The Outcast - Floyd Landis Still Waiting
PLAY-The New York Times Sports Magazine
By SARA CORBETT
Published: August 19, 2007
He wasn’t sure why they’d sent the muscle-building pudding.
His old sponsors still sometimes mailed him stuff — maybe it was an act of hope. All he knew was that he now had a case of protein-heavy, nutritionally pumped-up chocolate pudding sitting in his kitchen and, by god, he was hungry. As the dishwasher churned, as his wife, Amber, lounged nearby on a leather couch wearing a tank top and sweat pants, having just come home from the gym, as the family’s three dogs yapped on the patio outside and, a continent away, the year’s flock of professional cyclists began their slow migration toward London for the prologue stage of the 2007 Tour de France, Floyd Landis picked up a spoon and started eating.
It was early summer, muggy in Southern California, especially in the scrub-covered hills of Murrieta, a town 60 miles northeast of San Diego, where the Landises — Floyd, Amber and their daughter, Ryan, 10 — have lived for the last six years. The heat was unfamiliar. The high tilt of the sun, the burned-out ocher of the bushes on Mount Palomar where he often rode his bike, the 10 extra pounds he was carrying on his lean body, all of it was wrong for Landis this time of year. For the last seven years, he spent April to August mostly in Europe, and so even the familiarity of home was unfamiliar. There was a neglected air hockey table in the front room; a barely used Harley-Davidson on a kickstand in the garage. The absence of a goal — the whole-body, life-sucking, punctilious effort to get to and finish the Tour — was something not easily filled by dinners around the kitchen table, yardwork, paperwork, driving the car, whatever the domestic rhythms of another man’s life might be.
How badly had things gone for Floyd Landis? Really, there were no words for it. “Humiliating” was how he most often described the past year. Or given to understatement as he was, he summed it up simply as “not good.” The good stuff had simply become the preface: Landis won the 2006 Tour as a 30-year-old, scruffy-haired rogue, who was raised a strict Mennonite but is now a Metallica fan, a charming redneck among a venerable group of sleek, mostly European race ponies. And he won the Tour in a way that made even people who were indifferent to the sport of bike racing take notice: he bashed his way through it.
Despite the fact that his left hip was, in essence, rotting in its socket, a complication from a bad crash four years earlier, despite the fact that he had a spectacularly horrible outing on the bike a day earlier, blowing what seemed to be a solid lead in the overall Tour, Landis came from behind to win one of the hardest stages of the 2,272-mile race. He brazenly dumped the rest of the peloton and then rode ferociously for hours, mostly uphill, leaving everyone behind. Landis, who started his career racing mountain bikes, was heralded as a gritty rider with a superhuman ability to endure. His Tour victory was deemed to be the most exciting in years, if not decades.
And then he fell. Or maybe he’d already fallen. With Landis, it’s virtually impossible to know whether he earned his way into hell or was thrown there without a lick of fairness.
Four days after his Tour victory, race officials announced that the urine sample he’d given following his mighty comeback showed a suspicious imbalance in his body’s testosterone. He became the first Tour winner to be hit with charges that he had doped during the race. And though he denied it immediately, Landis went from being lauded as the next great American cycling hero, heir to Lance Armstrong’s lordly throne, to an international subject of scorn, the butt of late-night television jokes and an example of everything that is wrong with cycling, with sports and maybe with humanity in general. His sponsors backed away; his fellow racers kept mum. He became, in his own words, “radioactive.” The fall from grace took less than a day.
His fate then lay in the hands of an arbitration panel convened by the United States Anti-Doping Agency, whose lawyers hammered at him relentlessly, painting him as an immoral cheat, part of a diabolical underground that threatened to ruin the sport of cycling. Landis spent close to $2 million on his own lawyers, who hammered right back, working to discredit the French lab that performed the drug tests, attacking what they said were bumbling, poorly trained technicians who, in the end, were just looking to bring a winner down.
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