30 June 2008

Landis' appeal failed.

This just in, Floyd Landis' last chance appeal to the Court of Arbritration of Sport (CAS) has been declined. They are upholding their previous ruling that he was guilty of doping during the 2006 Tour de France.
"Consequently, Floyd Landis is disqualified from the Tour de France 2006 and is suspended for a period of two years starting from 30 January 2007. Floyd Landis has been ordered to pay the sum of $100,000 to the United States Anti-doping Agency (USADA) as a contribution towards its costs in the CAS arbitration."
Travis Tygart, the head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, said he was “satisfied with the decision.”
“We weren’t surprised by the outcome,” Tygart told VeloNews. “We did a full review of the evidence from the start. Before we brought charges in this case, every day we reviewed the evidence we had and asked the same question, ‘does this point to a doping violation?’ We were comfortable that we had the case when we started.”

Landis will not be eligible to race professionally until January 2009. Even then, will anyone touch him? I personally wanted to believe that he was innocent. That it was, if not a corrupt system, at least a system with gaping holes and glaring flaws in their processes that Landis happened to fall in. Do I still believe him? I don't know at this time. See VeloNews for the full article.

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