Breaking Away

"It drove me crazy," says Amber. "He'd be fixing the bike and holding it with one hand."

Any sign that Landis has become a cycling celebrity is absent. Amber once framed and hung some magazine photos of him; he took them down.

Landis long ago reconciled with his parents. In 2004 they took their first trip overseas to witness the peloton racing up a peak in the Pyrenees. There the route was clotted with screaming, liquored-up, flag-draped Basques, who had poured in from Spain by the busload. Amid this rowdiness, clustered together in their high-necked frocks and crisp white bonnets, sat Landis's mother, Arlene, and three of his sisters, holding up a hand-painted banner. On it was the modest assertion: "We Support Floyd Landis."

"I feel like what he's doing is a very wholesome thing," says Arlene. "He's made some different choices, but he doesn't live selfishly. I know he's a very caring person. . . . You just follow him with prayers. You know someone bigger is going to take care of him."

Landis has no entourage. He keeps in touch with a couple of trainers but relies mostly on his own daily pen-and-paper logs of his rides, stretching back more than a decade.

Still, he says, there are no answers in these charts. The only way to win is this: "It just comes down to pedaling your bicycle harder than the other guy. That's all it is."

"Anything you do more, you get better at it," he continues. "I think the downfall of most people is they just don't do it enough."

Can He Be Selfish?

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For many longtime observers, Landis's ability to triumph in the Tour de France hinges on whether he can handle both his team and the rest of the field with ruthless self-interest.

"There's a definite change, going from being a supporting rider to a leader," says Greg LeMond, who knows about such things. He became the first American ever to win the Tour only after a fractious battle against one of his own teammates for the top position. "It puts a lot of pressure on you to have the whole team racing for you. It wears you out."

"Does he have the killer instinct like a Lance Armstrong?" asks analyst Phil Liggett, who announces the Tour annually on cable's Outdoor Life Network. "I don't know."

Says Phonak team member Robert Hunter: "In many instances he hasn't been prepared to totally waste the team for his own benefit. . . . He's always thinking of the team's consideration before thinking of himself. Then that makes us say, 'Don't think about us.' " But there's an upside: "A lot of the time the guys end up sacrificing more for him."

Still, Landis seems uncomfortable with aiming for his own achievement at the expense of his teammates.

"You have to care about each other, otherwise nobody's helping anybody and nobody gets anything," he says. "If you're the leader and you want to win races, you kind of have to be a little bit selfish. The whole thing is kind of a mess."

Ready to Ride

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"Man, it smells good with all those orange blossoms," Landis exclaims the next day, inflating his chest with a loud sniff. "It's like heaven."

He's standing in the parking lot of a run-down burrito joint on the slopes of Mount Palomar, wolfing down a candy bar in preparation for his second ride of the day up to the top -- a dirt road climb that ascends 4,000 feet in a little more than 10 miles.

It's a chilly, blowy, dismal morning. Fog smothers the surrounding mountains and shrouds the orange groves. The parking lot is grimy and littered. But that sweet floral scent is like a little amen.

Landis couldn't be happier. In his painfully bright green-and-yellow Phonak uniform, he stands out against the bleakness like a giant ear of corn. He's all smiles.

"I'm tired from yesterday," he says with a grin, licking chocolate from his fingers. "I rode, like, 100 miles in four hours." He jerks his head toward the road. "Let's go ride some more."