‘The good people sleep much better at night than the bad people. Of course, the bad people enjoy the waking hours much more.’
I took 2006 as my gap year. My sabbatical, sort of. Time to go away and plug myself into a recharger, and finally write a book in English about this whole saga. It pleased me that From Lance to Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy at the Tour de France was published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House in New York. In the Arctic world that is home to trolls, the ice was melting.
That was also the year the SCA arbitration finished, the year the Sunday Times settled with Lance, the year that the Tour de France took off without its winner for the last seven years.
The Tour. No Lance. No me. I was okay with that. Paul covered the event for the Sunday Times. I did other things. I coached a boys’ football team. I wrote my book, stayed at home and it was easier than I thought it would be.
Then Floyd Landis won the Tour de France. And a day later, as the riders would say, they popped him. Did I feel a little jealous of Paul? No. A lot jealous? Yes.
In Floyd Landis we could see the genes that would let Lance continue. More squat, more muscular, less handsome, less cunning, but Floyd was Floyd and he had a will that sometimes made Lance look like a kitten. Certain people in life you don’t want to mess with.
Floyd broke his hip in 2003 on a ride just north of San Diego. He didn’t just break it as normal people would understand things: there was no crack, no hairline fracture. Nope, he broke the top right off his femur.
For most people that would be the hint to go and do something else. Floyd had some titanium pins inserted, each of them four inches long, and they held the top of the bone in place. They also snagged his muscles and ligaments as they moved over the bone while he trained. So he had them replaced. Next day he headed to Europe to join the boys at training camp for the Tour. He rode the Tour all the way home. Not a problem that his hip was just rotting away like a damp fire-log.
Not normal. Nothing about Floyd Landis was normal.
He came from the most unusual of backgrounds. Lancaster County in Pennsylvania has a large congregation of devout Mennonites, which makes it a no sex, no drugs, no rock and roll type of place. Every writer wanted to write a portrait of the cyclist as a young man.
Floyd was reared in Farmersville, as a Mennonite with all the trimmings: church three times a week, no television, no sport, no exertion on Sundays, no dancing, no revealing clothing, no mingling with the unrighteous. His early races he couldn’t wear shorts less the wrath of God hindered him. Finally Floyd decided that God had other things to be worrying about.
Young Floyd Landis developed a passion for mountain bike racing. Slightly sinful but he was good at it. At the age of sixteen, his parents had taken him aside for a little chat: ‘If you continue competitive cycling, your soul will burn for eternity.’ Floyd didn’t believe that. Maybe Paul and Arlene Landis didn’t really believe it either. They became their son’s greatest fans.
Floyd moved to California at the age of nineteen. He’d seen one movie, Jaws. He’d never tried coffee, alcohol or sex. He caught up. He started road racing in 1999 and signed for US Postal just three years later. Straight in under the wing of Lance.
Landis was both odd and straight up. In Girona, where the Postal boys were living, he kept an apartment which would have been small for an impoverished student. For a pro biker it was a joke. He got about the town on a skateboard. He worked like a lunatic. He questioned everything. He made people laugh. He had the word ‘winner’ stamped all over him.
Nothing could stop him, not even that hip he busted up in 2003. He could only mount the bike from one side, couldn’t cross his legs when sitting and was in pain most of the time. Who cared about hell for eternity when cycling was purgatory on earth?
Lance ushered Landis into the inner sanctum with unprecedented haste. Soon he and Floyd were off riding together for long stretches. Big bro. Little bro. He could see what the kid had. In 2002 and again in 2003, Landis spent five weeks before the Tour down in St Moritz in the company of Lance Armstrong and Michele Ferrari.
Floyd was inside and still he was outside. Unimpressed. When something offended his sensibilities he couldn’t handle it. He could rationalise doping. Other things he couldn’t tolerate.55
He didn’t like secrecy in the team over contracts. He didn’t like riders being played one off against the other. He didn’t like the dumb superstitions that riders worked under. The Mennonites back in Lancaster liked to say that they lived in the world but were not of the world. That was Floyd Landis: in the team but not of the team.
The tale of his first road race is always worth retelling. Determined not to be marginalised as some sort of farm-boy hick with a religious hang-up, he showed up in a helmet and visor, a dayglo jersey and a pair of argyle socks. He was wheeling a massive bike. He cleared his throat and announced: ‘If there’s anyone here who can stay with me, I will buy you dinner.’
That lightened the atmosphere considerably. They thought that Farmboy had made a joke. He cleared that up.
‘You shouldn’t laugh because that gets me angry. And if you make me angry, then I’m going to blow you all up.’
As he cycled away from the leaders that day, he roared back at them: ‘You like my socks? How’d you like them now?’
Who wouldn’t want to be covering a Tour de France which had Floyd Landis among its prominent riders? Who wouldn’t want a character like that to emerge as clean? Hope against hope. Paul went to the Tour de France. Wrote brilliantly. Got more to write about than he had bargained for.
All the previews called this one as a wide-open Tour. On 1 July, just before the first Tour of the post-Lance era got underway, the riders who had finished second, third, fourth and fifth in the 2005 Tour were removed from the race because of involvement by them or by their teams in an investigation into illegal blood doping. This was Operación Puerto, the Spanish police in full swing against blood doping. Landis was among the favourites now.
You wanted to believe in him, and it was a good sign when he said that he didn’t expect to win any mountain stages, he just wanted to be in touch for the final time trial on the day before the Tour finished. He led going into the Alps but relinquished it all very tamely, giving up the lead in the Alps to Óscar Pereiro, who had started the day in 46th place some 28 mins 50 secs behind.
In the fifteenth stage he took back the yellow jersey which he had quietly surrendered two stages before. He came up Alpe d’Huez in fourth place. He looked strong. Then came the torture at La Toussuire. Strangely reassuring for those of us watching from afar.
Landis reached the bottom of the last climb on a day which the riders complained long and bitterly about being too hard, too tough. When he hit the bottom of the climb he had significant company. All his main rivals were there, each of them supported by two or three lieutenants. Landis had just one Phonak teammate and his support vanished at the end of the first mile of an 11-mile ride.
Landis was as vulnerable as a drunken wildebeest wandering into a barbeque afternoon for a pride of lions. Carlos Sastre, a Spaniard from the CSC team, made a break. Merciless. Landis faded. He started giving up the minutes faster than the minutes could give themselves up. One minute, two, then three, then more. The more minutes he lost the less relevant he became. He looked like death.
He reached the finish line of the 112-mile stage more than eight minutes behind Sastre and ten minutes behind the winner of the stage, Michael Rasmussen, of Rabobank. Rasmussen had ridden brilliantly, breaking away from the pack with two other riders less than a mile into a stage which included the crossing of the highest point of that year’s Tour, the Col du Galibier. What a slog. The race gains nearly 1.2 miles in altitude, ascending to 8,681 feet above sea level, over the 26-mile pass.
The previous day Landis had said that he was confident that he could win the Tour. Now he was 11th, more than eight minutes behind the race leader, Óscar Pereiro. If you wanted to believe in Floyd Landis now was the time to buy your shares. When the doping machine is working well there should be no days like these. Doping, by 2006, could make the promise that it would remove the drama from your life.
‘I suffered from the beginning, and I tried to hide it,’ he said afterwards. ‘I don’t expect to win the Tour at this point. It’s not easy to get back eight minutes. That was the best I could do.’
Now, with six riders within four minutes of one another, the race was going to be decided before the final time trial on Saturday, the penultimate day of the Tour. That was the day Landis had marked on the calendar for his big move.
Before that, though, another killer day loomed. The final mountain stage – a 124-mile slog over four gruelling ascents and a mad seven-mile descent into the town of Morzine.
And then, having risen from the dead, Landis went out the next day and launched an 80-mile attack over three colossal Alpine passes. He won the final mountain stage of the Tour by nearly six minutes, pulling back about three quarters of the time he had lost the day before. For Jean-Marie Leblanc it was a heart-warming answer to his prayers for no more one-man tours. The Tour director called the performance ‘the best stage I have ever followed’.
Afterwards, Floyd Landis’s epic climb on the road to Morzine that day was compared to that of Chiappucci on Sestriere fourteen years previously. If you knew your cycling, this was profoundly depressing, but maybe the comparison was intended to be more apt than complimentary.
On the way to Morzine, the final ascent, the epic Col de Joux Plane, is plain murderous. It measures 8.1 miles with an average slope of 8.5 per cent. Two of the last three miles of the climb have a slope of 10 per cent. Then that frightening seven-mile plunge to the end. The Col de Joux Plane was one of the few climbs where Lance Armstrong had showed mortality. He nearly collapsed there in 2000, losing two minutes to Jan Ullrich. That same day in 2000, Marco Pantani, with typical abandon, launched an attack at about the same point as Landis launched his. Pantani soon threw in his hand.
In 2006, Floyd Landis devoured it all.
Here was drama. In two days Floyd Landis had yo-yoed from first place to 11th and now, back to third. He was now just 30 seconds behind the race leader and his friend, Óscar Pereiro of Spain. Another Spaniard, Sastre, was in second, 12 seconds behind the leader. Three cyclists within 30 seconds of one another. The time trial was restored to its former prominence as the deciding factor in the race.
In a similar, earlier time trial in the Tour’s first week, Landis had come in second, more than a minute ahead of the two riders now ahead of him in the standings. The only rider who bested Landis in that time trial was now more than an hour behind.
Landis finished third in the time trial on the penultimate day of the Tour. That was that, really. Tour over. He was 50 seconds ahead of Pereiro and leapt from third to first. The kid from Lancaster County went to Paris in the yellow jersey and wore it to the top of the podium.
The nightmare began the very next morning when Landis was informed of a slight problem with his urine sample from Morzine. He scrapped his lucrative racing engagements for the week, got himself to a secret location somewhere in Europe and waited for the news to break. Four days later his Phonak team announced the sad tidings to the world. Phonak had been through the Tyler Hamilton bust the year before, so they knew the ropes.
The urine sample taken from Landis immediately after his epic and unforgettable Stage 17 had come back positive, having an unusually high ratio of the hormone testosterone to the hormone epitestosterone. His T/E ratio was nearly three times the 4:1 limit allowed by World Anti-Doping Agency rules.
Landis held a short telephone conference with reporters from the US late on the Thursday evening. When Landis began declaring his own innocence it was with a heavy heart. An invisible hand seemed to be guiding him back to the fundamentals of the life he had grown up with.
‘I’ll say no,’ he said, when first asked if he had taken drugs. ‘The problem I have here again is that most of the public has an idea about cycling because of the way things have gone in the past. So I’ll say no, knowing a lot of people are going to assume I’m guilty before I’ve had a chance to defend myself.’
He asked that the reporters cut him some slack, for everybody to take a step back. ‘I don’t know what your position is now and I wouldn’t blame you if it was sceptical, because of what cycling has been through in the past and the way other cases have gone. All I’m asking for is that I be given a chance to prove that I’m innocent.’
Floyd Landis was a bad liar, which suggested he might not be a bad person.
In truth, if you had watched the evolution of doping it seemed a little strange that somebody who had spent so much time in the company of Michele Ferrari should be popped for something as quaint as testosterone. Maybe being done for the wrong thing fortified him as his voice grew stronger in protest against his fate. And his excuses grew more fanciful. So bad that The Late Show with David Letterman created one of its famous Top Tens to mock him with:
10. High altitude in the Alps made Daddy dizzy.
9. Who can resist Balco’s delicious ‘spicy chipotle’ flavour?
8. I was trying to impress Sheryl Crow.
7. Uh . . . global warming?
6. The world hates Americans already, so does this really matter?
5. French bastards must have dosed my quiche.
4. Wanted to give New York Post excuse to run hilarious ‘Fink Floyd’ headline.
3. Hulk no need excuse.
2. Frankly, I’d rather be a disgrace than a loser.
1. Screw you – I’m Floyd ***damn Landis.
On 14 May 2007, arbitration began between USADA and Landis with regard to the Tour de France doping allegations. On 20 September 2007, the arbitrators found Landis guilty of doping. He took a two-year ban. His title went to Óscar Pereiro.
I continued coaching, got the book away and continued to enjoy the break from the weekly grind of newspapers. That lasted until 2007; another phone call from Alex.
‘Ready to come back?’
I was.