Breaking Away

His dream was to be a professional mountain bike racer. He first gained notice in the Maryland foothills, winning races at Greenbrier State Park in the early 1990s.

By the time he was 18, he was racing most of the summer. In 1996, at the age of 20, he moved to Southern California.

But the way he trained was all wrong for mountain biking, which demands short bursts of aggressive riding.

"The harder I worked, the worse I got, because the races were too short," he explains. "I trained for five hours a day and the races were only two hours." He laughs. "I didn't really think that one through."

By 1999, when no team would hire him, Landis says he came close to throwing his bike in a dumpster. He was so depressed he trained even harder, logging 50 hours a week, flogging himself into insanely good shape. Lacking anything else to do, he and a friend decided to enter a road race; they blew the competition away and soon afterward Landis landed a job on a pro road team. It turned out that his obsessive training style was ideally suited to the long-distance demands of road racing.

Just as he'd planned, the bike had set him free. But now, he realized, he needed it for something else. It had to fill a steadily widening hole, the one carved out by his conscience.

"I felt guilty about hurting my parents, number one," he says. "I didn't know if I was doing the right thing. I felt like I should be going to church on Sundays."

Perhaps that is why biking became so all-consuming: It filled in for God, for his family, for the security he'd given up.

"It takes so much time and energy -- that's why I did it in the first place. If you ride hard enough and long enough," Landis says, "you forget about everything else."

Modest Celebrity

---

Road racing is a cutthroat sport. With lots of money on the line, fellow competitors aren't always so friendly. (Armstrong in particular has a reputation for chilly relationships with those who left his team.)

In California, Landis has coped by duplicating some of the aspects he valued most about his upbringing, such as kinship and simple living. He married into a large Mexican American family; his wife, Amber, had a toddler daughter, who is now 9, and a bunch of brothers living nearby. One of them lives with the Landises and serves as sidekick-support-car-driver when Landis is at home.

Landis's house, in a gated community with a view of the mountains, is noticeably free of stuff. He earns close to seven figures from Phonak and could receive a $2.5 million bonus if he wins the Tour de France. But there are no signs of great wealth here. Walk into Landis's garage and beside his VW Touareg and a Ford Escape you will find exactly one bike. Above it hang a few spare tires; beside it, a bucket of neatly arrayed tools, kept upright like sharpened pencils on a teacher's desk. The stand that holds the bike was a gift from his wife last Christmas; Floyd, she says, never saw the need for one himself.