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Thank you, everyone who kept believing in me,’ Floyd Landis said after conquering pain and a huge deficit to give America its third Tour winner.
BY BONNIE DESIMONE
Special to The Miami Herald
Paris- His life has been a series of breakaways, so it’s not surprising that Floyd Landis won the 2006 Tour de France with the most audacious move the peloton had seen in decades.
When you have told your family you are abandoning their teachings and moving thousands of miles away, picking your way through a minefield of love and hurt and rebellion and fulfillment, how hard could it be to pedal alone up a few mountains? When you have ve survived a very public spat with your former mentor, who happens to be the most successful and popular cyclist in history, how hard could it be to rebound from one bad day on the bike?
Landis mounted the podium on the Champs-Elysees on Sunday without apparent distress, although his wife, Amber, said his degenerative hip condition makes the everyday act of climbing stairs more painful for him than ascending a steep mountain road. The 30-year-old Landis pulled his stepdaughter, Ryan, up with him during the victory ceremony under a hot, late-afternoon sky and lifted his arms in triumph.
His speech was short and direct, contrasting with the zany and circuitous path he took on 2,000-plus miles of French roadways to become the third American to win the Tour. U.S. riders have won eight consecutive editions — and 11 of the past 21 — of the world’s toughest and most famous bicycle race.
”Thank you, everyone who kept believing in me, most of all my team, when things weren’t going so well,” Landis said.
The brief trophy presentation capped a much more arduous journey that began when Landis, already an accomplished mountain biker, left his Mennonite community in southeastern Pennsylvania at age 19 to move to southern California. He later rode for three of Lance Armstrong’s Tour-winning teams, but sparred with the Texan after defecting to the Phonak team in 2005.
TEAM LEADER
Landis was promoted to team leader after Tyler Hamilton’s suspension for a doping offense and finished ninth in the Tour last year. During the winter, he worked to refine his time-trial skills and built up a reservoir of confidence — motivated even more by the prospect of potentially career-ending surgery on his bad hip.
Technically, Landis clinched the Tour title Saturday in the last individual time trial, but he really won it when he took off by himself in the Alps a few days ago.
He was eight minutes behind the race leader, Oscar Pereiro of Spain, courtesy of a mortifying collapse the day before. In a sport bound by tradition and etiquette, that time gap was the cue to write a concession speech and wait ’til next year. His initiative was viewed as desperate, foolhardy and doomed.
It was a grand slam, a long bomb followed by the onside kick, a midcourt shot at the buzzer. Landis knew most of his rivals were so conditioned by cycling convention that they would assume what he was trying to do was impossible, rather than trying to prevent it from happening.
”It’s always harder to follow somebody,” Landis said last week. “It’s always better if you just do it yourself.”
He was talking about the solo attack that put him back in the favorite’s saddle, but he could have been talking about his entire life.
”There are so many people he seeks counsel and advice from, but he makes all his own choices,” said physiologist Allen Lim, a key person in Landis’ brain trust. “Nobody tells Floyd what to do.”
The three American Tour champions are very different people, but there is an unmistakable similarity about their instinct for the jugular. Landis’ Stage 17 victory at Morzine had the faint echo of Greg LeMond’s last-day time-trial coup in 1989, in which he aimed his bike at Paris and made up 50 seconds when no one thought it could be done. It also harkened back to Armstrong’s anger-fueled ride to Luz-Ardiden in 2003 after he accidentally tangled with a spectator’s bag and crashed.
OVERCAME HARDSHIPS
Physical travails link them as well. LeMond returned from a near-fatal hunting accident, Armstrong survived life-threatening cancer and Landis only recently revealed he will have hip-replacement surgery within the next few months to alleviate his chronic pain from avascular necrosis.
The condition, triggered by a training crash three years ago, results when the bone is deprived of blood supply and begins to dry out and collapse.
Landis has had two surgeries since the original operation to try to reduce the inevitable friction in the joint.
He disguised his limp by adopting a rolling swagger and altered the angle of his time-trial position to try to minimize his discomfort. Adrenaline keeps him from dwelling on the pain during a race, but sleeping, walking and any other weight-bearing activities are difficult.
”If I had my way, we would have had this fixed yesterday,” Amber Landis said.
After seven consecutive years of Armstrong’s iron grip on the race, the 93rd Tour seemed to have a screw loose from the beginning. Seven men wore the overall leader’s yellow jersey, and the race lead changed 11 times.
But in the end, Landis came out ahead.
Landis plans to compete in a few minor races in Europe and the United States — the Tour champion’s victory lap — but he has finished his last major event for a while. There is no precedent for a cyclist at his level making a full recovery from hip-replacement surgery, but he bats away the prospect of retirement.
”I think if I’m given a little time with the hip, it’ll be OK,” he said.
Landis also said he hopes the mantle of Tour winner doesn’t weigh him down.
”I hope my life doesn’t change too much, because I’m a pretty happy guy,” he said.

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