Something in the Blood

It's a race you can bet Floyd Landis never wanted to win: The descent from the winner's podium in Paris to accused drug user. And yet he has accomplished it with breathtaking speed. With yesterday's news that Landis's backup "B"-sample drug test confirmed there were elevated levels of testosterone after the July 20 stage of the Tour de France, the man who two weeks ago was credited with a historical feat is now being labeled a cheat.

Landis's rollercoaster ride through the Tour attracted admirers worldwide. Among them were those who saw a poignant and triumphant humanity in his struggles through the baking-hot Alps, as well as once-jaded followers of cycling who felt Landis's very inconsistency signaled that he was racing "clean" in a sport that has been tainted by drug use.

Now he's been fired by his team and, pending an appeals process, he risks being stripped of his Tour win and potentially banned from racing for up to four years -- two years from cycling, and two years from competing in the ProTour events, cycling's major races. At that point he'd be at least 34 and nearing retirement age.

For many, the stunned reaction to Landis's crashout stems from admiration for his personal story. How do we reconcile the endearingly modest former Mennonite with the calculating rule-breaker that his urine samples suggest he could be?

"If Floyd Landis goes down, he will become the Ben Johnson of cycling," said three-time Tour winner Greg LeMond, speaking by phone earlier this week. "I hope he doesn't become that, but it is that shocking of a revelation."

Before the initial test result came out, it would have sounded crazy to suggest that Landis could be a fraud of the magnitude of the disgraced Canadian sprinter who, at the 1988 Olympics, broke the world record in the 100-meter race on steroids and was disqualified. In interviews over the course of two days in May, Landis appeared to me to be a good-natured and driven athlete who struggled with the sometimes cruel demands of the sport.

Yet given the trouble he's in now, the answers he gave then to questions about doping seem suggestively combative. In the past couple of years eight riders on Phonak, the Swiss-based team Landis led, have been implicated in doping scandals, including the American Olympic medalist Tyler Hamilton. (Landis is now the ninth.) But when asked what he thought about drug abuse in his sport, Landis complained about the frequent testing cyclists had to undergo.

"Sure, the people who are getting caught -- there's a lot of them," he said. "But the ones who are getting caught are the ones who are doing it, because it's practically impossible to get away with it." The random tests cyclists undergo are "a complete intrusion of privacy," he continued. "They've been to my house four times in the last four months. If you ask me, that's excessive. It makes my daughter wonder if I'm on drugs."

"We don't have any bigger problem than any other sport does," he said. "We just make it public immediately because we're too stupid to do anything about it."

"I've been tested 18 times already this year. How many do you need?"

Apparently, for him, just one more.

Even before the drug allegations, Landis demonstrated that he keeps secrets. He concealed a degenerative hip condition from his own team doctor. He kept it hidden from the public until the Tour was underway, when he announced it in uncharacteristically splashy style, with a press conference announcing imminent hip-replacement surgery. This coincided with a New York Times Magazine story ascribing agonizing pain and physical impairment to the otherwise normal-seeming athlete. Suddenly, it looked like Landis was trying to fashion an overcoming-adversity story to match Lance Armstrong's cancer battle.