Landis' Hatred, Stupidity Evident as Ever

Somewhere along the winding, climbing roads of the 2005 Tour de France, the first for Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis as competitors after being teammates, I remember sharing a lunch table with Landis' new coach, the brilliant Colorado physiologist Dr. Allen Lim, who tried to explain to me in layman's terms how he was tracking Landis' energy displacement by computer almost down to the pedal stroke.

But what was most memorable about our conversation was Lim describing how driven Landis was to upset his one-time team leader. It was clear there was no love lost with Landis over leaving Armstrong's Discovery team.

Indeed, Landis' dislike for Armstrong manifested itself before that Tour ended when Landis told the French magazine L'Equipe: "In some teams, they often talk about their friendship, but in a team like that [Discovery] with someone [Armstrong] who behaves as if he really is the boss, I don't think you can go that far in talking about friendship. In everyday life, it's hard to be friends with your boss. I don't believe that Lance has ever had that kind of friendship with any of his teammates ... friendship can't exist when you give orders and direct others."

But hatred, apparently, can rise.

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Hate, after all, is all Landis appears to have for Armstrong after telling The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that he and Armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs, something Landis was busted for after the 2006 Tour and something Armstrong has been accused of, but never convicted.

It was the height of stupidity that Landis said he spent as much as $2 million since 2006 fighting the Tour's finding and claiming he was innocent of something he said Thursday he was guilty of all along. That is further proof that Landis was under the influence of drugs.

But it was the height of vindictiveness that he would, as others have done, drag Armstrong's name through his own mud without a scintilla of evidence other than his own storytelling. It reminded me of Kobe Bryant spitting out Shaquille O'Neal's name trying to explain his dalliance outside of marriage.

Of course, Jose Canseco once did the same thing as Landis to some of the baseball players with whom he teamed over the years, and many of us (I'm guilty) dismissed him as kooky and untrustworthy. Those of us who did so eventually were proved wrong.

Maybe I haven't learned my lesson, but I am dismissing Landis as kooky and untrustworthy, too. After all, he admitted Thursday that he wasn't just living a lie the past half-decade. He was also trying to cover it up to with a moneyed legal attack on the places and people that nailed him.

Landis did so, too, after pleading his case with sullen eyes to a gullible public that gave him its hard-earned pennies and dimes to help him fight who he said were the real scoundrels in his downfall. He got them to give to his Floyd Fairness Fund.

What a charlatan, a Bernie Madoff of sorts, in sports. I suspect it'll take a class-action lawsuit from the people he turned into suckers in order for them to get their money back.



Landis isn't the first person to point an accusatory finger at Armstrong and claim that the king of cycling's Super Bowl event is just as dirty as the sport has been for years. Other riders have done it. European media, most famously L'Equipe, has done it.

Armstrong responded Thursday to Landis' allegations like he has a lot of others: dismissively.

"It's our word against his word," Armstrong said at the Tour of California before he crashed. "I like our word. We like our credibility. Floyd lost his credibility a long time ago."

He stopped short of going one more step and suing for libel or slander as he's done a few times, all successfully. That may be to come if there is anything left to be had from Landis. An apology from such a disgraced and now despicable person may not be worth it.

Some will suggest that if Armstrong doesn't go so far that his refusal to do so is a tacit admission of complicity. They'll argue that Armstrong doesn't want to wind up in a court of law and be forced to turn over documents that could indict him at worst, or just bring more questions about his outrageous accomplishment.

"It's our word against his word. I like our word. We like our credibility. Floyd lost his credibility a long time ago."
-- Lance Armstrong But Armstrong has history on his side. He always has. Despite all the testing, participating in as dirty a sport as there is, an association with a Dr. Galea of his own, Armstrong's never come up anything but clean.

There is no doubt that Armstrong's story is the most difficult to believe in modern-day sports. He went from near-death to defying the rigors of one of the most grueling endurance sporting events in the world, and did so over and over again.

Television does not do the difficulty of the Tour justice. It isn't until you arrive at the base of a mountain and see the switchbacks the riders must climb going up the side and disappearing into the clouds that you realize it isn't a sport made for mortals. It is hard to believe Tour racers, Armstrong included, can do what they do stoked merely on pots of pasta and plates of potatoes. It just doesn't seem humanly possible. Then again, neither do a lot of things athletes do, like Usain Bolt to name one.

But we know Landis did what he did. We figured as much the day he made a remarkable recovery in the Tour to stake his claim to the crown he would later have snatched away. We were more certain when he came up with his cockamamie explanations and threatened those who refused to buy in.

Now all Landis has left is his ignominious place in sporting history, and it is his alone. No one else should be blamed for his abject stupidity. Landis filled his own cesspool and now he's drowning in it.