Former Tour de France winner Floyd Landis has been given a one-year suspended jail sentence by a court in Paris for employing a hacker to spy on a French laboratory that was investigating doping allegations. The court in Nanterre (West of Paris) concluded that the disgraced rider – who had been stripped of his 2006 TdF title after testing positive for unusually high testosterone levels – had used a “Trojan Horse” to gain information from the WADA-accredited Chatenay-Malabry lab to use in his defence against the charges. The court also found Arnie Barker, Landis’s then-trainer, guilty of the same offence and handed down an identical sentence. Neither men were in France to hear the findings and Emmanuel Daoud, a lawyer for Landis, said he would advise the rider to appeal.
Landis announced his retirement from pro cycling back in January, after failing to find a new team with whom to ride; he was a member of Team Phonak at the time of his TdF win. When he made his original confession regarding the doping allegations, he claimed that the use of performance enhancers was rife and pointed the finger at a number of high-profile personalities including Lance Armstrong. Armstrong has always vigorously denied any charges of wrong-doing and no evidence from Landis was forthcoming.
