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Lance Armstrong

Presumably Floyd Landis believes that he has finally supplied the smoking gun – or, to employ a more appropriate metaphor, the dripping syringe – awaited for the past decade.

The piece of evidence, to be more precise, calculated to topple the reputation of a man who achieved the impossible by coming back from radical cancer surgery not just to compete in the Tour de France but to win it an unprecedented seven times.

Several years ago a book attempting to nail Lance Armstrong as a doper borrowed the title of a Hollywood crime thriller: LA Confidential.

It would be no great stretch to interpret the motive behind Landis’s testimony against his former team-mate via the appropriation of another movie title: LA Takedown.

Landis Lied Before

In his smoking email, as it may come to be called, Landis has spoken out at last, finally dropping the pretence of defending himself against the positive dope test that saw him stripped of victory in the 2006 Tour.

Like almost all dopers, Landis lied and lied and lied again, all the way to the court of arbitration for sport – which, like the United States Anti-Doping Agency before it, refused to believe his claims of innocence.

Now Landis has come clean, so to speak, implicating many former associates, principally Armstrong, in the process of admitting his own guilt.

Until he explains himself, analysis of his motives will be divided between those concluding that he is simply seeking personal revenge and others choosing to believe that this is a man, raised in a Pennsylvania community of Mennonites, who is confessing everything in the hope of receiving absolution.

The allegations against Armstrong date from 2002 to 2004, when they rode together in the US Postal squad under the direction of Johan Bruyneel, a former rider who won stages of the Tours of France and Spain during his 10-year career.

Armstrong and Bruyneel first teamed up in 1998 and stayed together until his retirement in 2005. They were reunited last year, returning to competition with the Kazakh-owned Astana team, in whose colours Armstrong finished third in the Tour. This year they launched their own squad, Team RadioShack, in search of Armstrong’s eighth Tour win.

It was Armstrong who personally recruited Landis to US Postal, seeking to make use of the strength and competitiveness developed during the younger man’s days as a mountain bike champion.

Now Landis claims that it was during his years with US Postal that he learned the techniques of performance enhancement, including blood doping and the use of erythropoietin (EPO).

Armstrong Refutes Claim

Armstrong has pointed out time and time again that, despite being probably the most frequently tested athlete in the history of sport, he has never given a positive result in a legitimately conducted test.

But when the book LA Confidentiel, by David Walsh and Pierre Ballester, was published in France in 2004, its accumulation of circumstantial evidence – including the testimony of a former soigneuse, Emma O’Reilly – left readers in no doubt of the authors’ conclusion.

After the Sunday Times had repeated some of the book’s allegations, Armstrong won damages and an apology.

But his threat to sue the authors in a Paris court was dropped a few days before the hearings were due to begin.

“Mr Armstrong considers that his honour and reputation have been re-established for all people who examine the facts in good faith and that no further purpose is served now in pursuing other actions in defamation,” his lawyers announced.

A year after the publication of LA Confidentiel, the French daily sports paper L’Equipe published the findings of new tests on urine samples given by Armstrong during the 1999 Tour, the first of his sequence of victories, which revealed the presence of EPO.

The “B” samples from the tests, however, had been destroyed, meaning that the statutory testing requirements could not be completed in order to corroborate the initial results.

In 2006 a former US Postal team-mate, Frankie Andreu, came forward to claim that he had heard Armstrong admitting the use of EPO, human growth hormone and steroids. Andreu’s testimony was supported by that of his wife, Betsy.

Armstrong denied the claims and a settlement was reached which enabled him to collect an outstanding payment of $7.5m (£5.2m) from an insurance policy that would otherwise have been invalidated. Andreu also admitted using EPO in order to win a place alongside Armstrong on the 1999 Tour.

By coincidence, Landis’s latest revelations appear in the same week as the UK publication of Le Métier, a strikingly vivid account of a rider’s life by Michael Barry, another former US Postal rider who now wears the colours of Team Sky.

Without specifically incriminating himself, Barry recalls how he discovered, on his arrival in the peloton in the mid-1990s, that doping was little short of de rigueur.

“Directors, doctors and soigneurs told their riders that to race they needed to be professional,” he writes, “and to take care of themselves: ‘Il faut se soigner.’

Drugs were called les soins, which made something wrong seem like a necessity for health … [The sport] had reached a point that no matter how talented a rider was, how much training he did, how fit he was, or how motivated he was, he could not compete with the medicine when the racing reached the extreme. The difference in endurance and power between a doped and a clean rider was too significant. Cycling went from sport to black science.”

Like Armstrong, Barry has been competing this week in the Tour of California, where they and other riders faced questions.

Armstrong has predictably responded by asking why anyone should believe a proven liar, before abandoning the race after a crash near the start of yesterday’s stage.

It would be more interesting to hear the seven-times Tour winner’s honest reaction to Barry’s eloquent description of the ethics of an era whose dying sparks continue to start fresh fires.

Courtesy of The Guardian

Armstrong’s response to Landis Claims

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Marion Jones

So we have come to the end of the eventful year and everyone is discussing the biggest, best and worst sports events of the year. What sports story do you think was the biggest or that stood out the most to you?

The decade of some sports highs and lows:

Usain Bolt set another world record in the 200 final, this time bettering Michael Johnson’s 1996 mark which statisticians had predicted would last for 25 years, and added a third when the Jamaicans won the 4×100 relay.

Usain Bolt

This year Bolt went under 9,6 for the 100 and again broke the 200 mark at the Berlin world championships.

Bolt on the track, Michael Phelps in the pool and Yelena Isinbayeva through the air showed that the most elemental Olympic sports can be the most satisfying. Phelps won a record eight gold medals in nine days in Beijing with seven world records while Isinbayeva raised her own women’s pole vault record to 5,05 metres, her 24th world mark.

Michael Phelps

Awe at Bolt’s extraordinary feats near the end of the decade followed widespread unease prompted by events at the start.

In 2000 Marion Jones was the athlete of the moment after announcing she would go one better than Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis and win five track and field Olympic golds. Jones, who had featured on the covers of Time, Newsweek and Vogue while securing multi-million dollar contacts, spent the Beijing Games in jail after admitting to systematic drug use before Sydney.

Drugs scandals have besmirched the Tour de France and eroded the credibility of athletics and weightlifting.

This year Formula One team Renault admitted Nelson Piquet had deliberately crashed at the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix to help team mate Fernando Alonso win the race.

Jones was exposed as a result of the BALCO scandal in which federal investigators discovered she had been one of the clients of a laboratory dedicated to manufacturing performance-enhancing drugs designed to fool the testers.

Despite its travails, sport not only survives but prospers in the rapidly shrinking global village and looks set to thrive further despite the financial crisis which hit the world shortly after the Beijing Games.

The world governing body FIFA is expected to amass $2,5 billion in television revenue from the 2010 World Cup in South Africa despite the economic crisis.

Sports are spreading outside their traditional markets, with the 2009 European golf tour, for example, starting in Shanghai and climaxing in Dubai.

The 2007 Tour de France started in London, two years after Lance Armstrong won a record seventh consecutive title.

Armstrong, who had fought a successful battle against cancer which had invaded his lungs and brain, retired in 2005 but came back in 2009 to finish a creditable third.

In September 2009 Forbes magazine announced that Tiger Woods, who has succeeded Michael Jordan as the world’s best-known athlete, had become the first sporting billionaire.

Woods has become an athletic and commercial phenomenon since winning the US Masters in 1997 by 12 strokes. In the process he achieved the improbable feat of making golf, sport of the suburban middle classes and the country clubs, appear glamorous.

However, Woods’s lifetime ambition to overhaul Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 majors was put on hold in the final month of the decade when he admitted to cheating on his wife and announced he was taking an indefinite break from the game.

One of the joys of sport is its unpredictability. The Woods case, which shows that athletes however gifted possess the same human frailties as the spectators, is all part of the appeal.

HAVE YOUR SAY: What sports story do you think was the biggest or that stood out the most to you?