Pat McQuaid, the president of the International Cycling Union (UCI), has hit back at the latest claims made by disgraced rider Floyd Landis. In an interview with German TV channel ARD this week Landis, who won the 2006 Tour de France but was later stripped of his title after testing positive for synthetic testosterone, claimed that one of the ways that the US Postal team of Lance Armstrong avoided positive dope tests was that the UCI was complicit in covering things up.
“In the peloton, everyone knows that Pat McQuaid, Hein Verbruggen and other leaders of the UCI protected some riders and not others during the past 20 years. It was their way of manipulating and creating stars,” the American claimed.
In an interview with the Irish Independent, MacQuaid refuted Landis’ claims from the UCI’s headquarters in Aigle, Switzerland.
"It's very easy for Floyd Landis to make statements like that with no proof,” he said. "Also, the journalist who interviewed him should have asked him for proof.
He also brought up the fact, as many of Landis’ critics often do, that the American proclaimed his innocence of doping at the 2006 Tour, raising millions of dollars from fans to pay for his defence, and almost bankrupted the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) as it fought to prove his guilt in court.
"He has already proven to be a liar and continues to be a liar,” said McQuaid. “There is no truth in it, absolutely no truth in it."
The Irishman ten went on to say that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) gets the same reports as the UCI, and so it would be “impossbile to protect riders”.
He defended the UCI’s recent record, where a number of big name riders have been found positive and suspended from the sport.
"All you have to do is look at the amount of big names that have been found positive over the years to show that I don't protect anybody and the UCI doesn't protect anybody," he said. "Landis won the Tour and we went after him, Rasmussen was a Tour leader and we went after him, and now Contador.
“Landis talks about clenbuterol being used,” he added. “We've gone after Contador with only 50 pictograms of clenbuterol in his system. This again proves that Landis' statement is complete fabrication."
With investigations going on into Landis’ many claims going on behind closed doors, the public fight has consistently been over the credibility of the various parties on both sides. The very last words of Lance Armstrong’s original statement to the press and public on the day that news of the allegations broke was “We like our credibility”, whereas Landis admits that he lied for years, and that he personally has very little.