Floyd Landis: Champ Or Cheater?

Last year's Tour de France winner Floyd Landis says he's done everything he could think of to persaude the world that he didn't use illegal substances to help him win the grueling bike race.

He just published a book, in which he tries to further his cause, called "Positively False: The Real Story of How I Won the Tour de France."

"The purpose of the book is to explain the whole process, over and above telling the story about my life," Landis told Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith. "Because people only have really a small picture of my life. They know about the tour and about the doping charges but they don't know anything about the rest. I want them to get the whole story."

Landis became an instant celebrity when he battled back from behind during the grueling mountain stage despite having a severely injured hip. But after the race, French authorities announced he tested positive for synthetic testosterone in urine taken on the day of his comeback.

Landis adamantly denied the charges from the beginning. Facing the loss of his title and a two-year suspension, he has aggressively attacked the French lab and the United States anti-doping agency. Landis, with the help of donations, has spent $2 million on his defense, says that the positive test result is based on flawed research. He said that if that research were applied in the United States, Switzerland and Australia, he would not have been found positive. Landis said the French lab only found a skewed ratio, but never identified testosterone.

"They never identified by their own rules what they were looking at was at the testosterone," he said. "That's the main defense in the case."

The panel has yet to make a decision about Landis's fate but the USDA has never lost an arbitration hearing.

In May, he presented his case in a nine-day public arbitration hearing. Landis' defense team hammered away at the USDA and the prosecution countered with incriminating evidence against the cyclist. But it was the former Tour de France champion, Greg LeMond who shocked the courtroom when he testified that Landis's manager called him and threatened to expose the fact that LeMond had been sexually abused as a child.

"I figured this was intimidation to keep me from coming here, thinking that I feared being exposed that I was sexually abused somehow," LeMond said in court.

"First of all, there was nothing that I could do to even help him with it, whatever it was that he's been through," Landis said.

But Landis had difficulty saying why his manager threatened LeMond that way. He sidestepped the issue and called it "terribly unfortunate situation."

"There was no good that came out of that for either side," Landis said.

Another problem that casts doubt on Landis' credibility is the fact that he was getting ready to join a new cycling team and was in need of a hip replacement. But he didn't let the new team know the full extent of his injury.

"I wanted the chance to race that year and it was going to become clear very quickly whether it was going to be a problem or not," Landis said. "And I decided at whatever point it came clear that I wasn't going to be able to compete at the level I was expected to and paid to do, I was going to have to just tell them that was it, but up until that point there had been no one who tried to race with a hip like that so it would have been very difficult to say it's going to be OK."

To read an excerpt of "Positively False," click here.

"Positively False" is published by Simon Spotlight Entertainment, a division of Simon & Schuster, which is part of the CBS Corporation, as is CBSNews.com.