An arbitration panel ruled against Floyd Landis Thursday, stripping the Farmersville native of his 2006 Tour de France title and banning him from competitive cycling for two years.

The panel ruled Landis used performance-enhancing drugs to win cycling's most prestigious title.

The cyclist has proclaimed his innocence since tests administered during the Tour showed he used performance-enhancing drugs, including synthetic testosterone, to win the three-week race.

Landis and his legal team have one final chance for appeal, before the Court for Arbitration of Sport.

If the 1994 Conestoga Valley High School graduate decides not to appeal, or loses an appeal, he will be the first Tour winner in the event's 105-year history to be stripped of the title for doping.

He has one month to decide if he wants to appeal.

"This ruling is a blow to athletes and cyclists everywhere," Landis said Thursday in a prepared statement. "I am innocent, and we proved I am innocent."

The panel's 2-1 majority decision in favor of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency came four months after a 10-day hearing in Malibu, Calif.

That hearing included attacks on Landis' personal character — perhaps none more memorable than former Tour winner Greg LeMond's testimony that Landis admitted cheating to him.

The panel admitted mistakes were made in the testing process — including flaws in a testosterone-to-epitestosterone test — but they said a carbon-isotope test that showed Landis cheated was accurate.

"As has been held in several cases, even where the T-E ratio has been held to be unreliable … the (carbon-isotope) analysis may still be applied," the majority wrote. "It has also been held that the (carbon-isotope) analysis may stand alone as the basis" of a positive test for steroids.

Landis' legal battle has already cost him a reported $2 million.

He did not provide any insight Thursday on what his next step in the legal process would be.

Attempts to reach Landis Thursday through two of his representatives were unsuccessful.

Many of Floyd's supporters, including his parents, Paul and Arlene, attended the May hearing in Malibu.

They said Thursday's ruling came as no surprise.

"Of course, we are disappointed," Mrs. Landis said Thursday night. "But we could tell what was going to happen.

"Still, this doesn't change the way people that love him feel about him."

Mrs. Landis said she realized her son was fighting an uphill battle during the hearing.

"I could tell by their demeanor," she said of the members of the arbitration panel. "He was mostly at their mercy."

Eric Gebhard, Landis' longtime friend and former classmate at CV, heard of the panel's ruling for the first time during a Thursday conversation with a reporter.

"I pretty much expected that from day one," he said. "I would have liked to have been hopeful, but I'm too much of a realist to think something positive was going to happen."

Gebhard said he spoke with an anxious Landis Wednesday night.

"He was a wreck. He could be doing better," Gebhard said. "Between the trial and the verdict, he was very confident. But he got tired of waiting and waiting."

Gebhard said he doubts his friend will make a final appeal, even though Landis did not speak of his plans during their phone conversation.

"I don't think he is going to appeal. That's just my gut feeling," Gebhard said. "I don't know if they expect to get a different verdict somewhere else. Why waste millions more dollars?"

To help pay the mammoth legal costs, Landis' camp established the Floyd Fairness Fund in January.

"He told me it's amazing how much money you can spend on lawyers," Gebhard said.

Landis tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, including synthetic testosterone, after he made a miraculous comeback in Stage 17 of the Tour. He made up an unprecedented eight minutes on the leader during that mountain stage, a day after "bonking" in Stage 16 and apparently riding himself out of contention.

But he charged back the next day with what experts called a ride for the ages.

Rich Ruoff, director of redroseraces.com — a Lancaster-based cycling organization — said performance-enhancers wouldn't have provided the extra push Landis showed during his comeback stage.

"I don't care what you take; that was all heart," he said.

Ruoff said he expected the majority ruling and disputed the carbon-isotope test, saying that test shouldn't have been considered.

"It should have never gotten to a second test," he said. "I watched this kid race when he was 16, and I could tell he had the potential to win the Tour de France. And I wasn't thinking about (him taking) drugs."

Landis has insisted he was merely a pawn in the anti-doping system's all-consuming effort to find cheaters and keep money flowing to its labs and agencies.

 "For the panel to find in favor of USADA when, with respect to so many issues, USADA did not manage to prove even the most basic parts of their case shows that this system is fundamentally flawed," Landis said in the statement.

The case was costly for the USADA and exposed flaws in the system.

In its 84-page decision, the majority found the initial screening test to measure Landis' testosterone levels — the testosterone-to-epitestosterone test — was not done according to World Anti-Doping Agency rules.

But the more precise and expensive carbon-isotope ratio analysis (IRMS), performed after a positive T-E test is recorded, was accurate, the arbitrators said, meaning "an anti-doping rule violation is established."

"Well, all I can say is that justice has been done, and that this is what the UCI felt was correct all along," Pat McQuaid, leader of cycling's world governing body, told the Associated Press by telephone. "He got a highly qualified legal team who tried to baffle everybody with science and public relations. And in the end the facts stood up."

Spanish rider Oscar Pereiro, who finished second to Landis in the 2006 Tour, claims the title by default.

"You never want to win a competition like that," he said. "But after a year and a half of all of this, I'm just glad it's over."

According to documents obtained by the AP, lead arbitrator Patrice Brunet and Richard McLaren voted in the majority and Christopher Campbell dissented.

"In many instances, Mr. Landis sustained his burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt," Campbell wrote.

In his dissent, Campbell latched onto the T-E ratio test, among other things, as proof that the French lab couldn't be trusted.

"If the (lab) couldn't get the T-E ratio test right, how can a person have any confidence that (the lab) got the much more complicated (carbon-to-isotope) test correct?"

With Thursday's ruling, USADA improved to 35-0 in cases it has brought before arbitration panels since it was founded in 2000.

This was a nasty contest waged on both sides, with USADA attorneys going after Landis' character and taking liberties in evidence discovery that wouldn't be permitted in a regular court of law. And Landis accused USADA of using a win-at-all-costs strategy and prosecuting him only to get him to turn on seven-time winner Lance Armstrong, who has long fought doping allegations that have never been proven.

More than the complex, turgid scientific evidence, the hearing will be remembered for the LeMond brouhaha.

The hearing turned into a soap opera when the former Tour de France winner showed up and told of being sexually abused as a child, confiding that to Landis, then receiving a call from Landis' manager the night before his testimony threatening to disclose LeMond's secret to the world if LeMond showed up.

LeMond not only showed up, he also claimed Landis had admitted to him that he doped.

At age 31, Landis has previously vowed he hadn't given up on cycling. He raced in small, non-sanctioned events in Colorado this summer.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

E-mail: bhambright@lnpnews.com