America’s New Tour De Force

CANNES, France — The strangest Tour de France in many years culminated in Paris yesterday with what has become the most normal of outcomes: an American riding into Paris wearing the yellow jersey, sipping champagne.Floyd Landis added his name to the storied list of Tour de France winners yesterday, becoming the third American to enjoy that honor after Greg LeMond (who won three times, in 1986, 1989, and 1990) and Lance Armstrong (who won the last seven.) It was the first victory for the former Armstrong teammate, and potentially his last, as he is scheduled for artificial hip replacement surgery when he returns to America.“My next goal is to come back here,” Landis said after riding into Paris. “That’s the plan.”All riders finished with the same time yesterday after the short ride into Paris and the traditional eight laps around the Champs Elysees, which meant that Landis preserved his 59-second lead over Spain’s Oscar Pereiro, and 1:29 lead on Germany’s Andreas Kloden. Norway’s Thor Hushovd won the sprint to the finish, but the day belonged to Landis.After the American accepted the yellow jersey on the podium, Tour officials handed him a microphone and encouraged him to say a few words. He thanked his Phonak teammates, then told the crowd that he and his team “never stopped believing.”Throughout this race and throughout his career, fate handed Landis a number of opportunities to stop believing that he could win cycling’s top honor.The most recent challenge came just this Wednesday, when the American favorite sputtered out on the second Alpine stage and lost a daunting eight minutes in the top of the standings.Following the disappointing Stage 16, which many observers termed a complete collapse, Landis all but wrote himself out of the race.“I don’t expect to win this Tour anymore,” he said after falling more than eight minutes off the pace.”It’s never easy to get back eight minutes, but I’ll keep fighting till the end and try.”The following day, instead of accepting his disadvantage, Landis launched a memorable attack on one of the Tour’s toughest days, and staged an unprecedented comeback. Adding to the drama, just a week before he revealed that he would receive an artificial hip in the autumn.Though Landis started as the favorite in this bizarre Tour— devoid of its top leaders thanks to an eleventh-hour doping scandal — it was hard not to see him as an underdog.Landis grew up in a Mennonite family in Lancaster County, Pa., riding his bicycle to church on Sunday afternoons. The bike, one of the few luxuries in a spartan childhood, became his hobby. His dream was to become a sponsored mountain bike rider.After putting in long, fruitless hours for such short events, he realized that he needed to take up long distance races, so he took to the amateur circuit on a racing bike. Fame and fortune seemed far off; in 1999, at 23, Landis found himself without a team, as none would hire him, and he considered giving up on the sport entirely.That year he was noticed after winning a small road race in his home state, which he did mostly for fun, and the Mercury team came through with a contract: $15,000 per year. He was, all of a sudden, a professional cyclist.Three years later, he joined a U.S. Postal team headed by Armstrong, and labored for two years, carrying water bottles up to the leader, chasing down attacks, and helping the Texan to consecutive titles. His compensation was a 77th place finish in 2004.Later that year he joined Phonak, led by another American, Tyler Hamilton, and in the 2005 edition of the Tour de France, Landis finished in ninth place. Hamilton was suspended from competition last year after his blood samples tested positive for doping (a decision the Marblehead, Massachusetts, native continues to fight in court.) So the 30-year-old Landis — who was on a tear, having racked up important victories in the Tour of California, the Tour of Georgia, Paris-Nice — took over the reigns of the team, and with it, a seven-figure salary.The Swiss manufacturer of hearing aids believed that he could actually win the Tour de France, and that hypothesis became much more likely after the top five finishers from last year were wiped off the starting list by an eleventh-hour blood-doping scandal.Phonak’s faith and Landis’s desire were rewarded yesterday afternoon as the green-and-yellow squad rode together triumphantly through the Paris suburbs. Landis, as is the custom, sipped a glass of champagne. He had 154 leisurely kilometers into the capital to ponder the depths of his achievement.With the exception of the Tour in the 1989, when LeMond beat out Laurent Fignon by just eight seconds for the winner’s jersey, the final stage in Paris has been mostly a ceremonial day of handshaking and shows of sportsmanship en route to the Arc de Triomphe. So it was yesterday.In the town of Champlan, near Orly airport, Montana-native Levi Leipheimer pulled over, lifted his bicycle onto the sidewalk and applauded the rest of the peloton.One by one, team leaders and friends of Landis rode up to the yellow jersey and offered their congratulations. Landis spent most of the ride shoulder-to-shoulder with CSC cyclist David Zabriskie: “the Z-Man,” as Landis calls his roommate in Spain.It was a conventional end to an otherwise unconventional Tour de France. Frankly, it was plain weird. Not only were there no clear favorites, there were no real team leaders for most of the squads, and none of them wanted to bring one forward in order to play their cards closer to their chests.In the end, the yellow jersey was worn by seven different riders’ just one short of a Tour record. Until Saturday’s time trial, which sealed Landis’s fate, there were at least five riders who had a shot at the title. Such uncertainty is rarely seen in this competition.Because the doping scandal thinned out four of the top five riders from last year, there are those who will put an asterix next to Landis‚ win. Maybe there should be. Cycling is paying a heavy price now, but it is for the kind of cheating that goes on in every sport. The ongoing lawsuits will determine whether the accusations are just.Even if they are not, the real losers won’t be the fans, who were treated to the one thing that has been missing in the Tour, ironically, since the days before performance-enhancing drugs, and that is old-fashioned excitement.That, we got in full this year.jmoretti@nysun.com

America’s New Tour De Force

America’s New Tour De Force

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