Landis Loses Final Doping Appeal

By IAN AUSTEN
Published: July 1, 2008

The costly legal battle by the cyclist Floyd Landis to recover his title as the winner of the 2006 Tour de France came to an apparent end on Monday. The Court of Arbitration for Sport, the final international appeals body, upheld a United States Anti-Doping Agency panel’s decision that synthetic testosterone had played a role in Landis’s victory.
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The cyclist Floyd Landis during the final day of his arbitration hearing in May 2007.

Landis and his supporters turned the doping allegation on its head and campaigned against the structure and practices of the antidoping system in general and Usada in particular.

But in addition to confirming that a dramatic comeback by Landis during the Tour two years ago was, in fact, too good to be true, the appeals court criticized the approach of his defense. The court said it agreed with Usada that witnesses for Landis “crossed the line, acting for the most part as advocates for the appellant’s cause and not as scientists objectively assisting the panel in the search for truth.”

The court ordered Landis to pay Usada $100,000 as a partial reimbursement for its costs in the appeal. The case cost the organization and the World Anti-Doping Agency millions of dollars in legal fees.

Travis T. Tygart, the chief executive of Usada, said the Landis case demonstrated that “the antidoping system will do everything possible to fight for the right to compete clean.”

He added: “The panel sent a pretty strong signal that while athletes are afford the right to a vigorous defense, it must be a credible defense. In this case, they threw everything up against the wall in an attempt to take down the antidoping establishment.”

The decision came six days before the start of this year’s Tour de France and was perhaps an unwelcome reminder of the series of doping embarrassments that have plagued cycling’s most important race.

In a bid to reverse that pattern, the Tour’s organizer, the Amaury Sport Organization, pulled this year’s edition out from under the control of the International Cycling Union, the sport’s governing body. That move allowed the Tour to refuse entries to some prominent teams, including the Astana squad that includes last year’s winner, Alberto Contador, because it has doubts about its commitment to doping controls.

This year’s race will also include an exceptional number of doping tests and will impose extraordinary penalties on teams and riders found to be doping.

Landis became the first Tour winner to lose his title because of doping after the initial decision against him.

Monday’s decision also upholds a two-year ban on racing by Landis; that expires at the end of January 2009.

There appears, however, to be little interest in Landis among established cycling teams.

He has entered two mountain bike races this year with the unusually long distance, for that branch of the sport, of 100 miles. Those races were not organized by any established governing body. Landis finished 26th in one event and did not complete the other.