Landis during arbitration hearing(Image credit: AFP Photo)
Maruice Suh(Image credit: AFP Photo)
By Susan Westemeyer
Floyd Landis has filed his appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), seeking to overturn his two-year suspension on doping charges. In the appeal, his attorneys continued their arguments that "a flawed test" unfairly stripped the USA rider of the 2006 Tour de France title, according to the AP.
Landis fully supports anti-doping efforts, the introduction to the appeal noted, and continued, "However, to wrongly strip a champion of his victory due to a flawed test is much worse than to have an athlete cheat his way to victory. To ensure a fair process and to protect against the travesty of wrongfully convicting a person for an act he or she did not commit, the anti-doping system must strike an adequate balance between the need for accuracy and reliability of laboratory test results and fairness in sports."
While riding for Switzerland-based Team Phonak the rider tested positive for testosterone after stage 17 of the 2006 Tour. The decision upholding the test and banning him was announced in September.
Maruice Suh will continue to legally represent Landis. "We welcome the opportunity to present this case to CAS," Suh noted. "We will prove, once again, that the French laboratory's [Châtenay-Malabry anti-doping laboratory (LNDD) - ed.] work violated numerous rules and proper procedure, rendering its results meaningless and inaccurate. We are optimistic that CAS will agree, and stop the miscarriage of justice that resulted from the earlier arbitration proceeding."
"I don't really have any comment on it," said Travis Tygart, head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). "It's a right afforded them under the rules, and they've elected to go forward."
Cyclingnews' coverage of the Floyd Landis case
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