Commentary: Cleared or not, Landis is a loser

From the article:
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By Phil Sheridan
Inquirer Columnist

Only one thing was proven beyond a reasonable doubt during Floyd
Landis' appeal hearing over the last two weeks.

Professional bicycle racing is a filthy sport and, in a perfect world,
the Tour de France would go away and never come back. Certainly there
is no reason for anyone to watch cycling's premier event with any
faith that it is clean.

Here's all you really need to know. Landis and his attorneys may
succeed in discrediting the technicians in the French lab that
produced his positive tests for synthetic testosterone, but they will
never be able to succeed in winning back Landis' reputation. Whether
he cheated to win last year's Tour is almost beside the point now that
we've seen what he'll stoop to in order to win his case.

Most of the testimony over the nine-day appeal hearing centered on the
science of mass spectrometry and the procedures followed by the French
national lab. No matter how the three-person panel of arbitrators
rules - and that could take as long as 30 days - there is a fatal flaw
in the Landis camp's approach.

From the moment news of his positive test broke last summer, Landis
has acted like a guilty man.

The most egregious example of that was the episode involving Greg
LeMond last week. It was shocking, sensationalistic stuff. LeMond
testified that he received a menacing phone call the night before he
took the stand, that the caller pretended to be the relative who
sexually molested LeMond when he was a boy.
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J. Spaceman