Tomorrow morning, friends, family members and supporters of Floyd Landis will gather for the Keep the Faith Ride, at 10 a.m., at the Petra Christian Fellowship church, on Airport Road, south of New Holland.
Landis, a Farmersville native,will not be at the 20-mile ride. He will be in his adopted home in California preparing for his hearing, beginning Monday at Malibu’s Pepperdine University. He faces charges that he took performance-enhancing synthetic testosterone during last summer’s Tour de France. The Farmersville native could be the first Tour de France winner to be stripped of his title and banned from professional cycling if a panel of three arbiters determines he did dope. Landis has steadfastly maintained his innocence.
The ride, http://floydfairnessfund.org/events.php, is the last fund-raising event scheduled by Landis’ Floyd Fairness Fund. Participants will pay $75 each for the opportunity to ride the same roads that Landis regularly rode before leaving to pursue a mountain biking career in the 1990s.
Floyd will need the money raised. His defense against the allegations is expected to cost $2 million. He was fired from the Phonak cycling team and denied his Tour winnings last summer, after the allegations surfaced in late July.
Just as with the local election, the news always takes a progressively stranger twist in the closing days and hours. Thursday night’s revelations that U.S. Anti-Doping Agency officials offered Landis a one-month suspension if he were to give them evidence that seven-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong doped are bizarre. Landis made the statement during a press conference. It was intended to show the lengths the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency will go in prosecuting athletes. The bombshell was the latest example. It seems unnecessary after they locked his representatives out of a French lab last month during retesting of his urine samples and two of the arbiters excluded Landis’ appointed arbiter from a recent decision.
Stick-and-ball sports commentators, such as Michael David Smith, at http://nfc-south.aolsportsblog.com/2007/05/11/floyd-landis-they-wanted-me-to-rat-out-lance-armstrong/, immediately came out condeming Floyd. He will say anything in denying his guilt, contended Smith.
New, possibly stranger, revelations may come in the hours before the hearing begins. They most certainly will come after the start of the hearing, which Landis - in an unprecedented move - has requested be open to the public.
The deck has seemed stacked against Landis since last summer. At least some people on Saturday will be keeping the faith.
