Doping case against Tour de France winner Landis is upheld

An international sports court on Monday upheld doping charges against cyclist Floyd Landis, affirming a laboratory finding that he had taken an illicit dose of testosterone to win the 2006 Tour de France.

The decision by a three-member panel of the Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration for Sport probably spells the end of Landis' nearly two-year effort to clear his name. Under the rules of the World Anti-Doping Agency, which governs anti-doping programs in elite international sports, the court is the final arbiter of such cases.

Although Landis can try to challenge the finding in an American court, that option may be limited by his dwindling resources. U.S. courts, moreover, have turned away previous challenges to the international anti-doping program.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport panel also upheld Landis' two-year suspension from competition. The ban was dated from Jan. 30, when he voluntarily agreed to withdraw from racing while his case was under review, meaning that he will again be eligible to compete next January 29. The panel further ordered Landis to pay $100,000 in costs to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which prosecuted the case against him.

Landis, 32, who was born in rural Pennsylvania and lives in the Riverside County community of Murrieta, was accused of doping with testosterone during the 2006 Tour de France, which he won with a dramatic come-from-behind performance in Stage 17, late in the race.

Landis immediately declared his innocence when the charges were made public four days after the race. He mounted a legal challenge costing as much as $3 million, much of it raised through a legal defense fund. At the heart of his defense was an attack on the performance of the World Anti-Doping Agency's Paris laboratory, which had done the analysis of his Tour de France samples and which he accused of technical incompetence, bias and fraud.

The doping charges were upheld last September by a divided three-member North American arbitration panel, which agreed that the French lab was guilty of numerous errors of procedure and "sloppy practice," but said that its errors were insufficient to invalidate its conclusion that Landis had taken synthetic testosterone. The Court of Arbitration for Sport heard Landis' appeal from that ruling at a five-day session earlier this year in New York.