What’s more important, character or science?

That was the principal question on the penultimate day of the Floyd Landis arbitration hearing, and could be the crux of whether or not Landis is found guilty of using synthetic testosterone to win the 2006 Tour de France.

In one corner was USADA attorney Matt Barnett, who used most of Tuesday’s morning session to attack Landis’s integrity, wondering about the spate of doping offenses on his Phonak team, why he’d penned a hateful Internet post directed at Greg LeMond, and what motivated him to stand by when his business manager made a threatening phone call to the three-time Tour de France champion.

In the other corner was Landis defense team star witness Dr. Simon Davis, an expert in carbon isotope ratio testing who got a firsthand look at the French national anti-doping lab in April, then used phrases like “complete lack of understanding” and “totally unreliable” in assessing the lab’s technicians and results.

With only one day left in the hearing at Pepperdine University, the testimony of Landis and Davis will likely have lasting impact on the three-man arbitration panel’s final decision. A ruling against Landis would make him the first Tour de France champion to be stripped of his title since the top four finishers of the 1904 Tour were disqualified for cheating.

No matter which side the panel takes, it's possible the hearing in Malibu, California is just a stopping-off point en route to a final verdict from the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Landis, 31, was first on the witness stand, and it only took a few minutes for Barnett to go on the offensive, asking about cycling’s ongoing doping problems. “I would say that some people in professional cycling have a problem,” admitted Landis. “If one person dopes it’s a problem because it changes the outcome of a race.”

Landis also admitted he’d looked at Internet sites about doping products and had a general ideal of what microdosing was. But he again denied using testosterone or any other performance enhancing drugs, and said Phonak’s frequent problems were a major concern when negotiating his deal to leave U.S. Postal Service and sign with the Swiss-based squad.

“I wanted to know what they were going to do to solve the problem,” he said. “I understood that they were going to make changes. That was good with me.” He later added, that, “You can only control so much. The riders don’t live in the same place. People are spread out all over the world. I can’t speak for the other guys as to what prompted them to take that risk.”

Later Landis argued that riders are not systematically pressured to dope. “Riders are only under pressure in their own mind,” he said. “There is no one out there telling you, ‘You have to win.’ You could say they are under pressure from themselves. I don’t know where else the pressure would come from.”

This was just the opening act for USADA’s assault on Landis’s character.

“You said people are defined by principals and how they make their decisions,” Barnett said, referring to Landis’s testimony from Saturday. “Would you also agree with what my mom always said, a person’s character is revealed more by their actions than their words.”

“Sounds like a good saying,” Landis replied.

Barnett then dove into Landis’s now-infamous dispute with LeMond, asking Landis to recall the initial conversation in August of 2006 and the Internet post he subsequently made in November. In startling testimony Thursday, LeMond revealed he had told Landis about being sexually abused as a child, and that Landis made what he felt was an implicit admission of doping.

When quotes about the alleged admission showed up in the press, Landis posted an angry message to the Dailypeloton website. On Tuesday, Landis again admitted he was responsible for the post, saying he always used the handle “Floyd.”

“That was a message to Greg,” Landis said. “I was upset. I was extremely upset. What was revealed to me in that conversation led me to believe that it was a private conversation. That’s why I called him. He commented before I spoke to him. After he revealed that, I felt like Greg was my friend. He came off as a sincere guy. I enjoyed the conversation. I was very upset when he came out in the press and mischaracterized what I said. I regret writing that, but it was a message to him to please stop.”

Asked if that message was “stop” or Landis would “reveal LeMond’s secret,” Landis offered only that, “It’s a message that no one else knew. It was between he and I, and I spoke to him directly after that about it.”

Asked to explain a passage where Landis called LeMond a “pathetic human being” Landis said, “That refers to his history of taking on the future winners of the Tour after he won. This isn’t the first time he’s done it, saying people have called him and admitted things. I can’t speak to what others have done, but I was upset that he did it to me, because that’s not what I told him.”

Talk then turned to Will Geoghegan’s infamous phone call to LeMond on the eve of his testimony here in Malibu. On Thursday, LeMond claimed that Geoghegan made direct references to the sexual abuse he’d confided to Landis, and LeMond felt it was an attempt at intimidation.

Landis said he shared LeMond’s secret with Geoghegan and others only because he needed to inform the people that were helping him make decisions about his doping case.

“I had hoped it wouldn’t come out, and I assured Greg that I wouldn’t do it,” Landis said. “But I had no idea what Greg planned to do. I had to tell my team the context of the conversation [from last August].”

As for the call, Landis said only he and Geoghegan were at the hotel dinner table. “I was in the room. I think I was at the same side of table. I don’t remember the precise time,” Landis testified, adding that as a matter of business operations, he’d given Geoghegan all the numbers from his cell phone including LeMond’s. “It was at the tail end of dinner. There were couple people taking food out.”

When Landis realized that Geoghegan had made the call he “talked to [Geoghegan] for a second about it. He said I think I made a big mistake. We both got up about the same time. He was on third floor and I was on first. I think I called him and he didn’t answer so I went to his room and knocked on the door. I don’t recall if he called LeMond back or if LeMond called him. He didn’t answer the door but I could hear someone talking.”

Landis said he felt terrible about the situation, and “may” have confided in his wife, but opted not to immediately inform his legal team or call LeMond to apologize.

“What can you say at that point?” Landis said. “As a human you’d want to say that’s not how I feel about that, but what can I do. It’s going to make me look like I’m trying to smooth something over when I know there is a problem. I knew there was a problem.”

But Landis’s empathetic testimony was painted as contrary to his actions. He wore all black to the courtroom on Thursday, and according to a report in the San Diego Union Tribune, which Landis disputed, he said the outfit was a representation of the “end to any credibility that LeMond had left.”

“[I wore the black suit] because it was a terrible day,” Landis corrected. “It wasn’t a day to celebrate by wearing a yellow tie [like he had in all the previous and subsequent days of the hearing]. It was a disaster. Nothing good was going to come out from that day. It was a bad day. After what happened the day before. I didn’t want to think I was happy about what happened.”

A lengthy debate about when his lawyers were informed and the timing of Geoghegan’s dismissal ensued. Landis said his lawyers found out about the call the morning after, and that he and Geoghegan rode to the hearing in the same car.

“Will and I talked about [telling the lawyers] on the way down, and I said we needed to tell them and he agreed,” Landis said. “It’s bad that he’s my friend and that he did it, and I assumed [LeMond would] make a big deal of it. I mean it was a big deal.”

Landis said he didn’t fire Geoghegan before the hearing because, “Everything I did was based on what lawyers told me to do. I didn’t know what to do because I wanted advice. I discussed it with the lawyers and acted based on what they advised me to do. In hindsight I don’t know. Would have it been better to fire Will immediately? Some problems are solved on the spot and don’t get worse if you wait. Others get worse. This was one of the things I couldn’t change and I didn’t know what to do, so I wanted to talk to someone. Yeah, in hindsight I probably should have fired him immediately. But I needed to talk to somebody.”

USADA also presented an email chain between a Phonak team doctor and a UCI representative. The anti-doping agency tried to make a case that the Landis team had purposely withheld results of long-term blood profiles, and initially it appeared to be a potential smoking gun. But the Landis team said they had located the blood screen and would be happy to provide it, defusing the matter.

While it lacked the salacious punch of the LeMond-Landis-Geoghegan affair, Davis’s testimony was potentially far more compelling. He has extensive experience with the equipment used to carry out the testing of Landis’s urine samples, and was on hand to watch retesting in April at the French lab.

Davis claimed he saw a litany of errors and misjudgments that tainted the final results beyond any realm of credibility. Lab technicians were moving critical data points, removing other data points, and even adding new ones “that resulted in readings that were much different than original samples.”

Later Landis attorney Maurice Suh revealed a photo that Davis snapped at the lab with his cell phone, showing a testing machine. Davis pointed out a pair of large magnetic lifting rings that he claimed should not have been left in place when the machine was in use because it alters the machine’s ability to function properly.

“I don’t know for certain that it’s caused a huge problem,” Davis said. “Nobody knows. But those rings are not supposed to be left there.”

Davis also gave failing grades to lab workers Cynthia Mongongu and Claire Frelat, who carried out the testing on Landis’s urine sample both last summer and in April. “They clearly did not understand the instrument,” Davis said of the two French women who testified earlier in the hearing. “I had to help them load the software onto the machine. Generally they did not know how the software worked.”

Testimony at the Landis hearing is scheduled to conclude Wednesday, but it’s uncertain whether that will actually happen. Davis has yet to be cross-examined, and USADA has intimated it will call at least one rebuttal witness. After that comes closing arguments, with each team allotted 90 minutes. Whenever that finishes, it will be at least another two weeks before the arbitration panel’s ruling is announced.