http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/austin_murphy/07/27/landis.react/index.html
Floyd denies cheating
Landis says he didn't dope during Tour de France
Posted: Thursday July 27, 2006 3:46PM; Updated: Friday July 28, 2006 12:30PM
by Austin Murphy - Inside the Tour de France
Floyd Landis says he didn't do it -- didn't inject testosterone, didn't apply a testosterone patch to any part of his body. Floyd Landis just returned my call, and I asked him straight up: "Did you do it, bro?"
He said, "No, c'mon man," in what would turn out to be the first of several denials.
I want very badly to believe him.
Landis had been crying. Not for himself -- he'd just gotten off the phone with his mother, Arlene, who has been driven from the family home in Farmersville, Pa., by reporters scavenging for quotes. "I know it's their job," he said, sadly, "but they need to leave her out of this."
The A sample from the urine test to which he submitted after Stage 17 shows "an unusual level of testosterone/epitestosterone." Landis told me he "can't be hopeful" that the B sample will be any different than the A. "I'm a realist," he said.
Landis says that an elevated level of testosterone is different from a positive test. He says this is a fairly common problem among pro cyclists. He's retaining the services of a Spanish doctor named Luis Hernandez, who has helped other riders shown by tests to have elevated levels of testosterone. "In hundreds of cases," Landis told me, "no one's ever lost one."
It's too early to tell if he's going to be on solid footing or if he's clutching at straws. The next step, he says, is to submit to an endocrine test that may help him prove that he just happens to be a guy walking around with an inordinate amount of testosterone in his blood.
He raised the possibility that the cortisone shots he's been taking for his ravaged right hip -- the hip he'll soon have replaced -- may have had some effect on the test. Then he revealed this: "I've had a thyroid condition for the last year or so and have been taking small amounts of thyroid hormone. It's an oral dose, once a day."
He raised the possibility that that medication may have skewed the test that appears to damn him.
He knows how bad this looks, and told me, "I wouldn't hold it against somebody if they don't believe me."
I don't know what to believe. I was surprised he returned my call.
"You were there when nobody else was," he told me, "so I thought I'd better call you back."
He was talking about a visit I paid to the team bus a week ago today. The day before -- in what had been his lowest moment in many weeks -- Landis appeared to have ridden himself off the podium and out of the top 10. As the Tour had unfolded, as he'd taken the lead and then relinquished it, then cracked spectacularly, he had not seemed like a rider under the influence of performance-enhancing drugs. In fact, the French were down on him for racing too conservatively, for not attacking or going for stage wins.
The next morning I went by the Phonak team bus (as I wrote in my Tour dispatch a week ago). It was eerily deserted, Landis having already been dubbed irrelevant. He sat on the steps of the bus and we chatted. After his incredible ride that day, I was a little embarrassed by what I'd said: I told him I respected that he'd finished the stage, no matter how long it took. I told him I looked forward to seeing what he did in the final time trial -- something about silver linings.
He smiled, and told me, basically, that he expected to make up some of that time that afternoon. He told me he was feeling better.
He went out rode himself into the lore of the Tour.
What to make of that ride now?
Anyone who follows this sport and professes to be blindsided by allegations of this nature risks sounding like Captain Renault in Casablanca ("I'm shocked -- shocked! -- to find that gambling is going on in here!"). You wonder sometimes if, in cycling, the clean riders are not, in fact, the minority. The purge that marked the start of this race -- 13 riders were ejected after being implicated in a Spanish doping investigation called Operación Puerto -- confirmed cycling's status as one of the dirtiest sports in the world.
But there was this hope -- was it naive, Floyd? -- that les coureurs that they didn't kick out were riding clean. And Landis had such a wholesome, heroic story: the rebel from Pennsylvania Dutch country who carved a career for himself despite tall odds -- the disapproving parents; the three teams that folded beneath him, felled by bankruptcy; the bum hip, which caused him so much pain that after some stages last year, he came close to vomiting.
Even before Landis finished Stage 17, when he pulled back most of the time he had lost the previous day, the whispers had begun. Allen Lim, Landis' trainer, took pains in the days that followed to point out that the effort put forth by Landis in that heroic, Tour-saving stage was generally in line with "what he's done in training." The anomaly had been the bonk the previous day.
Then you read what German doctor Kurt Moosburger recently told Cyclingnews.com: "You can do a hard Alpine stage without doping. But after that, the muscles are exhausted. You need -- depending on your training conditions -- up to three days in order to regenerate."
To help recover, testosterone and human growth hormone can be used. "Both are made by the body and are therefore natural substances," he said. "They help to build muscle as well as in muscle recovery."
Dr. Moosburger explained how it was done. "You put a standard testosterone patch that is used for male hormone-replacement therapy on your scrotum and leave it there for about six hours. The small dose is not sufficient to produce a positive urine result in the doping test, but the body actually recovers faster."
It would be funny -- if it weren't heartbreaking -- to think that as he sat outside the team hotel last Wednesday night, explaining his collapse, Landis was already getting a little help from a patch on a tender part of his anatomy.
So I flat-out asked him if he'd done the patch thing, and he told me he hadn't. All he can do now is wait for the B sample and, after that, hope another test proves that he's in a very elevated percentile of men, who go through life with more than their share of testosterone.
Meanwhile, I've got this passage in my Tour story in this week's Sports Illustrated: "Landis' epic ride on July 19 did not just succeed beyond all expectations, putting him in striking distance of the lead, which he seized for good in the Tour's final time trial two days later. It provided a gleaming counterweight to the doping scandal that had overshadowed this Tour since the day before it began."
Gleaming counterweight. That phrase will mock me for months, if not longer, unless Landis is able to convince us that it's all a great misunderstanding.
Floyd says he didn't do it, and I want very badly to believe him.
