Why Floyd Landis Broke Lance Armstrong

Going into the 2006 Tour de France, Floyd Landis had been a favorite to win, but chronic pain forced him out of the lead. This was, in his mind, the last tour the thirty-one-year-old would ever have a chance at, knowing that after three unsuccessful surgeries he’d soon need to have his hip replaced. He broke it in a crash years earlier while working as a domestique for Lance Armstrong. His job, from 2002 to 2004, was to make space for Lance and guard him from the wind and other riders in the dense peloton. As an employee of the US Postal Service Race Team, he was expected to not only keep Lance’s druggy secrets, but join him in his chemical pursuits, which mainly consisted of hormonal infusions and replacing depleted blood with transfusions of fresh blood, taken from before the tour, when the riders were at their physical peak. Having served his time under the world’s greatest contender, the cycling string-pullers saw fit to reward him with his own grand tour squad: Team Phonak. Lance took the 2006 tour off. 

But Where Lance’s US Postal team was a well-oiled doping machine, backed by Silicon Valley bankers who paid morally ambiguous doctors and a cohort of mules to transfer off-the-book purchases of dope and medical knowledge to the riders’ team bus at strategic moments between stages, Landis’s Phonak, (also backed by an investment banker, but one with less nefarious acumen) ran its doping operation as well as I would have – which is to say, haphazardly. In his first year as team leader Landis got himself poisoned by his own blood transfusion. He’s still not sure what went wrong, as an investigation would have warranted outside suspicion. By the 2006 Tour de France he’d managed to build a doping conspiracy, with the help of his wealthy banker friend, based on what he’d learned at US Postal. Unfortunately for him, Phonak lacked US Postal’s discretion, not to mention precision – two of the most important factors in the successful running of any clandestine medical conspiracy. Stage sixteen of the 2006 tour ended horribly for Landis, the topping cherry of a disaster cake layered by a missed start on the time trial and a cascade of disappointing performances, exacerbated by his aching hip.

In his hotel room that night, Landis took one of the oldest dopes there is: booze. Having gotten thoroughly tipsy (which doesn’t take much when you’re an emaciated endurance athlete. I used to get slurring-drunk off three beers) evidence shows that he must have taken some hits of synthetic testosterone, a banned substance.

The winner of the Tour de France is determined by adding up the total time it took a rider to finish each state. By the end of the third and final week the winner will have spent about ninety hours in the saddle. At the start of stage 17 (of 20 total) Landis was eight minutes behind the leader. That’s huge. Most tours are won by a matter or one or two minutes. The 1989tour saw Greg Lemond win by a mere eight seconds. But a third of the way into the race, Landis got out of the saddle and shot away from the pack, bullet style. Soon he was a minute ahead, then two minutes, then three minutes. Every mile the peloton covered Landis seemed to do two. I’ve been in the position of those in the peloton. When somebody just takes off early in the race all on their own it’s tempting to chase, but there’s also a tiny part of you that wants to see if they can stay away. In Landis’s case, he would be on his own for several mountain passes, totaling close to eighty miles. That’s the stuff of heroes. “If he thinks he can finish eight minutes ahead of us,” they thought, “without a pacer or a wind-breaker or a support team or anyone to suffer with, then let him.” Had this event not been diminished by the fact thathe was cheating, it would have been one of the greatest feats in all of sport. With a look of terrified anguish he ground his hip raw flying up the ascents, then carved the asphalt all the way down. He went so fast the chasing motorcycle with the cameraman on back couldn’t keep up in a few spots, but they managed to catch him losing traction on corners, skidding, and saving himself from the rails just in time. At the end of a long straight away, leading to a switchback, he hit the brakes so hard his rear wheel left the ground, but he slowed enough to make the turn, barely. His doping not withstanding, Landis took some very serious chances to maintain his lead. Eleven years earlier Lance Armstrong’s teammate, Fabio Casartelli, died on a similar descent, and he was merely riding to keep up, not to win. But Landis’s risks paid off, for the short-term at least; by the end of the stage he regained his lead, beating second-place by thirty seconds. He held on all the way to Paris, and fanfare, and money, and fame.

Until the results came back showing the lab found an abundance of testosterone in his urine.

What followed was a series of ill-considered defensive strategies, including the publication of the memoir, Positively False, claiming Landis’s innocence, convincing exactly nobody. The UCI, cycling’s governing body, stripped Landis of his title, and he retired in disgrace.

And here’s the thing about Lance Armstrong: yes, he founded and ran a peerless illegal drug syndicate for years, but he was no gangster. At any time, Floyd Landis could have come clean, could have told the world where he learned to dope, and who supplied it. After doing so, he’d be slapped with a brief suspension, but would probably come back to the peloton respected (cycling fans are some of the most forgiving in all of sportsdom. I think it has something to do with the fact that cyclists often have to endure the taunts and misdeeds of motorists but can’t fight back on the road. We can stew in hatred and let the clueless car drivers of the world ruin our ride, or we can get over it – all cyclists face this dilemma at some point, and the paucity of revenge killings on the public record shows that most cyclists do some variation of: “forgive and forget”; “forgive but don’t forget”; or my favorite, “forget but don’t forgive”. Nearly every grand champion has a blemished record, but they’re rarely remembered for that). Lance had enemies – a natural consequence of dominating by cheating – and his enemies might’ve become Landis’s friends in the aftermath.

T’was not to be.

Lance Armstrong’s goons – a group of money managers and lawyers – convinced Landis that the best way out was to defend the doping system and fight – claws out and yowling. They even gave him a little money, a pittance but still, so he could publish his book and hire lawyers and play his trombone all night long on the deck of that Titanic.

Then, after the UCI stripped him of his title, the Armstrong crew dumped him. Stopped returning his calls. Let his life and family fall apart in exile. 

If you’re ever looking for a good way to create a bitter, lifelong enemy: that’s how to do it, boy oh boy. Landis became a pariah in the seventh circle of loathing; nobody from the peloton so much as sent a postcard. Around this time I heard the best heckle of my life: I was riding in full regalia, all sunkissed in skintight spandex and hi-vis accessories, when I ran a red light. A guy from a witnessing car yelled out, “Shoulda stopped, Floyd Landis.”

By working with federal investigators and journalists, a disaffected and resentful Floyd Landis tossed the grenade that blew up the doping conspiracy. You can see the rest of the story on Oprah’s channel, where Lance admitted to her, and the cycling populace by implication, that he cheated his way through his whole career. The feds filed a $100,000,000 lawsuit against him, but he settled for five million. “No one is above the law,” says Justice Dept attorney Chad Readler, “this settlement demonstrates that those who cheat the government will be held accountable.” Yeah right. A portion of the moneywent to Landis for being the whistleblower, the rest didn’t even cover the government's expenses in the case, and five million dollars is just weekend spending cash to the likes of a former international sports celebrity like Armstrong. Justice is a construct of human civilization, but pain is a guarantee of the human condition, and thanks to rampant drug use I don’t think either applies to Lance Armstrong’s story. 

But why not just let people dope? Are blood transfusions so bad when it’s the racer’s own blood? Wouldn’t it be better out in the open with a professional medical team to mitigate poisoning like what happened to Landis early in his program? Is EPO really that bad for you? They give it to cancer patients after all. 

There are internationally recognized rules against doping because of something Americans have always had a hard time with: exploitation. Certain people are genetically predisposed to handle drugs, others aren’t, and a mediocre racer that can super-charge on a pint of raw bull semen can race as well as a clean top professional – and will likely burn out faster too, but there’s always more where he came from, right? Following that reasoning, a top professional who’s willing to dope will become a super human. Race organizers are keen to the public’s fascination with extreme feats of endurance, so there’s an incentive to pump athletes until it spills out their ears if it might attract a larger audience. But the only way to find out who will pee lightening and who’ll die young and tragic like Arthur Linton, Jimmy Michael, Knud Enemark Jensen, Tom Simpson, Johannes Draaijer, Michael Goolaurts, and oh so many others is to suck it and see. Take at look at the early '90s, when twenty-three-year-old riders like Patrice Bar died in their sleep of heart attacks. Oh, and let’s not forget the legions of would-be’s who’ve been crippled by untreated addiction and left to fend for themselves after being outcast by their teams, their sport, their friends, and their families. Let’s not forget Marco Pantani, the greatest rider of a generation and only person to win the Giro d’ Italia and Tour de France in the same season, who died of cocaine poisoning while Lance trained for what would be his sixth Tour de France victory.

Pantani’s is an especially sad death: in 1999 he tested positive for excessive hemocrit levels, a sign of blood doping. He swore he never doped, swore on his mother’s heart. The Italian press capitalized on the scandal, scrutinizing Pantani on the front page year after year. He gained weight, he hid in hotel rooms for days, he drove recklessly everywhere he went; he smashed eight cars after cannonballing the wrong direction on a one-way street. “He could have faced that problem like an adult, like a man,” said Italian journalist Mario Pugliese, “Or he could have faced it like a kid, and tried to escape it, like a kid. And he chose that.”

--> Italian police kept on the Pantani case well after his death in 2004. In 2014 they released lab results that implied somebody tampered with Pantani’s blood work. Renato Vallanzasca, an incarcerated member of the Camorra Crime Syndicate confirmed their suspicion that same year, saying his employers coerced a doctor to doctor the results to help the odds of an anti-Pantani gambling scheme they’d invested heavily in. And later the newspaper La Repubblica released a recording of a phone conversation involving an alleged Camorra crime guy confirming what Vallanzasca said. Point is: professional cycling is a volatile thing. Professionals have to deal with pain on and off the road that unnaturally shorten their careers and even their lives. Tossing amphetamine-dynamite into that bubbling volcano makes for a good show but only if you ignore the implied human sacrifice.

Wanna learn more? Buy Wheelmen by Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O'Connell. And give this article a share if you like it.