Cycling: After Tour triumph Landis takes on even tougher test

Last July, Floyd Landis returned a positive drugs test that is on the point of costing him his 2006 Tour de France title - and his career in cycling. As the seemingly interminable process drags into its seventh month, the American has mounted what has become the most high-profile campaign by an athlete to clear his name in the sport's troubled history of drugs-related controversy.

"I don't think what I'm doing is unconventional," he says. "It's about me fighting a corrupt system for my own good, for the benefit of my friends who are racing and have no say in how things are run - and for all athletes who have to suffer through the self-interests of the governing bodies."

A few days after he was named victor of the Tour de France came the shattering news that he had tested positive for testosterone after Stage 17's heroic breakaway that had effectively won him the Tour. Now, as well as a website dedicated to his cause, its highlight a 28-page Powerpoint presentation on the finer details of his case, Landis has created a foundation, "Floyd Fairness", and surrounded himself with a small army of lawyers, physicians and PR advisors. So far, all told, the cost has been $500,000 (£254,600), and his camp calculate that the final cost of clearing his name will be close to the $2m mark. Landis, who comes from a small community of Mennonites, a Christian denomination similar to the Amish, is on a grand tour drumming up financial support.

The Mennonites are known for taking a stand, and in a manner his forebears would surely approve of, Landis, 31, has been the star speaker at meetings in town halls across the United States, where he tells the truth of the matter - the truth for him, at least - while passing round the collecting boxes. Up for auction, though, is one article that would not go down well with the Mennonites: a signed bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey. "We're auctioning the signature, not the alcohol," Landis said with his typical wry humour. "And no, I haven't taken a few slugs."

A quick swig of Jack Daniels was one of the more surreal explanations offered by Landis for his positive test - he insists on calling it an "alleged positive" - for testosterone. It was not an explanation that did his credibility any good, and neither were the others he came up with at first: thyroid medication, dehydration, a tendency to produce excessive levels of testosterone naturally. The impression he gave was of someone caught red-handed. Or perhaps he was simply exhausted after three weeks of racing in what is, by common consent, the world's most gruelling endurance event, facing accusations he never suspected possible. That is how his friend and coach Allan Lim sees it.

"He'd just won the Tour de France," Lim says. "Three days later this all happens. Floyd hit the panic button. He didn't know what was going on."

Landis concurs. "I didn't have the information that would give us the explanation of why this wasn't a positive test until late August," he says. "Without that information all I could do was guess as to why the test results came back the way they did, and I had to do so with TV cameras pointed at me. Where the facts of the science support my innocence are that, firstly, my test was never a positive test to begin with, and secondly, the 'B' sample was degraded according to their own rules and never should have been tested. I am 100 per cent confident that if they tested my sample the right way back in July, I would be racing my bike right now."

Seven months ago Landis was hardly best placed to handle one of the sport's highest-profile doping cases. Compare him to Lance Armstrong, seven-times a Tour winner and a sharply spoken urbanite from downtown Dallas, who was subject to numerous accusations during his career. In Landis's place the Texan would have relished the struggle with the media sharks, while Landis had always given the impression of being a slightly goofy, amiable, kid from a rural backwater. And when his world caved in last July, he initially floundered.

Underneath his apparently bumbling exterior, however, lurks another creature altogether: stubborn, deter-mined to get his own way whatever the odds against him. When his parents banned him from bike racing as a teenager because it went against their beliefs, he headed out into the country at night with a flashlight taped to the front of his bike. Later, when he badly damaged his hip in a crash, he refused surgery until after the Tour de France.

Now Landis is fighting back again - and has achieved something not even Armstrong managed. Somehow, the Pennsylvania country boy has turned what looked like an open-and-shut case into a defence of athletes' rights against the anti-doping establishment - organisations which, he says, "have no sense of right or wrong. I've learned a lot of things since last July, one of them being that the anti-doping movement and its leaders don't care about the athletes they are supposed to protect. I'm in this position because of the problems in the system. Leaks of information about my case, lab errors. Then the US Anti-Doping Agency [USADA] denies me evidence, like my other tests from the Tour, that will help me defend myself in my case."

These might sound like the gripes of any athlete in a position like Landis, on the point of being stripped of the title in his sport's showcase event and facing a two-year ban. But there have been revelations of, at the very least, significant glitches in the Paris laboratory's testing procedure. Last September it emerged that at least one of his samples was mislabelled, while last month claims were made that the same lab technicians analysed Landis' "A" and "B" samples - an error which was used last summer to throw out a similar case against the Spanish cyclist Inigo Landaluze. And last autumn the laboratory reported that their computers had been hacked into. Could records have been meddled with?

But if Landis feels that French anti-doping authorities have been fair, if incompetent, he has more serious criticisms of USADA, who begins proceedings against him on 14 May. So far so good, Landis angrily points out, the only problem being that the rules he will be judged by are already twisted against him.

"The USADA have access to documents they can use to prove their case against me whilst they deny me access to any of it," he says. "In response to our request, they talk about how we're asking for things that they aren't required to give according to their own rules. Well, let me tell you something about their rules that they selectively follow: they were all written by the same lawyer who represents USADA in doping cases. He wrote the WADA [World Anti-Doping Agency] code and the USADA's procedures. I think there's a big problem when they're allowed to cite their own unfair rules as reasons to keep documents from me and my lawyers that are important for my defence.

"The current system has left no room for athletes' rights. I think that there's an idea out there that I, and other athletes, have rights like people do in a criminal or civil court. [But] I can't let them do this to me or anybody else. It's just wrong. The USADA see this as a competition. When you are interested in winning, you're not looking for the truth. And they are interested in winning and keeping their perfect record."

Landis states time and again during the interview that he is innocent and that he "never took testosterone". However, one of his principal problems in convincing the public, not just the scientists at USADA, is not of his creation: it is cycling's drug-tainted image. To many, Landis seemed like just the latest addition to an ever-lengthening list of dopers on two wheels. His victory in the 2006 Tour was preceded by a massive anti-doping investigation in Spain, Operacion Puerto, which led to the expulsion of four of the pre-race favourites.

Given the circumstances, Landis' dramatic collapse on the bike (he lost 11 minutes to the leaders in as many kilometres) 24 hours before sloping off on the four-hour charge through the Alps which effectively gave him overall victory, merely reinforced the idea that his win was chemically fuelled - particularly as it was after that stage that Landis returned his positive test for testosterone.

Perhaps it was a positive. But off-the-record sources inside professional cycling, both of them riders currently in the peloton, told me that if Landis wanted to pull off such a move, he would not have used testosterone. "It wouldn't have worked fast enough to enable him to make such a comeback after such a dramatic collapse," one of them said. "It was the wrong drug to do that."

Regardless of the opinion of the man on the street, Landis' case highlights the urgent need for a united, coherent approach against drugs in sport. But the devil, for Landis, is in the detail. Or as he puts it: "Fighting doping is one of the most important fights going on in sports right now. Doping is cheating. But it's also too easy to look at the sport from the outside and say that everyone is cheating. That's a cop out. My concern for professional cycling is that the current approach to testing and enforcement isn't fair to athletes and, in their rush to catch accused dopers, the governing bodies and anti-doping organisations don't play by the rules."

The hype, according to Landis, ends up mushrooming around the doping stories - partly thanks to journalists playing along with the idea of scandal.

"The media feeds on the sensationalism of doping stories," he says. "By announcing the results of 'A' samples before 'B' confirmations and breaking their own rules about confidentiality, the governing bodies make it look as if there is a major doping problem in the sport and that they are the good guys trying to get rid of all the dirty athletes. People need to start looking at both sides and the system needs to change."

His is not the only case, Landis insists, which has been mishandled. According to the American, cycling's world governing body, the UCI, has abused its position of power by overreacting too soon to documents released in Puerto. "It's like we riders are expendable if it helps cycling with its PR image," he says. "But it has the opposite effect. Their efforts for transparency basically throw the riders to the wolves. Their Ethics Code [under which riders can be suspended on the mere suspicion of doping, an extreme measure applied by no other sporting authority] is a sham, because it's not at all ethical. It's about maintaining the image of the UCI at the expense of the riders who have had their careers ruined by rumour and allegations."

The UCI and USADA apart, Landis saves his most bitter criticisms for the outspoken head of WADA, Dick Pound. When asked about Pound's claims that the administrative errors in the French Anti-Doping lab were insignificant, he retorts: "He hasn't said anything to prove that he has a grasp of the facts of my case. Look, I'd like WADA to be successful, but if it's going to work, Dick Pound needs to start thinking before he speaks and WADA needs to stop being an organisation focused on punishing athletes rather than living up to their own mission."

He makes a dramatic prediction. "If Pound is going to go on a crusade against athletes and entire sports, then the whole anti-doping movement is going to collapse. If after winning the Tour de France I don't have the means to get a fair hearing, how can other athletes who are not as high profile?"

Landis is so convinced that he will be cleared that he ends by saying: "If we have an open process, another Tour de France victory is in my future. You'll see me back because I love riding my bike. I won it fair and square. No matter what happens, I will always be the winner of the 2006 Tour. Nobody can take that away."

The cynical will say that half a million dollars, let alone two million, will buy you a very good smokescreen - and this could be all Landis is trying to create. How he can know that documents withheld by the USADA are "crucial" for clearing his name, for example, if his lawyers haven't seen them yet?

But by fighting the anti-doping authorities so hard and spreading the word that he is innocent so enthusiastically, Landis has managed something no other athlete has achieved. He has brought anti-doping procedures under the closest scrutiny to which they have yet been subjected, by the people they affect most closely: the athletes themselves. If he succeeds in clearing his name, that procedure will be in store for a major overhaul. For that reason, Landis deserves a fair hearing. Whether he will get one could be another story.

Alasdair Fotheringham writes for Cycle Sport

Floyd Landis' greatest day - and the start of his troubles

The 16th stage of last year's Tour de France, into the ski resort of La Toussuire, had been a disaster for Floyd Landis. Cracking on the final slope, the Pennsylvanian finished more than eight minutes behind Oscar Pereiro, ceding the yellow jersey to the Spaniard. He looked shattered. His Tour was over, he told journalists.

The following day, the stage to Morzine, the pundits were dusting off their Lazarus lines as Landis flew away from the peloton to chase an 11-man breakaway up the first ascent, the Col des Saissies. Soon only the German Patrik Sinkewitz, could stay with him.

Astonished observers struggled to recall a more dramatic comeback in the race's long history of heroic feats. Combining the grim determination of Lance Armstrong and the brio of Eddie Merckx, Landis burned off Sinkewitz 500 metres up the final climb, the brutal Col de Joux Plane, and stretched his lead on the descent. He finished more than five minutes ahead of the next man in, and three days later mounted the podium in Paris as winner of the Tour de France. Four days after that came the news that turned his world upside down: at the finish in Morzine he had tested positive for testosterone.

Chris Maume