Simon Gerrans has become one of the first of the current batch of professionals to comment on Floyd Landis’s plans to come to Australia in order to speak at an anti-doping conference, saying that he wishes the American is blocked from entering the country.
“I hope they get him at customs and send him back to where he came from,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Landis was banned from cycling for two years and stripped of his 2006 Tour de France title when he tested positive in the days after that edition of the race. He denied the accusation for over three years, but backtracked this spring when he announced that he had doped for much of his career. His confession was accompanied by claims that several of his former US Postal team-mates did likewise, and that Lance Armstrong and Johan Bruyneel both facilitated and supported it.
Gerrans is friendly with Armstrong and that may or may not be a contributory factor in his stance. “'I'm a bit surprised that anyone organising an anti-doping conference around world championships would invite someone who is going to bring so much negative publicity,'' he told journalist Rupert Guinness. “'There are probably plenty of guys out there [who] would have the same impact that Landis would. Yet he is a heck of a lot more controversial.”
Much of the criticism about Landis’s participation centres on people’s presumption that he will talk about specific riders, most notably Armstrong, and thus generate very negative headlines. However Landis released a statement in recent days that denied that would be the case; instead, he said that he would talk about his own personal experiences, and what way forward the sport should take.
“To be clear, I do not wish to use the conference as a “soapbox,” nor do I wish “hijack” the world championships,” he wrote in that statement. “I will not and cannot discuss events or circumstances related to the ongoing investigations and lawsuits involving Lance Armstrong and certain of his current and former business associates and teammates, including what I saw and heard during the relevant time periods.”
He said that his motivation now is to try to help the sport to recover, and to ensure that other riders don’t make the same mistakes in future.
“I have always loved racing my bicycle. For me, racing as a professional was a dream come true and it represented the culmination of years of very hard, very painful, dedicated work. Having felt those dreams collapse, having experienced the result of my work publicly evaporate and having subjected the sport I love to unnecessary criticism, I now must be of service and do what I can to help others avoid a similar fate.”
Gerrans said it didn't matter whether Landis said his intent was not to upstage the world titles. “How can you expect not to hijack the event, whether it's his intention or not?” he said. “I am not wasting any energy on it. I am thinking about the road and putting in the best performance possible. It's more of a shame for the event. It's such a fantastic event, and it'll have this cloud over it.”
Conference organiser Martin Hardie told the paper that he didn’t approve of censorship against Landis. ''We are getting overwhelming support from team directors, federations, riders, WADA [World Anti-Doping Agency], fans,” he said. “But we have the party line going, the same sort of Soviet Union stuff … 'Oh, he's got a problem, this guy. Lock him up.’”
There are a number of high profile speakers due to appear at the conference, which is entitled New Pathways for Pro Cycling. This group includes the prominent anti-doping scientist Dr Michael Ashenden, as well as Carlos Arribas, the journalist who broke the Operación Puerto story. It runs from September 27-28 in Deakin University, Geelong.