Tour de Testosterone

This one hurt. A sudden, fall-off-the-bike at 40 m.p.h., road rash, legs mangled in the wheel hurt. After Marion Jones, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, aren't we immune to the fact that our beloved athletes might not have achieved immortality on talent alone? Hell, no. Last week came word that Floyd Landis--the fun-loving Mennonite from Pennsylvania, the guy whose Alpine comeback in the Tour de France was dubbed, properly, "The Ride of the Century" (and he did it with a bum hip to boot)--that guy might have cheated.

Landis tested positive for abnormal testosterone levels, a result confounding and dumbfounding, given that a number of prerace favorites were tossed from the Tour under a cloud of doping suspicion. Could he have been so brazen--or stupid? "I hoped there was a genuine hero in the making," says Dick Pound, head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), who is quick to add that people shouldn't convict Landis right away. Still, it's painful. "Oh God," he says, "another nosebleed for the sport."

There's hope for Landis lovers inspired by his back-from-the brink tale: his guilt is far from established, and the case has other twists ahead. "It's going to be more complicated and longer than anybody thinks," says Gérard Dine, president of the Biotechnological Institute in Troyes, France, and an antidoping consultant to French and international sporting authorities. Phonak, the Swiss sponsor of Landis' cycling team, revealed last week that on the day of Landis' miraculous comeback, an abnormally high ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone was found in his urine. (Testosterone is a muscle-building anabolic steroid; epitestosterone, a related substance, has no performance-enhancing effects.) Specifically, Landis' testosterone-to-epitestosterone (T/E) ratio was above the 4-to-1 limit set by WADA; the ratio for most people is between 1 to 1 and 2 to 1. The team suspended him immediately.

So did Landis put synthetic testosterone into his body? He has denied using any illegal substances. One possibility is that there was an error in the testing. That will be known when the French national antidoping laboratory in Chatenay-Malabry examines a second, B sample, to confirm its initial findings. If the B sample matches the A sample, Landis could lose his Tour title. Landis has promised to fight any adverse findings and would likely appeal them to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Even if the B-sample ratio is also high, some antidoping experts say that could mean that Landis' body produced excess testosterone on its own. "We know there is a small percentage of the population who are going to have a natural production of testosterone that is above the norm," says Dine. Another possible explanation lies in what Landis consumed the night before his 125-mile comeback: he has admitted to trying to erase the worst performance of his career by downing some whiskey. Medical research has linked alcohol with an elevated T/E ratio.