Landis bashes arbitration process

On the day after, Floyd Landis was fuming.

"The deck was stacked," he said Friday from his home in Murietta. "It turned out that the best odds I had were zero."

On Thursday, a three-member arbitration panel in a split decision stripped the Pennsylvania-born cyclist of his championship in the 2006 Tour de France and banned him from competition for two years, backdated to January.

The verdict closed a long and grueling chapter in Landis's life, coming 14 months after he was declared the winner of the 2006 race, four months after the end of a wearing nine-day evidentiary hearing and two months after the 2007 Tour de France.

Landis put up the most sustained and detailed challenge to the sports anti-doping program's science, fairness and integrity since the World Anti-Doping Agency was created to oversee it in 2000, raising serious doubts that even the arbitrators acknowledged.

His legal effort was as intense as his comeback victory in Stage 17 of the 2006 Tour, the one in which he was accused of spiking his system with testosterone.

But the outcome was the same as it has been in every doping arbitration held in the United States: conviction and condemnation.

Landis said he had been resigned to losing his appeal, even though the long gap between the hearing and the decision led some of his supporters to hope that the arbitrators were giving the evidence unusually close inspection.

The 31-year-old cyclist lashed out at the two arbitrators who voted against him. They were Richard McLaren, a London, Canada, lawyer generally known to favor prosecutors and appointed to the panel by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, the prosecuting agency in this case; and Patrice Brunet, a Montreal lawyer selected as the neutral arbitrator. The third arbitrator, Bay Area lawyer and former Olympic wrestler Christopher L. Campbell, appointed by Landis, is known for his concern for athletes' rights; he filed a blistering written dissent arguing for Landis' innocence, the fourth time he has done so in a doping case.

"I know McLaren . . . was going to vote for USADA because that's what he does," Landis said. "And Brunet was absolutely incapable of understanding the science. He just didn't get it." (McLaren didn't respond to a request for comment and Brunet, through an assistant, declined to comment.)

"Right now I have a very dim view of humanity," Landis said, "even though I know in my heart that most people are trying to do the right thing. I just have to get away from all this for a while."