of the top cyclists in the world, went public with an array of revelations about the pervasiveness of drug use in cycling, saying that "a cyclist couldn't do the Tour (de France) or Vuelta (Tour of Spain)" without doping.
"I don't have any reason to believe that any of them do it," Landis says. "The sport's getting a bad rap because it's the only professional sport that lets WADA come in and do whatever they want."
Asked if he ever thought about doping to improve his performance, Landis pauses and says, "I don't want to lie and say I don't ever think about it because obviously people talk about it when it's connected to cycling. (But) I wouldn't say that it crossed my mind that maybe I should call this guy, because I know he has it."
Are drugs a problem in cycling? "If one guy does it and it affects the outcome of the race, then yeah, it's a problem," Landis says. "I don't think it's anywhere near as prevalent as they speculate it is."
About 10 days ago in the desert east of here, Landis and a group of friends went on a six-hour, 100-mile ride. Landis climbed a couple of mountains. It was his first extended ride with his new hip, which was replaced three months ago. Being back on his bike was salve for his soul, a big psychological boost. The biggest mountains are ahead, though, and Landis knows it.
If his test is overturned, he'll ride for a couple of more years, and be in a position to recoup the bulk of the millions he has lost, according to business manager Geoghegan. If not, he says he will retire from the sport.
Is Floyd Landis, the son of Mennonites, a big-hearted Everyman with world-class legs and lungs? Or is he a small-minded cheater who traded his morals for wealth and glory?
Says Fortune, "In all of my dealings with Floyd, he has been nothing but a man of integrity and honesty."
Says Pound, "Based on what we know, we think there is a doping offense."
Floyd Landis gets up from the patio table, autographs a poster for a young fan, and heads into his bedroom, reemerging with the famed No. 71 yellow shirt from the 2006 Tour de France. He knows he probably can't clear his name. He just hopes that people will hear him out, and that his adverse analytical finding will be reversed. He walks outside and poses for a photograph against the rugged brown hills, a man and his bicycle, still uncertain if the shirt in his hand will ultimately embody his greatest moment, or his worst.
For more of Jody Gomez's photos, visit her web site, www.JodyGomez.com.
Originally published on December 17, 2006

