Cycling: Tour de France winner Floyd Landis has given a positive drugs test. The American, who won in Paris last Sunday, has tested positive for the male sex hormone testosterone.
"The Phonak Cycling Team was notified yesterday by the UCI of an unusual level of testosterone / epitestosterone ratio in the test made on Floyd Landis after stage 17 of the Tour de France," Phonak said in a team statement.
Landis produced a remarkable effort a week ago to win the 17th stage of cycling's showpiece event following a disastrous 16th stage in which he dropped from first to 11th place.
Phonak said Landis would not ride until the matter had been clarified and said that if the B sample analysis confirmed the result of the A sample, the rider would be dismissed.
Phonak added: "The team management and the rider were both totally surprised by this physiological result.
"The rider will ask in the upcoming days for the counter analysis to prove either that this result has come from a natural process or that this is the result of a mistake."
Landis had earlier withdrawn from a race in Denmark today. He also did not ride in a scheduled race in the Netherlands yesterday.
Cycling has been dogged by doping controversies for some time now and the start of this year's Tour de France was no different.
Two of its biggest names, Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, were banned from the race 24 hours before its start three weeks ago as they were implicated in a doping investigation in Spain.
Ullrich, who won the Tour in 1997, Oscar Sevilla and team manager Rudy Pevenage were banned after their German T-Mobile team was notified by race organisers ASO that the three had been named in the probe by Spanish police.
The CSC team withdrew Italy's Basso, winner of the Giro d'Italia race in May.
The AG2R team followed suit by withdrawing Spain's Francisco Mancebo. He was also on the list of nine Tour riders provided by the Spanish police to an investigating magistrate.