KEY POINTS:
BRUSSELS - American Floyd Landis, who is expected to be stripped of the Tour de France yellow jersey for testing positive after this year's race, said yesterday that his cycling career may be over.
Landis won the race in spectacular fashion this year to succeed his now-retired compatriot Lance Armstrong, seven-time winner of the world's biggest bike race.
But days after his triumph it emerged that Landis had tested positive for the banned male sex hormone testosterone after his spectacular victory on stage 17.
Landis, who grew up in a strict Mennonite Christian community in Pennsylvania, has always protested his innocence, saying inconsistencies by the French laboratory which analysed his samples led to the positive result.
He told the Belgian press that even if he is cleared by an American arbitration body early in the New Year, he will likely miss the coming season.
"There's a minute chance of me racing again in 2007," the 31-year-old is reported as saying. "Even if I'm not suspended, who will want to sign me? And if they suspend me for two or four years - a humiliation which I hope doesn't happen - it's over for me.
"As things stand now, I don't see myself as a bike racer."
- AFP
