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Landis lashes out - Part II

Published: Jan. 18, 2008
In happier times: Landis at the 2006 Tour de France
In happier times: Landis at the 2006 Tour de France
Photo: Graham Watson (file photo)

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NR: I think the reason people still hold the suspension against Tyler is because
he denied having doped, and even had a campaign to believe in him, and
then there were documents from Operación Puerto detailing his doping schedules, and receipts sent to his house. You can compare and contrast the career arcs of Tyler with someone like David Millar, who also served a suspension, but admitted to doping as soon as he was accused. Tyler fought it and fought it, but as more evidence surfaced it seemed more and more like he was guilty.

FL: That’s not lost on me. I can see it from the same point of view as everyone else. But if you want to create a punishment of some kind for lying, then create a punishment for lying. But right now what you have is a system where, if a person is convicted, they get a suspension of a defined amount of time. There’s nothing that says we’re going to treat you like shit afterwards if you don’t admit to it, and if you do admit to it, you’re fine. If you want to add that to the rules, add it to the rules. But if you don’t add it to the rules… it just leaves people completely in limbo.

NR: Who specifically is treating Tyler like shit? Are you referring to the UCI, USA Cycling, or the media…?

FL: I don’t know. Look, I don’t mean to point out Tyler in this whole thing. It’s not just Tyler. [Ball] hired Santiago Botero, Sevilla, these are people who have been under suspicion before. He’s given them another chance, and there are a lot of people who want to judge him and say that he just doesn’t care whether someone is doping or not. That’s not the case.

From my point of view, the problem that is taking cycling backwards and not forwards is that it’s becoming polarized. You have teams like Team High Horse, or whatever they’re called these days, and Jonathan Vaughters’ team, and they are saying we don’t care about winning, we just want to be clean and so it’s okay with us to get whatever place we get because we’re not doping. You know what? That’s one of the most offensive things you could ever say. That immediately accuses everyone who finishes ahead you of doping. That’s hypocrisy. That’s asinine. They have to stop saying that. It’s all fine and good that they are against doping, but for them to say we’re not interested in winning, we’re just interested in being clean is an accusation of anyone that is better than them.

Look, if this could happen in a vacuum, where everyone was clean, somebody would win. Somebody behind them would cry like a bitch. That’s the problem. Now we’re never going to know who did or who didn’t cheat, but you can’t imply that everyone is cheating in front of you. That’s f--ked up man. That is not going to help cycling. Saying things like that is idiotic, and I can’ t believe no one else sees it the way I see it. That just doesn’t make sense to me.

NR: Well, in their defense, I have heard Vaughters and David Millar say things such as last year’s Tour was cleaner, the cleanest in years, and that the peloton seems to be cleaning up.

FL: Cleaner? Cleanest? A little bit cleaner? Look, the more they talk about it, the worse it gets for cycling. Of course we need to fix it. You will never solve all the crime. There is always going to be a police agency, because there are always going to be people trying to rob liquor stores. You’re never going to fix it. The more we talk about it, the longer this goes on. I’m not saying ignore it. I’m saying in the background enforce the rules the way they are written and leave it at that. That is what police do. That’s what the government does. The government enforces rules, and a person that breaks the rules pays for those rules in defined way. And after that, that’s it, that person then goes back out to live their life. In cycling, that’s not how it works. And the way it is now can never help cycling. It’s going to always be a mess until people start to realize that we have to have people enforcing the rules, and the rest of the time, the show goes on

NR: You don’t think there can be a bottoming out, a purging of the old mentality and a new beginning?

FL: That’s not what I am saying. That’s fair. I’m not saying there can’t be less crime because the rules are enforced in a better way. All I am saying is that there is always going to be the argument that our team is clean, so we don’t have to focus on winning. And that always accuses everyone else, and it’s always ambiguous, it’s always vague, and you never really know. Cycling is a very small version of the way the country works — you have rules, you have a government, you have people enforcing them, you have a police force.

It’s a good system, but everyone has to follow the rules. Everyone. The cyclists, the police (in this case USADA), the government (in this case USA Cycling), everybody has to adhere to the same standard. You can’t say, well because we had a bunch of cheating before, let’s just convict everyone and clean this thing out. That’s no way to fix anything. That will never work. First of all it’s an irrational way to deal with it. It is completely nonsensical if you talk to anyone in the real world, they’ll say that can’t possibly be the way things are supposed to be. You have to have a set of rules, and the people enforcing the rules and the people following the rules all have to follow them. Of course, I’m not saying it’s going to be perfect. Sometimes an innocent guy is going to be convicted, sometimes the guilty guy is going to be exonerated, but you have to make sure that both sides follow the rules to the same standard. You can’t just say, well, we just know everyone is cheating so f--k it, we’re just going to do what we want because we don’t care.

NR: That’s what you feel like has happened to you?

FL: That’s not just me, it’s a lot of people. Look, obviously Operacion Puerto is legitimate. There are people that were cheating. But you can’t leave people in limbo. If you don’t have evidence, you’ve got to write it off and say, all right, we think he was guilty, but we can’t convict him because we don’t have evidence, so we’ve got to let him go live his life. You can’t just leave him hanging for five years.

NR: Yeah, but both Botero and Sevilla have licenses. They both raced last year, and will be racing this year.

FL: That’s a whole different story altogether, and that’s why come to the defense of Michael Ball. I don’t believe he is trying to be defiant against the rules. All he is saying is, I’m following the rules. You guys drew the line in the sand. My team is on this side of the line. I didn’t cross the line, so stop saying I’m coming close to the line. There’s a line, that’s it. That’s what a law is; it’s a line in the sand. Don’t cross it.

NR: Okay, well you’re saying that Ball hasn’t broken any rules, but some might suggest that him looking to hire you while you’re suspended is flagrantly disregarding your suspension.

FL: Okay, I had never researched that rule before. I had never even considered being a director of a team so I had never researched the rule or how it was written as to whether I was allowed to be involved in a team or not. Unfortunately, the rumor got out before even Michael Ball said anything that he was speaking with me about becoming a director. I don’t have an agreement with him. I am not employed by his team. We had spoken about making an agreement, and then we did some research and his guys called USA Cycling and they said that I’m serving a suspension. Michael is not out just to break the rules just to make a point.

If the rules are that I can’t be a director, I can’t be a mechanic, I can’t be a coach, then I am not going to do that. He doesn’t have any desire to do that just to make a scene. Michael is not out to break rules. Of course he is brash, and he is bold, and he stands up for his interpretation of the way things are, but he’s not blatantly just breaking rules. He’s not going to hire me as director. If I work for his team in any capacity, it will be something that is within the rules. And if it’s not within the rules, I am not going to work for his team.

NR: It seems like there is a gray area there. You could become an employee of Rock & Republic. Other than driving the car during a race, there are a lot of possibilities. As far as I know, the UCI rules only concern who is behind the wheel of the caravan vehicle. Maybe, you could ride in the passenger seat.

FL: Look, I don’t think he’s even trying to force the gray area. It came to a point where he basically said you can’t be the director, so let’s wait for the future and call it off. We are still trying to figure out if there is something I can do that is helpful for team, and if it’s not within the rules we’re not going to do it. Of course there are the rules way they are written in black and white, and then there is the spirit of rules and the way they are supposed to be enforced.

It’s obvious that what they are trying to say is that they don’t want someone being the coach or the person making decisions on the team because they are suspended. It’s clear that is what the rules are trying to say. That doesn’t prevent me from consulting with them as far as tactics go, or something like that, but how much value that adds, I don’t know.

On the other hand, if you’re not going to draw the line where the rules are written, then you might as well just say that Floyd shouldn’t be allowed to speak with anyone on the phone that is currently racing, because he’s radioactive. At this point Michael and I agree on things. You write a rule, and if you didn’t write it right, that’s your fault. You can’t change it as you go to fit your opinion about how things might be.

This is a broader interpretation of the problem I’ve got with the case against me. They didn’t follow their own rules. They got a result that they liked, and so they just made up the information as they went. If that is the way you’re going to do things, then why do you even have rules? Just say this is a monopoly, this is a dictatorship, if we don’t like you, you’re not going to race, deal with it. That would be better than what they’ve got now. At least then, everyone would know, they are the ones making the decisions, and we can’t argue. That would be more reasonable that what they have now. What they have now is a mess. Then you’ve got people like Steve Johnson saying they’re not even paying attention? Well if you’re not paying attention, then who is? Is anyone?

Ultimately I don’t like to just complain. I care about cycling. If I never race again, I have a hundred friends of mine who I’ve spent years of my life with, and I know how hard they work, who deserve better than what they are getting. And it’s not just people in a gray area who other people are wondering if they’ve doped or not. It’s everybody. It’s people who just love to ride their bikes because they love to do so, and the sport attracted them because it was something that appeared to be better than what it is now. Really, there are a lot of people in this sport that deserve better than what they are getting now, including you guys, the press, everybody. Everyone deserves better than what they are getting now, and it all comes down to the people at the very top, people like Steve Johnson, who say, when something bad happens, oh I wasn’t paying attention. You know what? If you are the referee at the Super Bowl and you weren’t paying attention, you’re fired. Your job is to pay attention.

NR: Maybe in that analogy Johnson would argue that he is not the referee, maybe more like the commissioner of the NFL.

FL: Then you shouldn’t be collecting fees from cyclists, because the cyclists that are paying you are expecting you to enforce the rules. At the very best he could say I am the commissioner of the NFL, but even in that case you would hope the commissioner is watching to make sure things are working the way they are supposed to work. To say ‘I didn’t pay attention,’ that is the worst possible thing that could happen when it’s the guy who is supposedly the boss.

NR: There were certainly some VeloNews readers who wrote in expressing the same thing.

FL: I want to make clear my intention is not to make Steve Johnson look bad. I believe he is intelligent enough to be in the position he’s in, and I believe he has the right intentions. But I also understand that he’s afraid politically to say anything, when that shouldn’t be the case. There shouldn’t be political pressure on Steve Johnson to avoid the answers to those questions. The problem is not Steve Johnson, the problem is the fact that there’s pressure on him to be unable to answer those questions. That in itself is a problem.

NR: Going back to the Mayo situation, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. It seems like the Spanish federation is at a stalemate with WADA, or the Spanish anti-doping agency. At some point you have to figure that one of these anti-doping agencies will try to enforce the result on Mayo, and the federation may be penalized.

FL: Look, I don’t know what Mayo did or didn’t do. All I know is that the reason you have protocol for anti-doping stuff is because anti-doping is based on science, and science is based on performing tests according to certain criteria. And if you don’t perform to the right criteria, you don’t get the right result, and when you don’t get the right result, the wrong person gets punished.

Everyone always uses the example that O.J. Simpson got off because some police planted some evidence. Yeah, but some Duke lacrosse players that almost got convicted because some f--kers planted some evidence too. It goes both ways. There’s a reason you have rules. There’s a reason you draw the line and say neither side can cross this line. Yeah, you can always find an example of a guilty guy that got off, and you can always find an example of an innocent guy that got convicted. But what you try to do is narrow that down so that the lowest number of guilty people get off, and the lowest number of innocent people get convicted. And right now everyone is getting convicted, and that cannot be right.

NR: Are you speaking specifically about USADA, or WADA, or…

FL: It’s across the board. With the Mayo thing, they can’t say he is guilty. If you’ve got an A sample and a B sample, and the rule says that the B sample needs to confirm the A sample, and you test the B sample and it doesn’t confirm the A sample, that is not a positive test. That is what rules say. It doesn’t give any leniency to saying let’s just test it again somewhere else because we didn’t like that. Well if you didn’t like that one, you should have maybe tried that out first.

A lot of people, if you just say it’s a scientific test, they’ll believe it. Well here’s how science works. Science starts with a set of criteria that you have to perform in order for the test to provide a legitimate result. You can’t get the result and work backwards and say, well we did that different, but that doesn’t matter. That always affects the outcome of what the real test result should have shown. Science doesn’t work backwards. These guys try to take a result and show why a result was right. No, what you’re supposed to do is do the test the right way, and whatever result you get, if you didn’t do the test right, the result is meaningless whatever you think the outcome should have been. It’s absolutely meaningless. You can’t say, well, we didn’t do this part right, but it came in inconclusive so let’s just do it again because we don’t like that. That’s not what the rules say. The rules say the A sample and the B sample have to match. In the Mayo case, they didn’t match. There’s nothing in the rules that say we can do it a third time.

I mean, let’s just take it statistically speaking. If they did it three times and they got it two out of three, where in the rules does it say two out of three, that’s good enough? It doesn’t. It’s two out of two. Why did you even do it three times? Where in the rules does it say you get to do it three times?

This is why I brought up the question about Scott Moninger [with Steve Johnson, -Ed]. If you’re going to be lenient on the anti-doping agencies and the labs, then you probably should have some leeway with the racers too. When they say, yeah, it’s obvious the guy took a supplement and wasn’t really trying to cheat, but we can’t bend the rules for him. On the other hand, if the lab f--ks up half of the things they are supposed to do, we can bend the rules a little for them.

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