Saxat ur Outside Magazine:
From his offbeat stunts (he once drank 15 cappuccinos in one sitting) to his anything-goes demeanor (see Exhibit a-the fur coat-on page 4), Floyd Landis is the anti-Lance in every way but one: He'll stop at nothing in his quest to finish the Tour de France wearing the yellow jersey.
FLOYD LANDIS appears at his apartment door wearing his usual expression: a sharp, knowing smile.
"Welcome to the palace," he says.
His gaze flickers playfully around, taking in the small room's bare white walls and jumbled contents, which resemble a college dorm room after a mild earthquake. Here is the mantel clock frozen at 8:40, as it has been for two years. Here are the shiny piles of helmets and shoes; the tiny balcony stuffed with bikes. Here, sprawled on the couch, is fellow American cyclist Dave Zabriskie, a.k.a. Z-Man, Landis's sometime roommate. Here's the stereo vibrating with Ludacris. Here is the crammed bookshelf: How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker, alongside thick biographies of Che Guevara and Frank Zappa. Should have known: Landis has a weak spot for revolutionaries.
Landis, 30, is the kind of person other bike racers like to tell stories about. A lot of it has to do with the narrative potency of his background, including his escape from a strict, oldfangled Mennonite childhood in Pennsylvania's Lancaster County. A lot of it has to do with Landis's penchant for offbeat, memorable feats-like riding wheelies after detaching his front tire or seeing how many bags of airline peanuts he can eat during a cross-country flight (28, for those of you keeping score). The result is that his fellow bike racers are constantly telling and retelling Floyd stories, creating a highlight reel that resembles nothing so much as old Warner Bros. cartoons. There is "The Time Floyd Dove into a Dumpster to Get a Pair of Shoes" and "The Time Floyd and Z-Man Drank 30 Cappuccinos in One Sitting" and "The Time Floyd Rode the Tour de France Nine Weeks After Having Major Hip Surgery." The stories hang together because they have the same plot: a curious, unusually determined guy pushes against conventional limits, causing varying degrees of pain, humiliation, and triumph, not necessarily in that order.
Landis begins our visit by showing me something on his computer: an image of his grimacing face superimposed on the heavily muscled body of an ax-wielding maniac. Beneath the image, in stylish typescript, are the words I'M A HOMO.
"I e-mailed this to Lance and Z-Man and my wife," Landis says, smiling hugely. "Z-Man and my wife got right back to me-they thought it was pretty funny. I never heard back from Lance, though."
"I wonder why?" Z-Man asks, deadpan.
They contemplate this question with amused expressions, the two former U.S. Postal teammates tapping easily into a convenient theme: Landis's semifamous feud with another former teammate, seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong. The clash, which began in 2004 when Landis left Armstrong's Postal team, and reached soap-operatic proportions during the 2005 season, is now officially over. But it would be unlike Landis and Zabriskie to leave the scab alone, never mind any attempt at diplomacy. So they joke about it. Landis and Zabriskie might be riding the Tour for rival teams-Landis the leader for Phonak, the 27-year-old Zabriskie a key lieutenant for CSC-but it's instantly apparent why the two have been best friends since they first wore Postal blue together back in 2002.
"We were just wondering if, when this biking thing is over with," Landis says, "we could apply to Harvard."
Judging by the bookshelf, I offer, they might have a shot.
"We were thinking we'd get in based on life experience," Landis says.
"And death experience," Z-Man points out.
"We know how to kill things," Landis says with enthusiasm. "Killing things can be extremely useful."
"For eating," Z-Man says.
I ask what they eat around here. Bike racers are prodigious eaters, yet the cupboards and counters are distinctly bare. "We eat a lot of eggs," Landis says. "And we boil chickens."
"Boiling chickens," Z-Man says, in a Beavis-like voice. "Gotta boil the chicken."
"That's our philosophy, in a nutshell," Landis says. "You gotta boil the chicken. Until the bird flu comes. Then the chicken boils you."
"Boo-yah," says Z-Man.
Landis offers another of his philosophies, one that comes courtesy of comedy writer Jack Handey. "If life deals you lemons," Landis quotes, "why not go kill someone with the lemons, maybe by shoving them down his throat."
"Lemons," says Z-Man. "Leeee-mons."
LANDIS ADORES logic. There is no easier way to infuriate him than to say or do something that does not make sense. We are in a Girona restaurant drinking beer and shooting the breeze with the Z-Man when I begin a sentence with the phrase "Of course, it could be worse . . ."
"What does that mean, really?" Landis wants to know. "Of course it could be worse. If you are alive-if you are standing up and have breath in your lungs to say those words-then, yes, I agree, you're definitely right, it could be worse."
Or later, when Z-Man mentions an athlete who spoke about "giving 110 percent."
"Well, why not 112 percent?" Landis inquires, eyes widening with burning incredulity. "Why not 500 percent or 1,300 percent or 38 billion percent? I mean, if he can crank it up beyond 100 percent, why not? What's stopping him, exactly?"
Other items on the Landis list include traffic roundabouts (stoplights are superior), French architecture, and, probably most of all, explanations for losing. The latter especially rankles. Bike racers hardly ever win (Landis's three recent victories tripled his win total from his five-year European career), and so most racers naturally tend to attribute losses to ostensible causes: bonking, lack of training, cold, fatigue, team strength, luck. But their logic is of a smaller magnitude than Landis's.
"Everybody wants to say, 'I couldn't win because of this or that,' " he says. "To my way of thinking, it doesn't matter if your goddamn head fell off or your legs exploded. If you didn't make it, you didn't make it. One excuse is as good as another."
Landis takes a sip and leans forward in his chair. "There's only one rule: The guy who trains the hardest, the most, wins. Period. Because you won't die. Even though you feel like you'll die, you don't actually die. Like when you're training, you can always do one more. Always. As tired as you might think you are, you can always, always do one more."
Z-Man rouses, concerned. "I hope some 16-year-old doesn't read this and then go kill himself on the bike," he says.
"That was what I did," Landis says, not missing a beat. "I read something like that, and I trained like that, and, yeah, I was pretty damn depressed for a while. Then it got better."
So there's no such thing as overtraining?
"If you overtrained, it means that you didn't train hard enough to handle that level of training," Landis says, his fingertip rapping the table for emphasis. "So you weren't overtrained; you were actually undertrained to begin with. So there's the rule again: The guy who trains the hardest, the most, wins."
BIKE RACING, AT ITS ESSENCE, is about pain. According to the hackneyed but ultimately reliable theorem, great bike racers draw their strength from fights they've encountered elsewhere in life-against poverty, abusive or absent parents, injury, or illness (or, with surprising frequency, all of the above). But even in a peloton brimming with poor tough kids from the wrong side of the tracks, Landis manages to stand out.
"Floyd once told me that during races, it made him feel better to know that there probably weren't too many other guys who'd shoveled out a septic tank in tattered shoes in the winter," Z-Man told me. "So he's got that going for him."
The essentials of the Landis biography tread perilously close to myth: He was born in Farmersville, Pennsylvania, the second-oldest of six children in an observant Mennonite family. Rules were simple: no television, movies, uncovered heads for women, dancing, or anything that brought glory to the self instead of God. When Landis discovered mountain biking (which was permitted, so long as he covered his bare legs with cotton sweats) at 15, he improved so fast that, when he told his parents he wanted to pursue it as a career, they warned him of God's wrath. When he wouldn't listen to Scripture's logic, his father, Paul, tried a different tack. He saddled Floyd with an endless list of strenuous chores: fixing the car, painting the barn, digging the septic tank. If the boy was too tired, the logic went, he couldn't ride-a theory that Landis quickly disproved by training at night, often returning to the house at 2 or 3 a.m.
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