Tour de France winner Floyd Landis has tested positive for the male sex hormone testosterone, the United States rider’s Phonak team said on Thursday.
”The Phonak Cycling Team was notified yesterday [Wednesday] by [world cycling body] the UCI of an unusual level of testosterone/epitestosterone ratio in the test made on Floyd Landis after stage 17 of the Tour de France,” Phonak said in a team statement.
Landis produced a remarkable effort a week ago to win the 17th stage of cycling’s showpiece event following a disastrous 16th stage in which he dropped from first to 11th place.
Phonak said Landis will not ride until the matter has been clarified, adding that if the B sample analysis confirms the result of the A sample, the rider will be dismissed.
He said: ”The team management and the rider were both totally surprised by this physiological result.
”The rider will ask in the upcoming days for the counter-analysis to prove either that this result has come from a natural process or that this is the result of a mistake.”
Landis had earlier pulled out of a race in Denmark on Thursday. He also did not ride in a scheduled race in The Netherlands on Wednesday.
Blow for Tour de France
The confirmation of Landis’s positive drugs test is the final blow for a race beset by doping problems before it had even started.
Landis’s main rivals for the title, Jan Ullrich of Germany and Ivan Basso of Italy, were withdrawn immediately before the start of the Tour in Strasbourg after they were linked to a Spanish doping investigation.
Ullrich, the 1997 champion, and Giro d’Italia winner Basso both denied any involvement. Ullrich was subsequently sacked by his T-Mobile team, who also suspended his teammate Oscar Sevilla and sporting director Rudy Pevenage.
The entire Astana-Wuerth team were withdrawn after five of their riders were found on a list provided by the Spanish police.
As a result, the peloton was cut from 21 to 20 teams and from 189 to 176 riders.
The investigation came to light in May when the Spanish Civil Guard raided addresses in Madrid and Zaragoza and found anabolic steroids, equipment used for blood transfusions and more than 100 bags of frozen blood. — Reuters