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Del Mar, California Sports fans have little patience and even less tolerance. When tired of controversy, fans react as if facing a pile of dishes in the sink. They leave the kitchen with hopes that someone will cave in and diffuse the muck. So it is with professional cycling and drug use. Fans won't stop eating, but the thought of actually rolling up sleeves and trying to find the drain seems an insurmountable task that must be someone else's problem. Blame the ubiquity of performance enhancing drugs in pro sports. Blame the content-hungry media. Hell, blame Congress for spending more time on the Mitchell Report than the mortgage crisis. A collective "we're over it" has spread through box seats and sports bars alike. Convicted substance user and toppled Tour de France winner Floyd Landis is cycling's version of a noxious smell from under the sink. Sooner or later, you close the kitchen door and move the TV upstairs. Nobody wants to talk about Landis anymore. Certainly not now, after an inspiring Carlos Sastre of Spain just triumphed at the most recent – and slightly less – drug-tainted Tour. And this is a shame when all that Landis and his case represent could finally send an arrow into the black heart of The Drug Problem in pro cycling.  Stripped of his Tour victory, savings, honor and competitive bicycle, Floyd Landis waited for a redemption that never came. On June 30th of 2008, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) denied Landis' appeal from a previous panel's ruling on a positive doping test in the now-infamous Stage 17 of the 2006 Tour de France. What's significant – and perhaps even more troubling than the "spectacularization" of the first open public hearing in August of 2007 – is that the three-person panel from CAS told Landis he must pay $100,000 toward the legal fees of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. Landis, who mostly expected the news, but not the monetary salt-in-the-wound, has reportedly spent up to $2 million of personal and privately raised monies in his rather eclectic defense. And in doing so, he not only exposed the obscene underbelly in the world of anti-doping, but caused USADA and WADA to spend its own millions in building a solid case against him case.
When USADA chief executive officer Travis Tygart said,"We are pleased that justice was served and that Mr. Landis was not able to escape the consequences of his doping or his effort to attack those who protect the rights of clean athletes," it sounded more personal than judicial, more "what you were you possibly thinking, Landis?" than straight reportage. Of course, it was always personal, and regardless to whom the victory went, knife twisting was not unexpected. But the notion of recovering legal fees has sent a message not only to tempted athletes, but it's reverberating through legal systems of several first world countries. As one Tour stage winner asked about the sweeping jurisdiction of WADA, "Who made them God anyway?" Landis' attorney, Maurice Suh, said in an interview last year,"They've (WADA) always had more resources than the athlete. This is the first time it's even been close." But that sound bite sounded like some kind of "we sure scared them, didn't we?" and ultimately served to further annoy the sleeping WADA dragon, which felt that doping athletes had long been stealing gold from under the snoozing reptile's nose.
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