Just Do It

Floyd Landis

by Brian Howard

Mon., July 2, 7 p.m., free, Chester County Book & Music Company, 975 Paoli Pike, West Chester, 610-696-1661, www.ccbmc.com

The final week of last year's Tour de France was a dizzying mix of massive highs and crushing lows for Floyd Landis. The Mennonite-raised Lancaster County native went from Stage 16 choker to Stage 17 legend to doping whipping boy after his urine tested positive for out-of-whack testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratios. Since August of last year, Landis, 31, and his legal team have been fighting back, using what they've dubbed a Wiki defense, posting the evidence against him online and inviting experts to poke holes in it. With final arbitration in his case looming, and hopes of getting himself and his surgically replaced hip back into competition "as soon as possible," Landis is releasing the tell-all Positively False: The Real Story of How I Won the Tour de France (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, $24.95). City Paper recently chatted with him — click here for more of our interview.

City Paper: Do you think the alleged false positives were the result of incompetence or malice?

Floyd Landis: They were fairly incompetent [at the lab]. To sum up the defense: They never identified that what they were alleging was testosterone was [actually] testosterone by their own rules. They never provided any rebuttal to that.

CP: The idea of the Wiki defense — an open-source legal team — seems ingenious. How much help did you get?

FL: We got quite a bit. A lot of the help that we got in the early parts was from people we didn't know before.

CP: It seems that you may never get a fair shake, at least in an official sense. Is the book an effort to reclaim your good name?

FL: The only part of the story [most people] get is the tour and the doping scandal. This is showing there's more to me than just that. Hopefully in that way it will make it easier to understand that our arguments are real.