Late Response to the Landis Ruling

I know that the decision in the Floyd Landis doping case was handed down at the end of last week (14 months after he tested positive at the Tour de France), but I figure posting my reaction four days later is just sort of par for the course the way things have gone. Was I surprised? No. Do I believe he doped? Yes, although I don't want to believe it. His team did a pretty good job of discrediting the lab that handled the samples and the way this whole thing was carried out bordered on the ridiculous, but when the arbitration panel roundly criticized the lab and still found him guilty it became pretty hard for me to believe that Floyd was totally clean.

That may be more of a response to the general state of pro cycling which has done a lot to clean up, but has so much farther to go, which makes it hard to believe that anyone that has a positive A and B sample in a doping investigation has any credibility no matter how hard they protest their innocence. I've had several favorite riders over the last few years test positive and say they were clean. It's becoming harder to believe any of them.

So where does that leave the 2006 Tour de France? With Oscar Pereiro as the official winner, a winner who is one of the least deserving Tour champs in the history of the event. Had he not been given a half hour gift as a part of a breakaway in the middle of the race he wouldn't have finished in the top 10. His lackluster showing this year is more on par with his quality as a Tour contender. No offense to Pereiro as he is an excellent pro cyclist, but he didn't deserve the '06 Tour win and will never finish near the podium again.

As to the historical significance, it has widely been reported that Landis is the first Tour champ to have his title stripped. This is not entirely true. At the beginning of the summer, 1996 champ Bjarne Riis confessed to doping during the '96 Tour and was voluntarily stripped of his title. I had also read on cyclingnews.com at some point in the last year about one of the early Tours where the champ was stripped of the race win due to cheating, although I'm going to have to hunt for awhile to find the article. I'll try to do some follow up if I find time.

Regardless, American cycling is at a crossroads with the general sporting public cynical about the sport, the biggest and most successful team disbanding and now a fallen Tour champ. There's still a lot to love about the sport, but it's going to take something special to put cycling back on a positive track in the US.