Disgraced Tour de France winner Floyd Landis has provided more details about his use of performance-enhancing drugs and claims against some of the biggest names in the sport, including Lance Armstrong. Six weeks after he finally confessed to doping and pointed the finger at some of his former teammates and team officials, Landis gave what the Wall Street Journal described as “the most detailed view yet of what may be one of the biggest and most intricately coordinated cheating conspiracies in sports history.” In the article, published Saturday to coincide with the start of the Tour de France, Landis again admitted to using a variety of banned substances, including testosterone, human growth hormone and erythropoietin (EPO), as well as accusing his former US Postal teammates and officials. Landis provided accounts of blood transfusions, including one in an isolated Alpine mountain where they pretended the team bus broke down and another in a hotel room during the 2004 Tour, as well as fresh claims the team had funded their doping operation by selling off spare bicycles. Three other former US Postal riders, who were not identified, had said in interviews that doping had occurred within the team, the Journal added, but all the riders and officials identifed by Landis have denied the accusations. The claims are nothing new for Armstrong, who won the Tour de France seven times in succession between 1999 and 2005 but has spent most of his career fending off accusations of wrongdoing despite never failing a doping test. The American has always maintained his innocence and dismissed Landis, who was stripped of his 2006 Tour win for a doping offense, as having no credibility. Armstrong hit out Saturday hours before the start of his final Tour campaign at the more “false” doping accusations. “Today's Wall Street Journal article is full of false accusations and more of the same old news from Floyd Landis, a person with zero credibility and an established pattern of recanting tomorrow what he swears to today,” a statement from Armstrong said. “The article repeats many of Landis' baseless and already-discredited claims against many successful people in cycling, and even includes some newly created Landis concoctions. “Landis' credibility is like a carton of sour milk: once you take the first sip, you don't have to drink the rest to know it has all gone bad. “For years, sensational stories - based on the allegations of ax-grinders - have surfaced on the eve of the Tour for publicity reasons, and this article is simply no different. Lastly, I have too much work to do during this, my final Tour, and then after my retirement in my continued fight against cancer, to add any attention to this predictable pre-Tour sensationalism.” Anti-doping officials have called on Landis to provide evidence backing up his claims. He has been speaking with US federal investigators, who are examining whether the US Postal team defrauded their sponsors by using performance-enhancing drugs while vowing to race cleanly, according to the Journal. Landis was a teammate of Armstrong's at US Postal between 2002 and 2004 before changing teams in 2005.
