Even after Floyd Landis won the Tour de France last Sunday, marketing experts said he probably was not destined to become a magnet for corporations hiring him to endorse their products, despite the inspirational tale of his riding with a dying hip that will soon be replaced. He was expected to maintain his appeal largely within the cycling world, but not crash the mainstream, as Lance Armstrong did.  “Maybe he could have been in a Gatorade commercial, but he couldn’t carry a campaign,” said Bob Dorfman, executive creative director of Pickett Advertising in San Francisco. “The average fan couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.”  Steve Rosner, a partner in 16W Marketing, in Rutherford, N.J., said Landis’s prospects would have been enhanced by Armstrong’s success, but more as a corporate speaker than as a part of national advertisements. “He wasn’t going to be a major player, but I think he’d do a little more than people thought,” he said. “More people would have been listening to him.”  But even those relatively modest prospects have been dimmed significantly by a positive test for an elevated level of testosterone after Landis’s extraordinary performance in the Alps last week in Stage 17 of the Tour.  To be suspended for using a performance-enhancing drug, the positive result for Landis’s first sample must be corroborated by testing a second sample.  Even if the second sample proves negative, the marketers said that Landis was already tainted by the first test. “The average American can’t differentiate between which sample is worse,” Rosner said.  Jeff Chown, president of Davie-Brown, an entertainment consulting firm in Dallas, said “a brand won’t take the risk” on an athlete who tested positive on a drug test, even if he was cleared by a second. “He’s not a compelling enough story, so why risk associating your brand with him?” Chown said.  Chown said Davie-Brown, which measures how stars influence consumer purchases through its DBI Index, found that Landis was known by less than half of those surveyed after he won the Tour. Armstrong is the fifth-ranked athlete on the DBI, four places after Tiger Woods. Landis is unranked.  Even if Landis’s second sample is negative, his positive test will be uppermost in the minds of fans in the United States because there are no other major races to offer a distraction. “There is no mitigation for cycling, as in baseball, where the games continue to be played,” said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon.  Landis, and cycling, did not start the Tour on a marketing upswing. A doping scandal caused the ouster of several favorites, including Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso. Landis was one of several contenders in a diminished field.  By contrast, when Armstrong won his first Tour in 1999, he had recovered from testicular cancer and was already supported by Nike’s marketing power.  Armstrong’s retirement caused Tour television ratings to suffer on the cable network OLN, but Landis’s stunning victory in Stage 17 produced the network’s 11th-highest live viewership of the race. More importantly, it also had the most-viewed prime-time replay. An OLN press officer, Amy Phillips, had no comment on Landis’s positive drug test other than to say that “these are allegations.”  Landis is in his final season as part of the cycling team sponsored by Phonak, which is leaving the sport and turning the team over to a secondary sponsor. According to his Web site, his endorsement deals are with Oakley sunglasses; BMC Bicycles; Vision Quest, a company that designs coaching programs for cyclists and triathletes and is owned by his coach, Robbie Ventura; the Saris Cycling Group, which makes cycling equipment, and the cycling shoe manufacturer Specialized Footwear.  Landis is still scheduled to compete Aug. 12 in the Tour of Elk Grove, a 62-mile race in Elk Grove Village, Ill., 15 miles west of Chicago.  “We’re anxiously optimistic that he will race,” said Tony Abruscato, president of Chicago Special Events Management, the race’s promoter.
The Tour de France winner had limited prospects to begin with, but the failed drug test dimmed his hopes significantly.