Littman: Americans need to support Landis now more than ever

The Olympics are great for one reason: feigned ethnocentricity.

We can put aside all our… The Olympics are great for one reason: feigned ethnocentricity.

We can put aside all our differences for two weeks while a small group of people shows the rest of the world why our country is better than them at a number of sporting events that all require extremely specific skill sets.

For those two weeks every two years, we care about sports we don’t normally consider sports. We turn all our attention to Lindsey Vonn’s shin, Apolo Ono’s soul patch and Bode Miller’s blood alcohol content.

This Olympic season, however, the American athlete most in need of our support isn’t in Vancouver. No, he’s on the lam.

Okay, maybe not on the lam, but still. America, remember Floyd Landis?

Landis is an American cyclist most famous for winning the 2006 Tour de France only to have his title stripped after a lab tested his urine and found abnormally high testosterone levels. He became the first man since the race started in 1903 to have a win taken away from him. Although Landis denied ever doping — and maintains that position still — the win was awarded to Spain’s Óscar Pereiro.

Now, using performance enhancers isn’t something foreign to cycling. It’s widely considered to have the most doping of any sport in the world. Cycling does fall to second if you were to imagine the fictional sport of Steroiditarod, an underground race in Alaska where men get all hopped up on steroids and pull sleds carrying dogs — also on steroids ¬— across the state.

On Monday, Reuters reported that a French judge issued an arrest warrant for Landis for “suspected hacking into an anti-doping laboratory computer,” according to French anti-doping agency head Pierre Bordry.

The hacking in question occurred in September 2006, while Landis was trying to prove his innocence, which was a failed effort that led to his banning from the sport for two years. According to The Los Angeles Times, French judge Thomas Cassuto wants to question Landis about the allegedly stolen computer data from the anti-drug laboratory outside Paris that tested Landis. Bordry said the arrest warrant was issued Jan. 28, after Landis failed to show up in November on Cassuto’s summons.

Reuters also reported that the judge put out a warrant for Arnie Baker, Landis’ former coach. Back in May of last year, French newspaper Le Monde reported that a French cyber crime investigation team linked the documents to a computer supposedly registered to Baker.

After he was stripped of his title, Landis brought his case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport claiming the lab mishandled his sample, but the case was thrown out the next year.

“It seems that [Landis] made all he could to enter into our computer system to try to prove the laboratory was wrong. He showed many documents he got by hacking to numerous sporting instances,” Bordry told Reuters. “The judge traced a network of hackers back to the ringleader.”

As of Monday, though, Landis said he hasn’t been served a warrant, but wasn’t sure about his former coach.

“I can’t speak for Arnie, but no attempt has been made to formally contact me,” Landis said in an e-mail to the Times. “It appears to be another case of fabricated evidence by a French lab who is still upset a United States citizen believed he should have the right to face his accusers and defend himself.”

Boom!

If you’re getting ready to light a croissant on fire only to put it out with that foul-tasting Perrier — a bottled water company in France — while talking about how much you hate justice, wait. Landis wasn’t done in his scathing e-mail just yet.

“But certainly I hope it’s not lost on anyone that it is a grand admission to having substandard computers at their self-proclaimed ‘nation’s best lab,’” he also told the Times.

Those last two sentences are the e-mail equivalent of going out to eat in France and ordering “freedom fries.”

Landis also denied any involvement with the hacking.

It’s clear he needs our backing. Sure, when we hear of computer hacking, we want to imagine someone sneaking up to a heavily guarded lab, disarming the guards, acrobatically flipping through a room secured with an alarm system trigged by lasers, magically guessing a bunch of passwords to a giant computer and then blowing up the lab on his way out. We want to imagine the ultimate American — our James Bond or Smash Adams.

Apparently, disappointingly, none of that happened. Sure, he didn’t do anything spectacular and inspiring like Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour de France seven straight times and dated Sheryl Crow. Still, we need to support Landis here.

If he says he didn’t do anything wrong, whether that be doping or hacking, we have to believe him. He’s an American, and he’s in the midst of being called a liar by French people. That’s bigger than the Winter Olympics.

Stop pretending to wear an American flag as a cloak and to care about Shaun White when we both know that you don’t. Instead use all that patriotism to support someone who really needs it: Landis, Floyd Landis.