Heart of the matter

FLOYD LANDIS never saw the stump that sent him flying. Landis strayed from the track into a patch of weeds while screaming down a steep descent during his first lap at the 24 Hours of Canaan, a mountain bike relay race in West Virginia. Landis was propelled into the air like a circus clown from a cannon when his front wheel hit the concealed log.

“The wheel took on the shape of the stump,” recalls Will Geoghegan, one of Landis’ teammates at the 1994 race. “It was like a cartoon.”

Geoghegan was resting at the team’s condo and not expecting Landis for another hour when he saw a bloodied lunatic riding a wheelie in his direction and shouting “I need a new wheel!”

Same race, following year: Landis had three flat tyres in a mudfest, and his bike light failed during a loop in the wee hours.

He finished the lap riding on his rims and while “biting down on one of those squeeze lights people have on their key chains,” says Geoghegan, who shares these Landis stories “to give you an indication of his determination.”

Landis would never have taken up pro mountain bike racing if it hadn’t been for his hardheadedness 11 years ago, when he was 19: he wouldn’t have trained at night — and in the winter — on the byways of his native Lancaster County; he wouldn’t have entered races without the permission of his parents, who rightly worried his obsession with the sport would come between him and the family’s Mennonite faith; he would have quit riding in 1998, when his mountain biking team lost its sponsorship; he wouldn’t have made the implausible leap to road racing, where he soon attracted the attention of the US Postal Service team; he wouldn’t have clashed with his Post master — team director Johan Bruyneel, and another stubborn cuss by the name of Armstrong — if it hadn’t have been for his mulishness; and he wouldn’t have defected to Phonak — the cycling team sponsor and Swiss hearing aid manufacturer, whose pea-green and lemon-yellow jerseys are the loudest in the pro peloton.

Landis is now in his second year with Phonak (and his first as its uncontested leader) and is having a breakout season. He’s won three major week-long races — the Tour of California, the Paris-Nice and the Tour de Georgia — and he’s a strong favourite to earn a podium spot at the Tour de France.

Landis’ four-second Tour de Georgia win over Tom Danielson of the Discovery Channel team (and formerly of the US Postal Service team) was by far the most dramatic of his recent victories. Landis held a Lycra-thin lead going into the penultimate stage of the race, which ended with an obscene climb up the 1,458-metre Brasstown Bald Mountain. He found himself isolated with Danielson and Discovery’s Yaroslav Popovych — who lurked only 97 seconds behind in the general classification — midway through the ascent. The Discovery riders took turns attacking Landis, hoping to force him to expend extra energy. Instead, Landis let Popovych go up the road and spot-welded himself to Danielson, even attempting to draw him into conversation.

“I’m happy to let Popovych win the stage,” Landis recalls telling the Discovery rider. “I just gotta stay with you.”

Popovych couldn’t hang on in the end and fell to third, while Danielson couldn’t drop Landis.

Why talk to Danielson during the climb?

“I was just trying to get into his head,” says Landis, grinning. “When you’re trying to drop a guy and he sits there talking to you, it’s the most annoying thing in the world.”

The win was sweeter for Landis because it came at the expense of his former team.

By his own count, Landis had competed in only “four or five” week-long races when he was informed he’d be working for Lance Armstrong in the 2002 Tour de France. It was a measure of his toughness and the distance he’d come that he got through the hardest bike race in the world on his first try. It was also a measure of how little he’d changed since his days in the fat-tyre fraternity — that was Landis popping wheelies on the Champs-Elysees during the final race stage.

LANDIS is the second of six children for parents Paul and Arlene.

Paul owns a carwash and laundromat near Farmersville, a hamlet in Lancaster County.

He and Arlene are devout Mennonites who took the family to services every Sunday “and on Wednesdays,” Floyd adds, “in case you forgot what they taught you on Sunday”.

The Landis family had no television, in keeping with its strict faith.

Floyd and his buddy Eric Gebhard rode their bikes down to the Conestoga River for entertainment, telling their parents they were going fishing.

“But we didn’t care about fishing,” says Landis. “We liked to throw rocks and burn things. You don’t have TV or video games, — what else are you going to do?”

The pair upgraded to mountain bikes when Landis was 15.

He dropped $300 on a neon-green and orange Marin Muir Woods.

“My dad was bitter for a month,” he recalls.

Landis entered — and won — the Beginner class when the local bike shop put on a race.

He won the Sport category a year later, the next level up.

The future couldn’t have been clearer: he would race mountain bikes for a living.

Landis’ parents didn’t see the wisdom of his career path. He was forbidden to go on after-school training rides until he’d finished his chores and had no choice — in his mind — other than to ride at night.

In his 2005 book Lance Armstrong’s War, author Daniel Coyle tells how Paul was sceptical of his son’s claim about riding his bicycle after dark and once discreetly followed him along the roads of Lancaster County.

Landis won the junior national cross country race at Michigan’s Traverse City when he was 18.

He graduated from Conestoga Valley High School in 1994 and moved to Irvine in California where he first raced for TWB — a tiny bike component company — and then for Chevy Trucks.

However,Landis’ cycling career appeared to be over when the latter sponsorship was yanked in the spring of 1998.

He decided not to return to Farmsersville but stayed in California and did what came naturally: he rode for hours on end.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” he says.

Landis was still unemployed after a couple of months of 50-hour training weeks — but in terrific shape. He and Geoghegan — who’d been a Chevy Trucks teammate — decided to enter some road races. The pair took pleasure in creating chaos in the peloton; they’d attack out of the gate and stage arguments in front of other riders: “It’s my turn to go.”

“No, it’s my turn.”

“You got to attack last time!”

Their stock response to the angry questions that followed — “Who the hell are you guys? Why do you keep attacking?” — was “We don’t care. We’re mountain bikers.”

They’d go on to explain they mightn’t win, but would enjoy making it harder for the guy who eventually did.

Landis finally got a call from Mercury team director John Wordin in April 1999, after he took second in one race and third in the next, against some of the top road riders in the country. Wordin asked if Landis wanted to ride for him.

“Well,” said Landis, “I don’t really have much else going on.”

Professionally, no — but his personal life had taken a felicitous turn. Landis had met Amber Basile, whose daughter attended a preschool across from his San Diego apartment.

Floyd and Amber married in February 2001.

In the spring of 1999, Landis found himself in the lead of a prestigious under-25 race in France called the Tour de l’Avenir. He finished third, a preposterously good result for a rider no one had ever heard of in Europe.

He got a call from Dan Ospirow of the US Postal Service team not long after. Landis thanked Ospirow for the call but told him he’d agreed to ride for Mercury for two more years. Mercury went broke halfway through the second of those seasons — which is how Landis came to be riding in the service of Lance Armstrong in 2002.

Landis broke his hip on a training ride in January 2003. Doctors inserted a number of screws, but the bone “compressed” while healing “so [the screws] were sticking out” and causing pain in the tendons that rubbed over them.

Landis underwent surgery to have the screws removed after he raced in that year’s Tour de Georgia.

He rode the Tour de France nine weeks later, after being advised to stay off the hip for six months.

What on earth was Landis thinking?

He was thinking about how much he didn’t want to go back to Farmersville and empty the dirty lint filters at his dad’s laundromat.

Landis regained his form in 2004. That year’s Tour de France featured a time trial up the sinister, serrated Alpe d’Huez. Landis was instructed by Bruyneel to “go easy” so he’d have plenty in the tank for the next day’s brutal stage — he placed 21st.

Armstrong and Bruyneel made sarcastic remarks at dinner that night such as “Not bad for a guy who was going easy”. In not as many words, they were accusing him of riding for himself, rather than husbanding his strength to help the team leader.

It made Landis furious.

“I’d done my job every day and done it without saving anything for myself,” he now says. “and that applied to my entire three years with them.

“That night I called Amber and said ‘If those arseholes ———- want to see me go hard, they’re gonna see it tomorrow’.”

Landis was sensational on a sweltering day, pacing Armstrong up a monstrous alp called the Col de la Croix Fry, riding almost the entire peloton off his wheel. His pace was so savage that only five riders could stay with him; one of them was Armstrong, who looked as if he were struggling to keep up at times.

That was Landis’ finest day in a US Postal Service team uniform. He bolted for Phonak soon after, leaving a burned bridge behind — as so often happened when a rider bid Armstrong adieu.

The ill will between the Phonak and Discovery teams was stoked by Armstrong during last year’s Tour de Georgia — and even evidenced during this year’s race — but it seemed to abate on the final day when Bruyneel was uncommonly gracious in congratulating Landis.

“You were the strongest,” he told his former domestique.

They had a nice chat. Of course, Landis remembers his days in Bruyneel’s employ, he also remembers his mother’s fond saying: “A servant is exalted in time.”