Oh man… this again?!

French judge issues arrest warrant for Landis

PARIS — A French judge has issued a national arrest warrant for U.S. cyclist Floyd Landis in connection with a case of data hacking at a doping laboratory, a prosecutor's office said.
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The American cyclist challenged the drug test results before an arbitration hearing in California - claiming that computer files were mishandled and erased - but he was stripped of his Tour de France title and banned for two years.

"Landis used the hacked files for his defense, that's how we discovered the whole scheme," [France's anti-doping chief] Bordry said. "He wanted to show that the lab made mistakes in the handling of the tests."

Okay. As if the French (more accurately, the Agence Française de Lutte contre le Dopage) don't have anything better to do (wait, don't we have some sort of major world sports competition going on right now?), they're now bringing this up again.

I still can't say for sure whether I think Floyd doped or not. At the time, I was skeptical considering the circumstances, but the evidence proved otherwise. So be it — Floyd gets suspended for awhile, Phonak decides to stop sponsoring a cycling team (thank you, Tyler Hamilton), and we forget about it. Then Lance comes back, and our clean all-American cycling hero helps rub away some of the tarnish left behind by the 2006 TdF.

Now France is insisting Floyd hacked the computer files. Let me point this out: not only is Floyd Landis considered to be old enough not to have grown up with computers, but he was raised as a Mennonite. Last time I checked, Mennonites weren't exactly the types to have access to such devices — especially considering they ban TV and shorts. So where on earth is the AFLD getting this idea that Floyd decides to sneak into their lab, perform some Mission Impossible or Hackers-esque work, and alter the files to be in his favor?

I have yet to hear of a computer hacker that hasn't had his hands buried in a keyboard since he was 6, so the notion that a kid raised in a Mennonite household in the 1980s actually grew up to be a quasi-computer hacker is a little preposterous.

Maybe AFLD is doing this to prevent Floyd from attempting the Tour de France again. (The warrant is only valid on French soil.) Who knows? But the fact of the matter is, he was convicted, sentenced, and has served his suspension without any issues. Hard to say the same for some other French riders that have tested positive and continued to dope after that! (See: Philippe Gaumont, Christophe Moreau, etc.)

Oh, and AFLD: P.S., we know you're on the verge of being shut down. Guess you got the publicity you wanted…