The Spanish-based Cyclingpost.com website on Wednesday published a bizarre report, http://www.cyclingpost.com/rider/article_004276.shtml, that Lancaster’s own Floyd Landis and his former team captain, Lance Armstrong, will participate as a team in an anti-doping program “to prove that cycling is possible without doping.”
The Tour de France winners, Landis and Armstrong, and presumably other riders, would have their blood and urine tested 50 times this year in an attempt to determine if illegal performance-enhancing drugs are used, the article states.
(”However it seems uncertain that one of the riders will use forbidden substances while being tested regularly,” the article said - whatever that means.)
The report ignores the fact that Armstrong has been retired from racing for more than a year and that Landis’ racing license is presently suspended and he is without a team. He is waiting for his hearing on charges he used artificial testosterone to boost his performance in last year’s Tour de France.
The report appears to be a linking of Landis and Armstrong to a testing program being used by team Slipstream this year. That program was profiled in a New York Times article earlier this week.
Landis’ spokesman Michael Henson, in an e-mail message, confirmed there was no truth to the report. He has written to the website asking for a correction to be posted. Henson called it “a gross misinterpretation” of the NYT piece and other wire service stories.
The report sounds like fantasy-league cycling, or maybe the cyclingpost.com writer got into some banned substances.
