Bike World News

If you follow the Trust but Verify blog, you’ve known about this for some time, but Velo News has a good report this morning on Floyd Landis’ new attempt to challenge the ruling of the international Court of Arbitration for Sport. Landis feels that the system for resolving doping cases is biased against the accused and also claims that the three arbitrators in his case had undisclosed conflicts of interest that may have affected the outcome of his appeal of an earlier panel.

What are we to believe here? Is Landis trying to improve conditions for all athletes accused of doping or is he just trying to get his Tour de France title back?

I hope that its the former, but I think that a better way of achieving this would be a class action suit on behalf of a number of athletes who feel that they suffered from the same judicial circumstances cited by Landis.

The VeloNews article cites several examples of other athletes that have unsuccessfully tried to challenge the CAS, but Landis’ attorneys seem to be bouyed by evidence of arbitrators’ conflicts of interest after CAS recently posted information about past cases on its Web site.

If its the latter, I think that Landis just needs to accept fate and wait for his term to run out and just enjoy racing again. At this point, he has a little over two months until he can race again (and has found a team) and going back to court only brings him negative publicity, reminding people of the doping charges. Also, I feel that it is a waste of the money that his fans contributed to his legal defense fund.

The best thing for him to do now is to race clean, do well, and re-establish himself as the cycling power we all know he can be.

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