Cycling: Euphoria fades with bitter taste

Hopes of a new dawn for cycling after its drug-addled past were raised and dashed in the space of a week during the Tour de France which finished on Monday.

The race began in controversy and has ended that way.

On the eve of the race, which runs throughout most of July, those who finished second through fifth behind Texan Lance Armstrong in the Tour last year were among those culled from this year's lineup after a raid by Spanish police on the premises of a doctor accused of masterminding the doping of numerous athletes.

The bright side was that with so many apparently tainted riders out, this would be the cleanest tour in a long while. Early signs were encouraging. Competition was close, people had good days and bad, as people do. No one rode like an infallible automaton.

A new star rose in the form of Floyd Landis, the likeable red-head raised by Mennonite Christian parents in Farmersville, Pennsylvania Dutch country.

Landis seized the lead several times as the race forged its clockwise journey around France.

Then, on the last Wednesday of the race, he imploded in one of the most shocking collapses of Tour history.

"There are days when you crack, but on those days you lose one, maybe two minutes," said Landis' coach Robbie Ventura.

"This wasn't a crack, it was a detonation."

It was indeed difficult to watch him crawl up the ascent to La Toussuire, to see a lifetime ambition flowing down the drain like the rivers of sweat pouring from his pallid face.

He lost almost nine minutes and fell from the lead to 11th place. It was as though he'd flung his chance in the race over the side of the Alps in the space of half an hour.

Amber Landis wept for the sake of her husband. "It was," Landis said later, "one of the more humiliating things that had happened to me."

He is now dealing with worse.

He was told of his positive test for testosterone a week later, a day or two after he delivered his victor's speech from the podium on the Champs-Elysees, dedicating the win to the chairman of Phonak, the company which is withdrawing from the sport bloodied by a series of doping scandals involving team riders.

But first things first. The day after his battering in the mountains came his resurrection. Landis won the Tour that day. He may have lost it that day too. It was after this ride that he provided the sample which failed the drug test.

If his B sample confirms the testosterone positive of the A sample, he will be stripped of his title and banned. It will be concluded that he was given steroids before his remarkable ride, and an uplifting story will be confined to the dustbin the story of the boy who conquered the world astride a bicycle in defiance of his parents' belief that cycling about in short pants was a quick route to hell.

On his way to the top, he won over his parents, who took what was only their second ride in an aeroplane to cheer him from French roadsides during the 2004 edition, and impressed the world with his courage and perseverance. It wasn't the fact of Landis' win that made him seem an ideal pin-up boy for a sport desperate for good publicity.

It was how he achieved it. It was his personality, the trademark rifle-shot logic, the Beavis and Butthead humour. It was also his backstory - his unusual upbringing and his ailment.

He is soon to undergo an operation to install a titanium hip in place of his own which, starved of blood after a training crash in 2003, is dying, the balljoint withered 25 to 50 per cent to a cauliflower-shaped knob.

It's called osteonecrosis. It means pain, walking with a limp, sitting whenever he can, taking lifts rather than stairs, mounting his bicycle right leg first.

If he tried to get on the other way, Landis told Outside Magazine's Daniel Coyle, tilting his pelvis against his damaged hip: "I'd be lying on the pavement. Then people would be wondering what the hell's wrong with that guy."

Yet on a bike he is fluid Floyd. Cycling doesn't put weight on the joint. His orthopaedic doctors say it's not as though he can damage it much more and besides, they'd have a fat chance stopping him.

The same chance his parents had. They weren't that thrilled when young Floyd morphed from someone who used a bike to get around to someone obsessed with it. Before even he realised it, he'd worked out that Mennonite life wasn't for him, but also that a bike could take him places in more ways than one.

He told friends that someday he'd win the Tour de France.

"They weren't that thrilled," he said of his parents, Paul and Arlene, in a recent interview.

"Their life was based on working always hard work and the rest of the time spent in church."

He suspects they piled on the chores in the hope he wouldn't then have the time or energy for the bike.

"They basically told me I was going to hell if I kept racing my bike," he said in another interview. "I love my parents and they are good people, but that didn't make any sense to me. So I knew I had to get out and the bike was the way."

So he did his chores, donned his long sweat clothes instead of a racing outfit to avoid offending the community's sense of modesty and took off for long solo rides into the hills at night.

He became United States junior mountain biking champion and at age 20 moved to California where he received from friends an education about foreign things such as movies, music, television and dating.

In his late teens he'd instigated The Plan, an eight-year training regime requiring him to log monstrous training distances, some years up to 36,000km. He switched to road cycling in 1999 and three years later was picked up by Armstrong's team, US Postal, where he helped the Texan win three of his seven tour victories before his own impressive form led to offers from other teams and this season to a leader's role in the green and yellow colours of Phonak.

Which brings us to nine days ago and the last of the tour's mountain stages, where Landis put into practice another audacious plan during the 199km stage to Morzine over four alpine passes - number four the Col de Joux-Plane, a brute of 11.7 km with a gradient of 8.7 per cent.

"I needed to get rid of the calculations and logic and get angry," he said. If he couldn't win the Tour he could at least show he was a fighter.

He made no secret of his tactics. He would attack virtually from the start. As word rippled through a field weary from a week in the Pyrenees and Alps, several riders pulled alongside and begged him not to try.

"I just told'em," Landis recalled "'go drink some Coke, 'cause we're leaving on the first climb'."

They couldn't. Landis rode most of that day alone, riding himself back within 30s of the Maillot Jaune.

Old heads steeped in Tour minutiae reached back to the 1970s to find a comparable feat, vanquished rivals spoke of their respect for Landis, the superlatives were rolled out: A ride of "beauty" and "panache", said retiring Tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc; "the best Tour of all", said three-time tour champion Greg LeMond.

It was a feelgood story celebrated around the world. They made an exception in Mennonite country where the faithful frown on celebrating individual accomplishment. Well-wishers flocked to the Landis home, a white farmhouse festooned in green and yellow balloons, in Farmersville, a rural crossroads of 20 or so homes.

Inside, visitors got a look at a Phonak jersey signed "To Dad" and a Tour de France chocolate and vanilla layer cake with green and yellow icing, baked specially by Landis' mother for a celebration.

"[All the attention] just really humbled me," Arlene Landis said. "I think this is terrific."

After the bombshell of the positive drug test dropped, it seems the Landis' weren't about to claim their early instincts about Floyd going cycling were right.

Arlene Landis said it could take two weeks for the results of the backup test to be made public.

"My opinion is when he comes on top of this everyone will think so much more of him.

"So that's what valleys are for, right?"

How tempting it is to make that leap of faith and respond: "Sure, Arlene. Right."

Because there is so much to like in her son's story, so many legends that resemble, in Coyle's words, nothing so much as old Warner Bros cartoons.

The Time Floyd Dived Into a Dumpster to Get a Pair of Shoes and The Time Floyd Ate 28 Bags of Peanuts During a Transamerica Flight and The Time Floyd Drank 30 Cappuccinos in One Sitting and The Time Floyd Crushed His Opposition the Day After They Wrote Him Off. And, The Time Floyd Won the Tour de France and Then Went Off To Have His Hip Replaced.

It hardly seems right, but he now appears deep into a story that might be called, The Time Floyd Won the Tour and Let Us Down By Cheating.