ShareThisBy GWEN KNAPP
San Francisco Chronicle
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
The Tour de France champion chewed gum quietly and laughed frequently as he listened to lawyers and scientists talk endlessly about peaks that bore little resemblance to the Alps. They debated the graphs of urine-test results that placed the champ, Floyd Landis, at a defense table Monday, wearing a yellow necktie loaded with symbolism at the start of his 10-day legal fight to keep the world's most famous yellow jersey.
Landis' explanations have evolved considerably in the nine months since a Paris lab found synthetic testosterone in his drug test from Stage 17 of the Tour. What started as "It must have been the Jack Daniels I drank the night before" is now "The chromatograph was on the fritz."
For his arduous arbitration hearing at Pepperdine Law School, Landis has put together a multifaceted defense, overflowing with complaints about drug-testing policies here and abroad. His legal team should have streamlined the case, building a reasonable argument around a few points, starting with an error they found in the labeling of a sample, then proceeding to the big mouth of Dick Pound, the pompous chief of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
But Team Landis, like an obsessive athlete, goes to extremes. His advocates are only a few hyperbolic breaths away from accusing his prosecutors at the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.
"This case is an utter disaster _ the disaster of the anti-doping movement," his lead attorney, Maurice Suh, said in his opening statement. "Such a disaster doesn't result from one or two things going on. It results from many things going on, all at the same time."
He took a roundhouse swing at Pound, reminding the three arbitrators of a typically impolitic comment the WADA chief made about Landis' testosterone levels at the Tour: "You'd think he'd be violating every virgin within 100 miles."
Suh moved into high dudgeon here. "First of all, it's offensive to his wife, who's seated here in the courtroom, who took a lot of pride in her husband's victory," he said, gesturing to Amber Landis in the first row. "Second," he said, pointing to the couple next to her, "to his family."
Landis' parents, Paul and Arlene, had traveled from their home in Pennsylvania Dutch country, his mother in traditional Mennonite dress with her hair wrapped in a bun and tucked into a white cap. Landis' family has been a rallying point for many of his fans, those who find it hard to believe that a strict religious upbringing could yield a cheater and a liar.
That opinion was, for a time at least, shared by the famous person listed as a witness for the prosecution. Greg LeMond, a three-time winner of the Tour de France and the first American champion, said by cell phone that he probably will testify Thursday. When Landis' positive test was announced last summer, LeMond publicly called on him to tell the whole truth. LeMond also said he spoke with Landis twice over the phone.
"I like Floyd. I feel there's a moral compass in him," LeMond told the San Diego Union-Tribune in September, "and he seems to be very sidetracked right now because of the people around him."
The defense has its own cycling legend on the witness list, five-time Tour champion Eddy Merckx, whose son Axel rode on the Phonak team with Landis.
The opening day, however, had no featured performers, merely a pair of scientists supporting the lab's findings. Howard Jacobs, one of Landis' lawyers, seemed to be scoring points against the anti-doping agency's first expert witness, Cedric Shackleton, in knots over the way two sets of number tracked differently from what he had described as the common course.
When Shackleton finally started to explain himself in detail, Jacobs quickly requested a lunch break. It was 11:50 a.m., and the arbitrators demurred.
Suh took over the questioning for the defense and, reviewing different evidence, went after Shackleton as if he were a witness in a murder trial. On several occasions, he interrupted the witness, he repeatedly restated what Shackleton had said incorrectly and then asked him to verify the misstatement. At one point, he cut off Shackleton and finished his sentence for him. The chairman of the arbitration panel, Patrice Brunet, ordered him to stop putting words in the witness' mouth.
During the lunch break, somebody must have hosed down Suh. He was much calmer in the second half of the day.
Landis' defense shouldn't need histrionics, if the anti-doping agencies truly act capriciously, applying rules to the athletes but not to themselves. Suh made that point near the end of his 20-minute opening statement. Brunet interrupted to tell him that he had gone 2 minutes over, but Suh didn't stop. He went on a little longer. His team doesn't know when to quit.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
