Floyd Landis fought the law, and, wow, the law won.

In a unanimous decision, the Court of Arbitration for Sports upheld the doping ruling against the 2006 Tour de France winner and ordered him to pay the United States Anti-Doping Agency $100,000 for its legal costs in the case.

In its press release, CAS stated that the arbitrators ruled that the Laboratorie National de Depistage du Dopage did not violate the International Standard for Laboratories and that because the lab is acredited by WADA, it “benefits from the presumption that it conducted sample analysis in accordance with international laboratory standards.” The release also stated that Landis didn’t prove that a “departure from internation laboratory standards occurred.”

Presumably, the ruling is despite the errors that prompted the American Arbitration Association’s majority and minority opinions to toss out the flawed A-sample test. By so ruling, CAS negated all of the arguments at the heart of Landis’ defense.

I have yet to peruse the CAS ruling en toto, but it is available on the CAS website.

In an e-mail statement, Floyd Landis’ attorney Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner Maurice Suh said:

“We are very disappointed in the result. The evidence strongly supports Floyd’s innocence. We maintain that the French laboratory’s work violated proper procedures and that these violations were not simply technical in nature. They resulted in the inaccurate findings at the heart of this case. CAS’s decision, which does not give credence to these violations, does little to require that laboratories and anti-doing agencies are held to the same high standards as are athletes.”

Floyd Landis said: “I am saddened by today’s decision. I am looking into my legal options and deciding on the best way to proceed.”

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