It’s a Thursday afternoon in the second week of July: the 11th stage of the
Tour de France from Tarbes to Pla-de-Beret has just ended and I’m standing
in the press pen, a couple of metres after the finishing line, when Floyd
Landis, the new race leader, climbs off his bike. One of the joys of
covering the Tour is access to the riders, and today, by pure chance, I am
so close to the 30-year-old American that I can actually touch him.
I watch as he removes his sodden jersey and every fibre of his being is
twitching as he towels his chest. I feel a splash of water on my arm as he
takes a cold bottle from a helper and douses his head. Five television
camera crews and a million hacks are wrestling for a comment before they
escort him to the podium, but I’m more interested in how he looks than in
anything he has to say.
I’m staring at his arms and his legs and at the crack of his ass; I’m scanning
for needle-pricks and bruising and the tell-tale signs of a guy who knows
the game. (Years ago, during my time as a professional cyclist, I showered
with one of the sport’s great champions after a race and his right buttock
was like a dartboard.) I see nothing suspicious. I reach for a pen and
scribble a note in my diary:
I would kill to interview Floyd Landis. He is one of the toughest and most
interesting athletes in sport, but do I believe in him? How can I be sure I
won’t be betrayed?
That night, I take The Book of Floyd — the title of a chapter from a biography
of Lance Armstrong by Dan Coyle — to bed and start reading.
The portrait of Landis is fascinating. Raised as a Mennonite (church three
times a week, no television, no sport, no dancing, no revealing clothing, no
mingling with the unrighteous or coveting of worldly goods) in Farmersville,
Pennsylvania, his one temptation as a boy is a passion for racing a mountain
bike that is soon raising eyebrows in the community.
At the age of 16, his parents take him aside one afternoon and issue a
warning: “If you continue competitive cycling, your soul will burn for
eternity.” It’s Floyd’s choice. He can rise with the righteous to eternal
life with God, or travel to hell with the unrighteous. Floyd thought about
it. Would God really send him to hell for racing his bike on Sunday? No,
probably not. He decides to keep racing and soon demonstrates a knack for
zany things — racing his bike downhill without tyres . . . taking naps on
the pavement — that sets him apart.
“It was usually portrayed as run-of-the-mill eccentricity,” Coyle observes.
“That wacky Floyd, crazy like all those mountain bikers. But, in fact, there
was nothing the least bit eccentric about it. This was a purposeful,
rational process. It was as if, as his former teammate Will Geoghagen once
said, Landis had just been defrosted from some distant past and needed to
figure out everything anew. His life was nothing so much as an experiment,
one that might have been titled ‘Reactions That Occur When an Unfrozen
Mennonite Is Mixed With America’.”
At the age of 20, Landis left home to begin a new life in California. He had
never tasted coffee or had sex, and had seen only one movie (Jaws) but he
was soon one of the strongest mountain bikers in the world. In 1999 he
turned his attention to road racing and for seven years now we’ve been
following another experiment: “Reactions That Occur When an Unfrozen
Mennonite Becomes a Professional Cyclist”.
If the analysis of the B sample supports the initial findings of unusual
amounts of testosterone, then that will be a massive disappointment — all
those qualities we admired that made him different; all the hope we invested
that Floyd would buck the trend. Reactions that occur when an unfrozen
Mennonite becomes a professional cyclist? If proven, he would become another
David Millar when it comes to cheating and lying about drugs.
IT’S A Sunday morning in the third week of July. The final stage of the Tour
de France will shortly commence from a suburb of Paris, and I’m strolling
around the tented village at the start when Landis emerges from his team
bus, surrounded by cameras and minders. Ten days have passed since I studied
his sweat in the Pyrenees. He has since delivered one of the greatest
performances in cycling history and turned the race on its head.
But don’t ask me to cheer for him. And I’ve lost any desire I had to interview
him. I just don’t believe what I have seen. How can I have any doubts? Last
Saturday, after his race-clinching performance in the time-trial at
Montceau, Landis was asked a series of questions about the doping affair in
Spain that had resulted in the eviction of the two race favourites, Jan
Ullrich and Ivan Basso. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.
When asked the question again, he grew irritable: “Look, as you keep asking,
I’ll say that it was an unfortunate situation and none of us got any
satisfaction out of the fact that they weren’t here. Got any questions about
anything else?” Contrast his response with the reaction of England’s Bradley
Wiggins, who said: “Get the bastards out.” Now, maybe I’m wrong, but if you
were constantly getting screwed by the guys on drugs, would you react like
Landis or like Wiggins? Ten days ago, on the eve of his dramatic collapse at
La Toussuire, Landis went to bed with a degenerative hip that he is treating
legitimately with cortisone, a thyroid problem he’s treating with hormones,
two aching gonads that have always produced too much testosterone and a pain
of defeat in his head that he treated with two beers and four glasses of
Jack Daniel’s. The next day he got back on his bike and blew the race apart.
“I got mad,” he said.
And you wouldn’t believe the number of muppets in the press room who didn’t
think his amazing comeback was worth even a moment’s questioning. An hour
after the stage, as I was walking towards Gee-Whizz TV (Outside Life
Network), I happened upon a former pro I hadn’t seen for a while.
“Wasn’t that fantastic?” he said.
“I don’t believe it,” I replied.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I think it’s against the laws of nature to completely fold one day and to
come out next day and blow everyone away.”
Others were equally sceptical. Christophe Bassons, the former French
professional, was one of many to express reservations when it was announced
that Landis had tested positive. “He rode most of the stage on his own in
the mountains, and when I saw the average speed — 37.175km/h . . . well . .
. I’d have trouble averaging 35km/h on the flat! I remember watching him
afterwards and thinking that he looked, I don’t know, nervous. If he’s shown
to have been caught with testosterone, then that was a schoolboy error when
you consider growth hormone and the stuff they can’t test for. I don’t
understand it.”
IT’S A Tuesday evening in the fourth week of July: Floyd Landis is sitting in
the back of a black, open-topped Mercedes with a local beauty queen and is
being paraded round the crowded streets of Stiphout, Holland. Two days have
passed since his triumphant ride to Paris and the time has come to enjoy the
spoils. Tonight it’s a €60,000 (£41,000) fee to flex his limbs in the
Criterium de Stiphout. Tomorrow there’s a similar cheque waiting in Chaam.
President George Bush has called to extend his congratulations. His former
boss, Lance Armstrong, has also been basking in the reflected glory. “I’m
glad that a guy who came through our programme has won,” Armstrong tells the
Associated Press on Sunday. “We can take a small bit of credit for helping
to develop Floyd.”
The problems start the next morning when Landis is informed that there’s a
problem with his urine sample from Morzine. He cancels his racing
engagements for the week, bolts to a secret location in Europe and holds a
short telephone conference with reporters from the US late on Thursday
evening. Someone asks if he has taken performance-enhancing drugs. He sounds
shaken and subdued. “I’ll say no,” he replies.
“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 requests that reporters cut him some slack. “All I ask is that everybody
takes 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.”
By Friday afternoon, bolstered by the support of some impressive new lawyers,
he’s sounding much more defiant before reporters in Madrid. “I declare
convincingly and categorically that my winning the Tour de France has been
exclusively due to many years of training and my complete devotion to
cycling,” he affirms. “This is not a doping case but a natural occurrence.”
Landis said he had naturally high testosterone levels and will agree to
undergo tests to prove his case. “I would like to (make it) absolutely clear
that I am not in any doping process.”
Asked whether he thought the timing of his failed test was significant, Landis
said: “I was tested six other times during the Tour. I am quite proud of
that day. I was the strongest guy and I deserved to win the stage.” Landis
now awaits the results of the analysis of his B sample this week.
Jonathan Vaughters, a former American professional, is one of many to offer
support. “I believe Floyd is innocent,” he says. “The majority of T/E
(testosterone/epitestosterone) tests are overturned at CAS (Sports Tribunal)
level. The guy will probably be proven innocent in eight months’ time, but
in the short term the media is killing him. Floyd is basically paying for
the sins of all the morons who came before him who have denied, denied,
denied. He’s going to take the fall for everyone who has cried wolf before
him.”
Really?
