Earlier this week we got on the phone with embattled 2006 Tour de France winner/Lancaster native Floyd Landis to talk about his new book. As promised, here's a little bit more of our interview with the generally unchatty Landis, who's devoted all his efforts over the past year to attempting to prove he didn't cheat in during his famous Stage 17 miracle.

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: If I understand correctly, the release of Positively False violates a gag order. Is this a big concern for you?
Floyd Landis: There's a gag order about the hearing. The book sums up some of the hearing at the end, but it's more of a story of my life and experiencing everything in the tour.

City Paper: You've probably been up nights thinking "Why me?" since this all happened. What's the best answer you've come up with? Why you?  
Floyd Landis: The lab just made mistake. There's no way I could have prevented it.

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.

City Paper: The idea of the Wiki defense - an open-source legal team - seems ingenious. How much help did you get?
Floyd Landis: We got quite a bit. Most of it went through Dr. Arnie Baker. He summarized a lot of it in the e-book you can buy at The Floyd Fairness Fund. A lot of the help that we got in the early parts was from people we didn't know before.

City Paper: How gratifying was it to get so much help?
Floyd Landis: It was good. We were trying to learn the science that we didn't have experience with before. That part was satisfying.

City Paper: 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?
Floyd Landis: 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.

City Paper: The process you've endured just to get your day in court has seemed unusually ridiculous. First the Operacion Puerto debacle, and now this. The anti-doping controls in cycling make baseball's steroids policies seem rational and organized. How did it get this way?
Floyd Landis: Nobody had the resources, money, time — really any way to challenge it or allow anyone to see the process.

City Paper: In challenging the ruling, do you also hope that cycling’s anti-doping process is cleaned up, or at least made more accountable?
Floyd Landis: I hope so. It’s too early to tell what they’re going to do to change. That would be a good outcome.

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

Floyd says it ain’t so