Thursday, May 20, 2010

So much for Floyd Landis.

Full disclosure: I have, in the past, stood up for Landis, I believed him when he said he was clean because he presented a compelling case that he didn't use drugs, and his lawyers punched many holes in the testing protocols of the French labs. I was wrong, Landis is a liar and should be banned for life from cycling.


How can you take anything he says seriously?

(Landis, Admitting Doping, Accuses Top U.S. Cyclists, Juliet Macur & Michael S. Schmidt, New York Times)
After four years of maintaining his innocence about doping charges that ruined his reputation and caused him to be stripped of his 2006 Tour de France title, the American cyclist Floyd Landis has sent e-mail messages to several cycling officials in the United States and in Europe in which he admits using performance-enhancing drugs for most of his career.
He also throws Lance Armstrong, George Hincapie, Levi Leipheimer & David Zabriskie (almost every big-name US cyclist) under the bus without a shred of documentary evidence to back up his claims.

After (falsely) claiming innocence for four years he's suddenly come out and said that everything he's been fighting against, is 100% true. That he has, in fact, been lying to us all this time.

Yet we're supposed to believe him now....because he's having trouble getting back on a top team and he's got a book to sell.


At this point I think it's also fair to question the 'evidence' that Landis produced during his trial. Was it doctored to appear that it had been tampered with? We'll probably never know because Landis probably isn't going to say. Even if he did say anything about it you shouldn't believe it. Nothing that guy says should be given any credence from this point forward.

Goodbye Floyd, sport is better without you in it. I really feel sorry for all of those fans you fleeced into giving you money to pay for your legal fight. I'm sure you're not going to offer refunds.