Landis Admits Systematic Doping

As one who followed closely the aftermath of the doping scandal which claimed the title of the 2006 Tour de France, I always believed Floyd Landis when he said that he did not take exogenous testosterone on the days he tested positive. I based that belief, at first, on Landis' strong denials of doping, and then later on the expert testimony during his appeal to USADA, that his positive result at the former LNDD in France would have been interpreted as inconclusive or negative at the testing labs at UCLA, Montreal, and Switzerland. The three member panel agreed with that statement, but only one of them thought that unfairness was enough to strike down the doping conviction. Even with today's bombshells from Landis admitting to participating in a full-blown doping regimen, and pointing his fingers at everyone else, it doesn't change that fact. In the story at ESPN, Landis still denies having exogenous testosterone in his system during stage 17 of the Tour, even though he may have had EPO and HGH, so his strong denials came from being caught doping for the wrong substance. So, while technically "innocent" of the doping charge he tried to overturn, he was definitely not racing "clean."

Does this change my opinion of Landis from four years ago? Not much, since his performances after his doping ban ended have not shown him to have the same racing quality that he had before the doping saga began. If he came back, and was as strong as ever, like a Vinokourov, that may have bolstered his story, but he did not. And now it seems that bitterness of not being able to reclaim that past fitness and strength has fueled these recent actions to admit that he was riding in the mud and drag as many people down with him. One thing I remember back in 2008, while Landis was in the middle of all his legal wrangling, was his comment disparaging one of the new American teams trying to establish an anti-doping image for the sponsors who had fled the sport of cycling after 2007: Team High Road, the former Deutsche Telekom team of Jan Ulrich, Andreas Kloeden, and Aleksandr Vinokourov, and current HTC-Columbia Team of Mark Cavendish and Andre Greipel. Landis called them "Team High Horse," which always seemed mean-spirited for someone proclaiming that he was innocent of doping violations and had always ridden clean. Now I know where that animus was coming from: guilt.