Copenhagen w/out the Queen of Cycling !

 

Regrettably Jeannie will not be at Copenhagen and the event will be diminished by her absence since she is the most accomplished woman racer of our generation !

 

As I write I have just discovered this item :

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/jeannie-longo-opts-to-miss-world-championships

　

Which news leads me to wonder whether the effort to get to Copenhagen is worthwhile . Each time I go to the “ Tour de Romandie “ and previous World Championship Road Races I have enjoyed the opportunity to ride with Jeannie and Patrice , the husband . Perhaps I have been lucky and it is serendipity but I do not set out with the intention to find them ! Indeed the first meeting at the Sydney 2000 Olympic was pure chance . Living on my friend’s yacht in Rose Bay , Sydney I would come ashore then float around on the bike not making any plan other than to enjoy the warm and sunny weather .

Centennial Park being the Road race start and finish was an obvious attraction and I enjoyed catching up with Dave Duffield on his Foldup bike , and Lance several times although he preferred to ride with Tony Doyle .

Eric Worlberg of Canada and the Danish & Austrian Mens’ teams and Italian and Dutch Womens’ Teams were some of the groups I was able to show the Race and TT courses . Early on I was able to say to the Aussies that Team Mobile were to be watched as I felt sure from seeing them ride together that they would work for one another rather than their individual Nations . Of course who was I to say this and was ignored and so the Podium was Team Telecom ! As Jan followed Vinky to the Podium I called out “ Gut Gemackte “ and Jan looked across and then pointed me out to Klody . When the presentation was over the Bouquets soared in my direction , to get Jan’s I had to reach out nearly toppling but Andy’s throw was just about perfect . These I later passed to the son and dAughter of a family who had befriended me as their yacht was in the same bay as the one I was living aboard . As time has passed regrettably I have lost touch with both parties with their moving house during the intervening years . Hard to imagine that 11 years have passed so quickly !

Before the Men’s Presentation ceremony I had placed my bike on top of the concrete support for the flagpole I was using as a support so my view over the two metre fence was unimpeded but a Police Inspector tried to tell me to come down as I was “ at risk “ and I later had him ask me who I was to receive the flowers . Of course there were some who made me welcome and one was David Millar who pulled alongside me after the TT Medal Presentation in the British team car and introduced me to James Quigly the Track Gold Medalist ! Getting kissed by all three Women after their Medal Presentation was a special moment as well particularly since I had ridden with them all as they surveyed the routes . Leotin also pointed me out to her parents whom I had met in Team Celebration at the 1998 World Champs , but whilst we waved I did not get to greet them as they were in the VIP enclosure .

Meeting Ray Godwin and Michael Milton was another interesting experience since I have caught up with them both in various parts of Europe . Michael at Para Ski Races and Ray at various Road Race Events . El Diablo was also a character that I came across and helped out as you can see from the Blog post about him .

 

 Haile Gebreselassie ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Gebrselassie

) was one of the runners whom I met as they used Centennial Park for training as did some of the Para Hand Bikers , so you can see it was a mixed bunch of Olympic Competitors that I came across but not unremarkably I came across Shane Warne sitting in the back of a Groundsmans’ vehicle as it drove through the park to the Sydney Cricket Ground . On the Thursday night before the opening of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games I rode up to the Sydney Town Hall and met the Waugh Brothers after one of them had run with the “ Olympic Torch “ .

Copenhagen w/out the Queen of Cycling !

LANCE AS SEEN IN 2005 by barry coyle/booknoise?

BORROWED FROM CYCLOCOSM: really interesting item about Lance !

[q+a]

Burning Questions

The author, on all things Lance

Booknoise: What’s our biggest misconception about Armstrong?

Daniel Coyle: That he’s a nice guy. Lance is smart, charismatic, incredibly hardworking, and he does a lot of good works, especially within the cancer community. All that has led most of us to the misimpression that he’s saintlike or even cuddly. He’s not, by a long shot. Like DiMaggio, like Sinatra, like Babe Ruth, Armstrong is one of those who lives life all the way up. When it comes to his sport, and especially winning the Tour, niceness is just not part of his decision-making.

So what’s he really like? Let’s put it like this: He’s the kid from nowhere who became best in the world at a sport that is very difficult, painful, and dangerous. He’s the proof that Darwinism works. As his best friend, John Korioth, says, Lance is animalistic, the ultimate alpha wolf. On the bike, and often off the bike, he’s a competitive beast. It’s what makes him a fearsome competitor—it also makes him a complicated human being to deal with.



Booknoise: You moved to Spain to follow Armstrong and write about his season. What surprised you most about him?

Coyle: How much control he liked to have, over everything. He called every shot—not just with the bike, but with what backroad-route the training ride was going to follow, what brand coffee was on the team bus. You name it, he controlled it.

Most world-class athletes and businessmen—and Armstrong is both, to the nth degree – insulate themselves from the mundane details of their lives so they can focus on their jobs. Armstrong does the opposite. He removes all the insulators. If you were to diagram his world, it would look like a galaxy, with Lance in the middle and a dozen or so people in orbit around him, sending a constant stream of messages and questions. They actually call it Planet Lance. Some people believe he doesn’t trust anybody to do be his filter, which is partly true. But the larger truth is that Armstrong likes it. He thrives on the constant interaction, all these questions and answers constantly flying back and forth, and nobody really knows what’s going on except for him. It’s not about the bike—it’s about the information.

The last time I saw Armstrong, he’d just gotten a news-alert service on his BlackBerry that beeped whenever it located a news article with his name in it. The thing was buzzing every couple minutes. And he looked at it every time.

Booknoise: What surprised you most about his sport?

Coyle: In America, bike racing is associated with happiness and health—it’s a sport for middle-to-upper class suburban kids. In Europe, it’s exactly the opposite. Bike racers are nearly all poor, rural kids from the wrong side of the tracks—sons of coal miners, butchers, farmers, often orphans. They are literally trying to ride away their dead-end lives. In some ways, it’s closer to boxing: whoever can take the most pain, succeeds.

The ones who make it are scary-tough, partly because many of them don’t have anything to go home to, especially kids from the former Eastern Bloc. They crash, they break backs, they take insane risks, they don’t care. In this way, Armstrong’s background—absentee dad, single mom, working-class Texas—is closer to what his rivals had.

The rivals are a fascinating bunch. Jan Ullrich, whose father left when he was three, was raised in a crumbling East German housing project. Alexandre Vinokourov, Ullrich’s wingman who finished third in the 2003 Tour, is the son of chicken farmers from Kazakhstan, one of the bleakest spots on the planet. Iban Mayo, who was nearly crippled in a car crash when he was 19, comes from a poor Basque family. Yes, Armstrong is a remarkable guy who survived cancer. But his rivals are also survivors, from the world’s hardest places.

Booknoise: Six Tour wins in a row, now trying for seven. What gives Armstrong his edge over these guys?

Coyle: His mind. He doesn’t just want to win, he needs to win, and so he tries to win every single interaction with his opponents. Armstrong is the kind of guy who wants to win not only the race, he wants to win the handshake­. He wants to have a faster bike. He wants to have a cooler-looking uniform. As his coach, Chris Carmichael, puts it, he’s not interested in making history as much as he’s interested in showing up every year and kicking the shit out of everybody in the big race.

Armstrong spends hours reconning the roads, but he spends more time reconning his rivals. He trolls the news every day for items about them—he calls it “doing homework.” If there’s a photo of Jan Ullrich’s butt online, Armstrong will find it and study it and comment on it—how fat he is, how this year’s butt looks compared to last year’s. In all this, his message to his opponents is I’ve got something you don’t.

The funny thing is, a large part of Armstrong’s effectiveness lies in the style in which he delivers that message. The more important something is, the more casual Armstrong plays it. A good example happened after the first big climb of last year’s Tour, at La Mongie. Armstrong destroyed his contenders—really destroyed them—then afterward he downplayed it. He wished them well, and he yawned. Who’s more intimidating, the guy who simply beats you or the guy who beats you and seems bored by it? Classic Lance.


Booknoise: How strong is he, really?

Coyle: Here’s a primitive test: Take two five-gallon buckets and fill them with water. Then lift them from the floor to waist height in one second—a move which requires about 500 watts of power. Most fit people can last a minute or so. When he’s in top shape, Armstrong can produce around 500 watts for an hour.

The secret does not lie in his muscles—in fact, plenty of athletes could beat him in the leg-press. Rather, it’s in Armstrong’s amazing ability to transport oxygen to those muscles. He can work very hard for a very long time—a function of his heart and his blood. He’s got a great motor, and the world’s greatest fuel-delivery system.

Booknoise: So is Armstrong the world’s greatest athlete?

Coyle: A fine question for a bar-room debate. He’s definitely the world’s greatest human power-plant. He’s quite possibly the world’s most obsessed and competitive athlete. Bike-racing is also far more dangerous than people think—he’s as good as any downhill skier when it comes to whole-body coordination.

That said, you have to remember that bike-racing is an endurance sport—therefore it needs to be judged on a different scale than skill-oriented sport. For instance, there’s no doubt that, with the right training, Kobe Bryant would have a better chance of becoming a pro bike racer than Lance Armstrong would have playing point guard in the NBA. So it’s apples and oranges.

Booknoise: What are his vulnerabilities, if any?

Coyle: Armstrong’s power margin over his top rivals is 10 watts, or about 2 percent. To go back to our test, that 2 percent is about what it would take to lift one quart of water to waist height over and over. It’s not much—so Armstrong guards it, checks it, gets a nuts about it. Friends and teammates can tell how he’s doing by his mood. If the numbers aren’t where they should be, he’s not very fun to be around.

Booknoise: He’s 33 now, which is old for a Tour rider. How has age affected his abilities?

Coyle: Armstrong doesn’t like to admit it, but his hips have given him trouble for years. The night before the 2003 Tour, his hip went out of joint and he was barely able to walk up a flight of stairs. He was able to get it fixed—and kept it quiet, of course. In fact, his chiropractor said he never mentioned it again.

Last year Armstrong experimented with a top-secret $250,000 bike with pedals set 18 mm closer together—it was called the Narrow Bike, and it made him more aerodynamic. But when he tested himself on it, his power numbers dropped off dramatically. Other people, including Jan Ullrich, were able to ride the narrow bike with no power loss. Which is one reason Armstrong worries so much about a crash. It could throw his hips out of alignment, and the 2 percent would be gone.

So what’s Armstrong’s margin of success? In the case of this bike, it was 18 millimeters—about the width of your pinky finger.

Booknoise: How can we tell when Armstrong’s struggling?

Coyle: Armstrong is the best at concealing weakness, but even he has one giveaway: His face takes on a distinctive look that people call the Dead Elvis Grin. His head tips forward, his upper lip goes into a kind of a snarl, he goes pale. That’s what his opponents want to see—and what Armstrong doesn’t want them to see. If you see it, you know things are about to get interesting.

Booknoise: What caused his 2004 divorce from his wife, Kristin?

Coyle: Like most things in Armstrong’s life, it happened suddenly—and it surprised people very close to the couple. But it’s clear that the divorce seems to fit a larger pattern in Armstrong’s life. As his teammate Jonathan Vaughters puts it, you get close to him, and then inevitably something goes haywire. A few years ago, Armstrong had a dispute with his best friend, John Korioth. The two went two years without speaking. It happened again with teammate Floyd Landis, who will ride against Armstrong this year for the Phonak team. You have to remember this is a kid who grew up without a father, and who might have a few issues in that department.

It’s also worth noting that bike racers—like astronauts and race-car drivers—are not particularly known for their abilities in the monogamy department. In the spring of 2005, both Jan Ullrich and Italian champion Mario Cipollini separated from the mothers of their children.

Booknoise: We have to ask: What’s Armstrong’s relationship with Sheryl Crow like?

Coyle: In some ways, they’re a good fit: she’s sporty, he’s a huge music fan. They share a down-to-earth style. But fundamentally, she’s quiet and reserved—definitely the opposite of Armstrong. She bought him a book on meditation, but he couldn’t get through it. She told friends she was interested in starting a family, something Armstrong has told friends he’s not interested in doing right now. But they’re together, and they seem happy.

Booknoise: What role does Armstrong’s mother, Linda, play?

Coyle: Anybody who wants to see the source of Armstrong’s intensity needs to look no further than his mother’s blue eyes.The daughter of an alcoholic Vietnam veteran, she got pregnant at 17 and decided to keep the baby. His relentlessness, his positivity, his organizational drive finds its wellspring in her—along with a certain willingness to keep moving forward, no matter what. Now married to her fourth husband, Linda shows up at each Tour, and is greeted like the Queen Mother.

Booknoise: How big a role does his cancer survivorship play?

Coyle: It’s defining. He’s incredibly committed to the cause, and the cancer community is committed to him; for a lot of people, it’s like he’s a living saint. It’s a feedback loop: he inspires them, and they inspire him. It also separates him from the other riders. He faced death, they didn’t.

Booknoise: How hard is the Tour de France?

Coyle: It’s the hardest event on the planet: nothing comes close. Studies have shown that Tour riders spend more daily energy than Everest climbers. During those three weeks they spend energy at a rate that exceeds the capabilities of all but four animal species. Imagine running a marathon a day for twenty days. The food alone is ridiculous: on big days, they eat the equivalent of 28 cheeseburgers. Watching them eat is like watching a cartoon: they lean forward, inhale, and the food disappears.

Booknoise:What’s Armstrong’s relationship with his team?

Last year Armstrong experimented with a top-secret $250,000 bike with pedals set 18 mm closer together—it was called the Narrow Bike, and it made him more aerodynamic. But when he tested himself on it, his power numbers dropped off dramatically. Other people, including Jan Ullrich, were able to ride the narrow bike with no power loss. Which is one reason Armstrong worries so much about a crash. It could throw his hips out of alignment, and the 2 percent would be gone.

So what’s Armstrong’s margin of success? In the case of this bike, it was 18 millimeters—about the width of your pinky finger.

Booknoise: How can we tell when Armstrong’s struggling?

Coyle: Armstrong is the best at concealing weakness, but even he has one giveaway: His face takes on a distinctive look that people call the Dead Elvis Grin. His head tips forward, his upper lip goes into a kind of a snarl, he goes pale. That’s what his opponents want to see—and what Armstrong doesn’t want them to see. If you see it, you know things are about to get interesting.

Booknoise: What caused his 2004 divorce from his wife, Kristin?

Coyle: Like most things in Armstrong’s life, it happened suddenly—and it surprised people very close to the couple. But it’s clear that the divorce seems to fit a larger pattern in Armstrong’s life. As his teammate Jonathan Vaughters puts it, you get close to him, and then inevitably something goes haywire. A few years ago, Armstrong had a dispute with his best friend, John Korioth. The two went two years without speaking. It happened again with teammate Floyd Landis, who will ride against Armstrong this year for the Phonak team. You have to remember this is a kid who grew up without a father, and who might have a few issues in that department.

It’s also worth noting that bike racers—like astronauts and race-car drivers—are not particularly known for their abilities in the monogamy department. In the spring of 2005, both Jan Ullrich and Italian champion Mario Cipollini separated from the mothers of their children.

Booknoise: We have to ask: What’s Armstrong’s relationship with Sheryl Crow like?

Coyle: In some ways, they’re a good fit: she’s sporty, he’s a huge music fan. They share a down-to-earth style. But fundamentally, she’s quiet and reserved—definitely the opposite of Armstrong. She bought him a book on meditation, but he couldn’t get through it. She told friends she was interested in starting a family, something Armstrong has told friends he’s not interested in doing right now. But they’re together, and they seem happy.

Booknoise: What role does Armstrong’s mother, Linda, play?

Coyle: Anybody who wants to see the source of Armstrong’s intensity needs to look no further than his mother’s blue eyes.The daughter of an alcoholic Vietnam veteran, she got pregnant at 17 and decided to keep the baby. His relentlessness, his positivity, his organizational drive finds its wellspring in her—along with a certain willingness to keep moving forward, no matter what. Now married to her fourth husband, Linda shows up at each Tour, and is greeted like the Queen Mother.

Booknoise: How big a role does his cancer survivorship play?

Coyle: It’s defining. He’s incredibly committed to the cause, and the cancer community is committed to him; for a lot of people, it’s like he’s a living saint. It’s a feedback loop: he inspires them, and they inspire him. It also separates him from the other riders. He faced death, they didn’t.

Booknoise: How hard is the Tour de France?

Coyle: It’s the hardest event on the planet: nothing comes close. Studies have shown that Tour riders spend more daily energy than Everest climbers. During those three weeks they spend energy at a rate that exceeds the capabilities of all but four animal species. Imagine running a marathon a day for twenty days. The food alone is ridiculous: on big days, they eat the equivalent of 28 cheeseburgers. Watching them eat is like watching a cartoon: they lean forward, inhale, and the food disappears.

Booknoise:What’s Armstrong’s relationship with his team?

Coyle: If there’s anybody he watches closer than his rivals, it’s his teammates. Especially since Armstrong is part-owner of Tailwind Sports, the for-profit company that manages the team—he is literally paying their salaries. Like a good boss, Armstrong is a great motivator and rewards those who do good work. But as his teammates know all too well, if they don’t do their job, they’re out. Dead Man’s Rules, they call it. Friendship comes second—and they all know it. As his ex-teammate Floyd Landis says, everyone is a scared of Lance. If you’re not, you haven’t been paying attention.

Booknoise:How did the book come to be?

Coyle: During the 2003 Tour, an editor friend and I were talking about Armstrong, and cycling in general. We were both fans, but in the course of the conversation we realized that we didn’t really know all that much about Armstrong or his world. As a culture, we’ve been watching Armstrong win the Tour like new baseball fans might have watched Babe Ruth hit home runs. There’s a collective sense that we want to move closer, move down from the upper deck, understand what’s going on, how the game is played, and how Armstrong plays it.

So the idea hit us—what if I moved closer to the field? What if I went to Europe, lived through a season—the season of his attempt to get his record sixth Tour de France victory, it so happened. I ran the idea past my wife, Jen, and our four kids, and to their credit, they were up for it. So I pitched the idea, and when HarperCollins said yes, we started packing our bags.

Booknoise: How’s your relationship with Armstrong?

Coyle: I’d call it carefully cordial. He knew about the book from the get-go; he did all his homework on me, and he treated me in a friendly, if distant, way. We’d been in Girona about a day when Armstrong rode by on a bridge and yelled to my son, “Don’t jump.” Later, he jokingly called me “LoJack,” because I always knew where he was.

I went to all the races, from February in Portugal to the Tour, and our living in Girona helped. He permitted me to hang around some—though of course not as much as I would have liked—and I gradually gained a degree of trust and access to the key people around him—especially Johan Bruyneel, the team’s director and probably the guy closest to Armstrong, sports-wise. Also, I spent a lot of time researching Armstrong’s rivals, in case one of them would emerge as Tour winner. From a reporting standpoint, I had to be ready for every possible outcome—win, lose, or crash.

My goal was to tell the story clearly, fairly, and accurately. In March, I sent Armstrong a draft of the book to read for corrections and clarifications; he didn’t respond. I don’t know if that means he hates it or loves it, or (maybe more likely) somewhere in between.

How important is bike technology to Armstrong?

Coyle: Very, but not only in the way that I’d assumed. They call him Mr. Millimeter for good reason—he’s very persnickety. But what he’s after isn’t just the extra fraction of a second from the wind tunnel. He’s after the feeling of having that extra second, showing the competitors he has that extra second. He uses technology as a tool to build his own confidence and demoralize everyone else. He’s in love with the process. As the mechanic told me, at some point, at some point the math stops mattering. When he has a piece of equipment he likes, he calls it The Shit, and when he really likes it, he calls it The Shit That Will Kill Them.

Booknoise:How do his top rivals—Jan Ullrich, Iban Mayo, Ivan Basso—react to Armstrong’s strategies?

Coyle: As a group, they seem to have settled on a strategy where they try, as much as possible, to simply ignore him. Ullrich, who nearly beat Armstrong in the 2003 Tour, gets real smiley and casual around Lance. Ullrich has developed an approach where he flaunts his simplicity—a low-tech, easygoing style. Ullrich has become an alternate-universe version of Armstrong—after all, how do you beat the guy who comes at you with everything? You lean back, you stay casual and mysterious. So far, it hasn’t worked.

Booknoise: What about the allegations of Armstrong’s doping? Are people out to get him, or is there actually something to these charges?

Coyle: Going into the book, I hadn’t hoped or planned on spending much time on the doping question. Doping is part of the shadow-side of bike racing or any sport—facts are often murky, contentious, hard-to-prove, and stories tend to end up in a courtroom or a lab. Plus, I had the sense that I probably wouldn’t find anything new. As a relative outsider to the sport, I thought I knew the routine. People—sneaky French journalists, it seemed—accuse Armstrong, Armstrong denies, there’s no proof. It didn’t exactly increase my interest to know that Armstrong had a well-practiced habit of suing people who questioned his integrity on the subject.

As it turned out, doping was a subplot of the bike-racing season—there was David Walsh’s book, Tyler Hamilton’s shocking positive test result, Armstrong trainer Dr. Michele Ferrari’s guilty verdict, and, as the season ended, a flurry of lawsuits between Armstrong and his former personal assistant, Mike Anderson. But to me, these weren’t just stories—they were people whom I’d gotten to know during the season, people whom I found utterly fascinating. And after two years of research, all I can say for certain is this: the doping issue has been around Armstrong and cycling for a long time, and it’s probably never going to disappear. I found that, as a relative outsider to the sport, there was a lot about cycling that I didn’t know—not all of it pretty. In my book, I try to share that information so that people can come to their own decision.

Booknoise: What are the facts?

Coyle: They fall into two categories. On the one hand, you’ve got Armstrong’s spotless record: 150-odd doping tests over the past six years, all clean. You’ve got the fact that he donates money to testing programs, that he’s probably the most-tested athlete in the history of sports, that his $20 million in endorsements would end if he tested positive. You’ve got the fact that some journalists would clearly love to nail Armstrong. You’ve also got the sheer epic stakes of the present situation. As Armstrong’s agent, Bill Stapleton, put it, “Can you imagine what would happen if Lance tested positive? Can you imagine what would happen if it turns out we’re screwing with people on this?”

On the other hand, you’ve got the fact that doping is inseparable from bike racing. (If you’re interested, check out The Crooked Path to Victory: Drugs and Cheating in Professional Bike Racing, by Les Woodland.) In 2004 alone, three current and former world champions were busted for dope, one team was nearly disbanded, and several pro cyclists went public with detailed, harrowing stories of doping practices on their teams, including one who said he was given a substance designed for anemic dogs. What would people say about the NBA if Kobe, Shaq, and Tim Duncan all tested positive in a single year? If a bunch of them died of heart attacks—as eight cyclists did in 2003-4?

You’ve also got the accounts accumulated by David Walsh, who spent two years trying to prove Armstrong might be a doper. His book, L.A. Confidentiel, came out on the eve of the 2004 Tour. It was 375 pages, and it went into exhaustive (and exhausting) detail. (See this link for more detail on Walsh’s allegations.)

Walsh has his own backstory—he’s anything but objective about doping, and people have pointed out that his personality resembles Armstrong’s, most particularly in stubbornness. But the accounts Walsh unearths–including testimony from seemingly credible ex-teammates, Armstrong’s former masseur—are interesting and detailed. Those accounts, it must be pointed out, are not clearcut proof of any wrongdoing—which is part of the reason, along with the inevitability of lawsuit, that the book was published only in France.

So maybe it will turn out that all these accounts are made-up, fantastic tales, vindictive baloney from disgruntled people. Walsh and his sources knew full well he was going to be sued—that’s part of what makes it so interesting.

Booknoise: What about the lawsuit with the ex-assistant, Mike Anderson?

Coyle: After the 2004 season, Armstrong’s former mechanic—Mike Anderson, a guy I’d gotten to know in Girona—alleged that he’d found a box of steroids in the bathroom of Armstrong’s Girona apartment. (see the pdf filings of the lawsuits here and here).

I didn’t know Anderson well, but as I say in the book, he didn’t strike me as the vindictive gold-digging type. Like much of this, it will probably get settled—to the extent that anything gets settled—in a court of law.

Booknoise: How does Armstrong handle all these allegations?

Coyle: He gets angry, and he attacks—the same as he does on a bike. At the start of 2005 he had ten lawyers in his employ, in various suits in France, England, and America.

He also uses the press effectively. Essentially, Armstrong drug-tests journalists. The ones who write about doping are put on a blacklist; the ones who don’t are his friends—which is not a small thing to a writer for whom Armstrong and his team are frequently the only story.

Booknoise:Do you believe him?

Coyle: I think we all want to believe him. I want my nine-year-old son to be able to believe him. I want my friend who’s suffering from cancer to believe him.

At the same time, when I looked at all the facts, I found it tough not to come away with a few questions—questions that I hope can be answered fully someday (Like a lot of people, I’ll be watching those court cases closely). Are those questions big enough to have us question Armstrong’s accomplishments? His character? That’s for each person to decide. My goal in the book is to give people some tools and some context to come to their own decision.

Why do we want to believe Armstrong and not believe Barry Bonds or Marion Jones? Is it because his story is so powerful? Because we don’t know much about his sport? Because, on balance, he creates a lot of good in the world? That’s an interesting question, and one that probably has more to do with us—our need to believe in our heroes—than with what Armstrong or any of these athletes have done.

Booknoise:What about the case of Tyler Hamilton? He was busted for blood doping during the season.

Coyle: That was a shocker, a real twist in the plot. Nobody thought this would happen to Hamilton—who lived right above Armstrong in Girona and who had a reputation as a nice guy, a clean rider. But at the same time, the evidence seems strong. He’s spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on tests and lawyers, and he hasn’t been able to beat it. It’s on appeal.

Booknoise: What’s Armstrong’s legacy?

Coyle: The power of his story, for most of us, remains its perfect simplicity: A young brash athlete gets cancer, beats it, then wins the world’s toughest race once, twice—six times. It’s mythological—in fact, it’s just about every myth combined into one. He crosses the river into death, defeats it, and returns with a lesson for us. It’s beautiful. He’s changed a lot of lives for the better.

At the same time, I think we all understand that life’s just not that simple, particularly when you live it on his level—having a family, being a celebrity, running a team and a business, being a father. There’s human relationships, there’s pain, there’s kids, there’s questions and complicatons and fascinating shades of gray—shades that need to be understood if you’re going to fully understand the man and what he’s accomplished.

Booknoise: What should we watch for in the 2005 Tour?

Coyle: Circle Tuesday, July 12th. It’s stage 10, from Grenoble to a mountaintop finish at Courchevel. It’s the first big mountain stage, the place Armstrong loves to send a message—and where his rivals are going to be trying to send one of their own. If Armstrong finishes alone, or clear of his main rivals, number seven is likely. If not, the next twelve days could get very interesting.

LANCE AS SEEN IN 2005 by barry coyle/booknoise?

MORE LANDIS than Reality

Copied this from a Veloreviews article!

Seems to me that fiction sells and reality is no longer of interest to the public.

Met flandis/the worm on many occasions, didn't impress me but then each to their own.

If the Gendarmerie leave me alone i can ride a whole tour stage by stage but at a slower pace than the professionals. i am not there to compete with them but to show that riding can be done without drugs and support such as the racers have available to them.

When money is involved people have different motivations and thus the "rotten apple syndrome" will surface.

The night of the win into Morzine i was the guest of english admirers of flandis and in questioning the result was offered the choice of sleeping elsewhere or holding my own councel, needed the sleep but i wonder if those people contributed to his defense fund

LIfe goes on and as i compose this, it is cold outside and i am wondering about snow on the tourmalet in the morning, if so i for one will be happy to watch the TV!

Reply by Jen Moore on July 2, 2010 at 7:56pm
Blood Brothers
Cyclist Floyd Landis gives an exclusive tour through what he and others say is a culture of systematic doping in the sport.

By REED ALBERGOTTI And VANESSA O'CONNELL
[landislede0702] Associated Press

Nine days into the 2004 Tour de France, the U.S. Postal Service cycling team, led by Lance Armstrong, checked into a hotel near the village of Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat.

It was July 12, one of two rest days on the Tour—the rare breaks that give riders a chance to rest and gird themselves for the punishing climbs and sprints that make this the most depleting event in professional cycling.

According to one of the U.S. Postal team's most prominent riders at the time, Floyd Landis, one room at the hotel had been set aside for a secret procedure.
Blood Brothers

To Floyd Landis, one of the mysteries of his time with the U.S. Postal Service cycling team was why more new bikes weren't available for the riders. He eventually struck on one possible answer: The team was selling equipment to the public to raise cash.

* The Case of the Missing Bikes

Outside its door, Mr. Landis said, team staff members were stationed at each end of the hall to make sure nobody showed up unannounced. The riders were told before they went into the room not to talk when they got inside, he said. The smoke detectors had been taken down, he said, plastic was taped over the heater and the air-conditioning unit, and anything with a hole in it was taped over. The purpose, Mr. Landis figured, was to obscure the view of any hidden camera.

The riders on the team who participated in this procedure lay down on the bed, two at a time, Mr. Landis said, with a doctor on each side. Mr. Landis said he got a blood transfusion. He said he also saw Mr. Armstrong and two other team members, George Hincapie and José Luis Rubiera, taking blood. He said he didn't see any other riders getting transfusions that day.

The procedure, which enhances performance by boosting a rider's red-blood-cell counts, is considered cheating by the International Cycling Union, the sport's governing body.

Mr. Landis said that he isn't sure what happened to the empty blood bags, but that on other occasions he had seen team staffers dispose of them by cutting them into tiny pieces and flushing them down the toilet.

On July 25, after more than 2,000 miles of racing, the U.S. Postal team rode down the Champs-Élysées in Paris and over the finish line. Mr. Armstrong, the team's lead rider, had won by a dominant margin of more than six minutes. It was Mr. Armstrong's sixth victory in a row, a record.

Mr. Landis won't be riding in this year's Tour de France, which begins Saturday. He has few friends left in professional cycling. This spring, he launched an effort to expose what he says is the sordid reality of the sport. In hours of interviews with The Wall Street Journal in May, Mr. Landis detailed how he had used performance-enhancing drugs extensively during his career, and alleged that Mr. Armstrong and some others had done the same.
The Dark Side of Cycling

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For Landis, a New Start

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Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

Professional cyclist Floyd Landis talks on his cellphone at a bar in Idyllwild, Calif.
Cycling Snapshots

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Take a look at snapshots from cyclist Floyd Landis's career.
Decades of Doping

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Henri Pelissier in the 1923 Tour de France.

Three other former U.S. Postal riders told the Journal in interviews that there was doping on the team during the time Mr. Armstrong was its lead rider, and one of them admitted that he himself had doped. Several other riders said they had never observed such activity during their time with the team.

Doping is a scourge in professional athletics, and pro cycling has seen numerous scandals and suspensions over the past decade. The picture painted by Mr. Landis in the interviews, and in a series of emails he wrote to cycling sponsors in May, provides the most detailed view yet of what may be one of the biggest and most intricately coordinated cheating conspiracies in sports history. It involves blood transfusions taken in a bus on a remote alpine road, riders wearing testosterone patches to bed, and an operative posing as an autograph-seeking fan to deliver a bag of blood to a rider after a race.

Messrs. Armstrong, Hincapie and Rubiera didn't respond to requests for comment about Mr. Landis's allegations of doping. Speaking to reporters in May, Mr. Armstrong dismissed the accusations in Mr. Landis's emails as untrue, though he said he wasn't going to comment on specific claims.

"Floyd lost his credibility a long time ago," Mr. Armstrong said. "We have a person who has been under oath several times with a completely different version, written a book with a completely different version, someone that took money. He said he has no proof. It is his word versus ours. We like our word. We like where we stand and we like our credibility."

Mr. Landis was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France victory for doping, then lied about what he had done in his 2007 book, "Positively False," in which he also said he had no evidence that Mr. Armstrong had doped.

Mr. Armstrong and his advisers said Mr. Landis used the threat of going public with his accusations to try to get a job riding on Team Radio Shack, Mr. Armstrong's current team. Mr. Landis said he did ask for a job on the team last winter, but made no threats in the process.

Federal investigators are looking into Mr. Landis's allegations. The probe is being led by Jeff Novitzky, a special agent for the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Criminal Investigations who led the investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative case that implicated many professional athletes in steroid use. Investigators are examining whether the U.S. Postal team defrauded its sponsors by using performance-enhancing drugs while vowing to race cleanly. Mr. Landis said he has shared with investigators details of many of the incidents he described in interviews with the Journal.

Chad Gerlach, who rode with the U.S. Postal team before Messrs. Armstrong and Landis were on it, said he's inclined to believe Mr. Landis's account of widespread doping based on what he saw during his own career. "I believe it because I have seen it personally," he said. "I am not ready to out my friends or provide names. I just saw it. It's just a systematic thing."

Mr. Landis's introduction to the elite ranks of professional cycling came in late 2001 when he was offered a contract to race for the U.S. Postal team. As a first step, he'd been invited to Austin, Texas, to participate in a training camp where the team members could get to know each other.

One evening during the camp, a handful of team members piled into a black Chevrolet Suburban for a night on the town, with Mr. Armstrong serving as the master of ceremonies.

Mr. Landis had met Mr. Armstrong briefly in the past, but most of what he knew about the world's most famous cyclist was what he'd read in Mr. Armstrong's 2000 memoir, "It's Not About the Bike." Mr. Landis had devoured the book, in which Mr. Armstrong chronicled his comeback from testicular cancer and portrayed himself as a modest and devoted family man.

Mr. Armstrong took the wheel of the Suburban and roared off through the streets. Stop signs didn't rate more than a tap of the brake, Mr. Landis said. Some traffic signals were wholly ignored and speed limits went unheeded. In the middle of the trip, Mr. Landis said, another rider asked, jokingly, "Are there no cops in this town?"

The journey ended at the Yellow Rose, a strip club on the north side of town. Don King, the club's general manager, said Mr. Armstrong and other cyclists on his teams have been coming to the club for about a decade. The riders were ushered into a booth. They ordered drinks and mingled with the dancers.

Later that night, some of the cyclists drove downtown to the offices of the agency that represents Mr. Armstrong. There, the party accelerated, according to Mr. Landis. Four strippers arrived at the offices with two bouncers and began performing a private show for the cyclists and others, he said. Mr. Landis and another young rider who attended, Walker Ferguson, said some people were snorting what appeared to be cocaine.

Mr. Armstrong didn't respond to requests for comment about Mr. Landis's description of the party. His lawyer, Tim Herman of Austin, said: "Mr. Armstrong had no contact with strippers or cocaine."
Floyd Landis Accuses Lance Armstrong of Doping

He was once one of Lance Armstrong's trusted teammates. Now Floyd Landis alleges that Armstrong's US Postal Service cycling team was involved in an elaborate doping scheme. WSJ's Simon Constable talks to reporter Reed Albergotti about the story.

Mr. Landis said he was surprised that Mr. Armstrong would be at such a party, but not offended. Mr. Landis had been raised by a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania's Amish Country but had distanced himself from the strict morality of his upbringing. If Mr. Armstrong was different in private than he was in public, he said, he could live with that.

"I made up my mind at that point that he's got his image, and then he's got the reality," Mr. Landis said. "He was the best bicycle racer in the world. I could respect that part, and I was happy to be around him for that."

By the time of the 2001 camp, Mr. Landis had been a professional cyclist for three years. He'd heard that the elite cyclists at the most grueling races used exotic and prohibited blood additives and synthetic drugs. Far from being repelled by this, he said, he had come to assume doping was part of the sport and, if he joined a top team, would be part of his job.

During the camp, Mr. Landis said, he had a private conversation with Mr. Armstrong's team director, Johan Bruyneel. Mr. Landis said he told Mr. Bruyneel that he wanted to be one of the eight riders who would ride with Mr. Armstrong in the Tour de France and that whatever he needed to do to improve beyond the typical training, he was willing to do. According to Mr. Landis, Mr. Bruyneel told him to just keep training, and when the time came, if it was necessary, they would figure it out.

Though nothing explicit was said about doping, Mr. Landis said, he believed the subtext—that Mr. Landis was willing to take performance-enhancing drugs—was clear to Mr. Bruyneel. "The fact that he didn't totally dismiss it was all I really needed to know."

Mr. Bruyneel did not respond to requests for comment. In a press conference in May after the publication of Mr. Landis's emails, which implicated Mr. Bruyneel in doping, Mr. Bruyneel said: "I absolutely deny everything he said."
The job of the eight riders Mr. Armstrong would select as his Tour de France "domestiques," or help riders, would be to shield him from head winds, insulate him from encroaching riders and fetch water bottles from team cars—anything they could to preserve his energy.

In May 2002, Mr. Landis said, Mr. Armstrong told him there was a chance he might be tapped to ride at the Tour. He offered to rent Mr. Landis an apartment in St. Moritz, the Swiss resort town where he was living during the cycling season.

Nearly every day for weeks the two men went on punishing rides in the mountains where, Mr. Landis recalled, he often had trouble keeping up. Mr. Armstrong's training adviser, an Italian doctor named Michele Ferrari, followed behind in an old station wagon stocked with food, water and warm clothes for the descents. At the top of a climb, Dr. Ferrari would pull over to analyze the wattage meters on their bikes that measured how much power they were putting into the pedals.

By June, Mr. Landis had shown great improvement. He finished second to Mr. Armstrong in the seven-day Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré, a warm-up race for the Tour de France. After the race, Mr. Landis said, he was packing to leave the hotel when Mr. Bruyneel, the team director, knocked on the door.

Mr. Landis said Mr. Bruyneel congratulated him and gave him the news he'd been hoping for—that he would likely be named to the nine-man Tour de France team.

According to Mr. Landis, Mr. Bruyneel told him that when he arrived back in St. Moritz, Mr. Armstrong would give him something to shorten his recovery time in the weeks leading up to the Tour. Mr. Landis said Mr. Bruyneel told him they were small patches that contained testosterone and that Mr. Landis should stick one on his stomach two out of every three nights before going to bed.

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Andy Rihs, owner of the now-defunct Phonak team.
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During this conversation, Mr. Landis said, Mr. Bruyneel also told him that before the Tour, Mr. Landis would have some blood extracted—blood that would then be put back in his body during the race. That process would boost his blood's ability to carry oxygen to his muscles.

Both testosterone patches and blood transfusions are banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, which oversees drug testing in many international sports. If evidence of their use is found in the blood or urine of a cyclist, it usually results in a two-year suspension.

Mr. Landis said the conversation with Mr. Bruyneel didn't come as a surprise, and that he agreed without hesitation. He said he was motivated by the prospect of making more money as a racer, and was happy he was being introduced to doping by somebody he trusted.

That day, Mr. Landis boarded a helicopter with Mr. Armstrong for a flight back to St. Moritz. It was the first time Mr. Landis had been in a helicopter and he said he was awed by the view of the French Alps. "It was fun, man. Riding around with Lance was fun. We lived big."

When he arrived back in St. Moritz, Mr. Landis said, he went to a penthouse where Mr. Armstrong was living with his wife, Kristin, and his three children. While he was sitting at the kitchen table drinking espresso with Mr. Armstrong and his wife, Mr. Landis said, Mr. Armstrong handed him roughly 20 testosterone patches in silvery foil. According to Mr. Landis, Mr. Armstrong didn't say what the patches were.

Mr. Landis said he put them in his backpack. That night, he said, he put one on his stomach. It was the first time he had done anything that wasn't allowed under the rules of cycling, he said.

According to Mr. Landis, a few days later Dr. Ferrari, Mr. Armstrong's training adviser, asked him to lie down on a bed in Mr. Armstrong's St. Moritz apartment. He said Dr. Ferrari stuck a needle into his arm and extracted a half-liter of blood. Mr. Landis said the doctor told him blood would be transfused back into his body at the height of the Tour de France, when his body would be depleted of red blood cells.

A lawyer for Dr. Ferrari said he was unavailable for comment. In 2004, Dr. Ferrari was convicted by an Italian court of malpractice and sporting fraud for advising riders on the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Two years later, an appeals court threw out the verdict, acquitting him of malpractice and ruling that the statute of limitations had expired on the sporting-fraud conviction.

During their training rides in St. Moritz, Mr. Landis said, Mr. Armstrong explained the complicated logistics of transfusions, which involved carrying coolers with hidden blood bags across international borders. He said Mr. Armstrong told him that cyclists used to use erythropoietin, or EPO, a drug that controls red-blood-cell production, to enrich their blood during the Tour. But that substance was now detectable in tests, so riders had turned to transfusions.

In July 2002, with help from Mr. Landis, Mr. Armstrong won the Tour de France, claiming his fourth title, and the team rode with champagne through the streets of Paris. Mr. Landis, who said he'd received one transfusion during the Tour, collected a $40,000 bonus. His performance prompted the team to offer him a contract that would pay him over $200,000 a year for two years.

Less than nine months after having few prospects, and having considered selling his house to pay his bills, Mr. Landis was now an established rider with a bright future in the sport.

For the 2003 cycling season, Mr. Landis and many other American riders had rented apartments in Girona, Spain. Mr. Landis said blood that had been extracted from him, Mr. Armstrong and their teammate Mr. Hincapie was being stored in a refrigerator in the closet of Mr. Armstrong's Girona apartment. Before Mr. Armstrong left town, Mr. Landis said, he asked Mr. Landis to stay in the apartment and to monitor a digital thermometer to make sure the blood stayed at the optimal temperature just above freezing—around two degrees Celsius.

Mr. Hincapie did not respond to requests for comment. After Mr. Landis's emails, which described the blood storage, Mr. Hincapie, through a spokesman, denied the allegations.

The 2003 Tour de France proved a struggle for the U.S. Postal team. Mr. Landis, who had broken his hip in an accident in the off-season, wasn't as strong as he'd been the year before. Mr. Armstrong dueled for days with his main rival, the German Jan Ullrich, before securing what would become his fifth Tour victory.

For Mr. Landis, the race was the high point of his friendship with, and admiration for, Mr. Armstrong. "He's a fighter," Mr. Landis said. "He's a bad-ass bicycle racer. All the things I say about him, I don't in any way wish to take away from that."

By 2004, in his third full season with the team, Mr. Landis began to rival Mr. Armstrong in strength and fitness. He also began to get frustrated, he said, with the way the team revolved around Mr. Armstrong.

During an eight-day race in France in early March, Mr. Landis said, he was in position to win the sixth stage when his carbon-fiber bike frame snapped, nearly sending him over the handlebars. He said he complained to Mr. Bruyneel about not having access to newer bikes like the one Mr. Armstrong rode. Later, at a team gathering, he said, he groused: "There's a guy on the team that has a jet, and I can't get a bike?"—a reference to Mr. Armstrong's occasional use of a private jet.

By calling the team's equipment sponsors, Mr. Landis said, he was able to figure out that not all of the bicycle frames and equipment the team was given each year were going to the riders: About 60 bikes were not accounted for. He said he found out that some of the bikes were being sold for cash. Mr. Landis said Mr. Bruyneel told him that the money raised from the sales helped fund the team's doping program.

Federal investigators have contacted one of the team's sponsors, Trek Bicycle Corp., and asked about the sale of bikes, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Robert Burns, Trek's general counsel, said in an interview that the company was aware that bikes meant for U.S. Postal riders were being sold, but said it didn't know what the money was used for. "Occasionally, you'd see a bike on the Internet somewhere where it would surprise us," he said. "We didn't want to see that stuff getting sold on the market. It should be going to a better use than that." He declined to comment about whether Trek had been contacted by investigators. (Read more about the bikes.)

According to some teammates, Mr. Landis began to grate on Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Bruyneel. "Landis is pushy," said David Clinger, a teammate on the 2002 U.S. Postal squad. Former teammate Benoit Joachim recalled that Mr. Landis had "no middle ground" emotionally. He was "either really, really funny and enjoying life, or aggressive and angry."

Later that season, Mr. Landis said, Mr. Bruyneel was giving a talk about team tactics before a race in France. When he got to Mr. Landis's role in the race, Mr. Armstrong wisecracked that Mr. Landis thought he was a world champion and deserved a jet. Mr. Landis said he shot back: "Not a jet, I want a bicycle. That's not too much to ask for."

After that exchange, Mr. Landis said, he didn't expect to be on the team much longer.

Using performance-enhancing drugs at the Tour de France is especially risky. There are frequent blood and urine tests on top riders. French police and customs agents are on the lookout for doping products, and have repeatedly confiscated them in raids. Journalists rummage through teams' garbage looking for incriminating evidence.

The transfusions in the hotel room near Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat weren't the only occasion during the 2004 Tour when some team members transfused blood, Mr. Landis said. The second time, he said, was an even stranger scene. After one day's stage, the team bus stopped on a remote alpine road. The driver opened the back of the bus to make it appear as though something was wrong, and set about pretending to fix it.

The bus had long benches on each side, and a couple of riders lay down on each one, Mr. Landis said. The doctors hooked them up, taping their blood bags to the sides of the bus, he said. Mr. Armstrong took his transfusion lying on the bus floor, he said. Mr. Landis said the process took about an hour.

At his press conference in May, Mr. Armstrong said: "What's gone on at U.S. Postal…and all of those Tours, we have nothing to hide." As for the specific allegations and claims, he said, "they are not even worth getting into."

During the 2004 Tour, Mr. Landis said, other cycling teams began courting him. Phonak Cycling Team, sponsored by a Swiss hearing-aid manufacturer, had approached him with a $500,000 contract, he said. U.S. Postal made a counteroffer, he said, but he rejected it and signed with Phonak.

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Floyd Landis at a press conference following a failed drug test in 2006.
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Mr. Landis faced a number of challenges in the 2005 season. One of them was recovering from off-season hip surgery. Another, he said, was that his new team, Phonak, didn't have a doping program. He said he was never quite sure which doping methods worked or how a program was administered. But he said he didn't want to risk losing the edge doping might give him.

Organizing his own program, Mr. Landis said, was expensive and time-consuming. Much of the time he wasn't on the bike he was dealing with the logistics of his doping schedule and the transportation of blood and drugs. Mr. Landis said he teamed up with cyclists on other teams, such as fellow American Levi Leipheimer, on the logistics and transportation of blood. Mr. Leipheimer, who now rides for Mr. Armstrong's Radio Shack team, did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Mr. Landis said he hired a Spanish doctor in Valencia to take transfusions, and paid one person $10,000 to make two separate deliveries of half-liter bags of blood during the 2005 Tour de France. Each time, the person posed as a fan who wanted a jersey signed at the end of a stage. Mr. Landis signed it and the man handed him a nondescript package containing the blood, which Mr. Landis put in his jersey pocket, he explained. Mr. Landis said he transfused the blood himself.

Mr. Landis finished ninth in the 2005 Tour, more than 12 minutes behind Mr. Armstrong, who won his seventh title and then announced his retirement.

Before the 2006 season, Mr. Landis thought he had a good chance to win the Tour de France. That winter, Mr. Landis said, he sat down with Andy Rihs, owner of the Phonak team, and told him that to win the Tour he would need to carry out the same kind of blood doping he had done with U.S. Postal. Mr. Landis said Mr. Rihs supported the plan, and agreed to pay for Mr. Landis's program.

After Mr. Landis made that allegation in his emails, Mr. Rihs said in a statement: "Neither I nor the management of the team knew that Floyd Landis was doped." He denied that Mr. Landis informed him of any doping plan. A spokeswoman for Mr. Rihs said he declined to comment further.
[LANDIS] Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Landis at a California bar in May.

Mr. Landis said money from Mr. Rihs allowed him to hire more people to handle logistics such as transporting blood.

On July 13, 2006, after stage 11 of the Tour, Mr. Landis's overall time was the fastest of any rider. For the first time in his career, he was awarded the yellow jersey that denotes the race leader.

Days later, Mr. Landis faltered badly. During the tour's 16th stage, he fell so far behind the Spaniard Oscar Pereiro that it looked as though he had no chance to win. The next day, however, Mr. Landis broke away from the pack in the mountains, leaving the Spaniard so far behind that he gained back nearly all of the lost time. He took back the yellow jersey in the final time trial against the clock and rolled into Paris with the overall win.

Then Mr. Landis's fortunes turned. Word leaked that a urine test after his miraculous mountain breakaway had revealed an abnormally high testosterone ratio. While another test still needed to be done, Mr. Landis's image had been badly damaged.

Mr. Landis said he had taken testosterone while training for the Tour. But, as he told officials for his Phonak team, he hadn't done so during the race. The next day, Mr. Landis said, team officials advised him to give a press conference to deny taking testosterone during the race. Mr. Landis flew to Spain, where a pair of Spanish lawyers had arranged what he thought was a meeting with a single reporter. Instead, he said, they ushered him into a giant press conference and handed him a statement that had been translated from Spanish. Mr. Landis tripped on the odd wording as he read the statement aloud. He said he realized immediately he had come off badly.

Minutes after the press conference ended, Mr. Landis said, he got a phone call. It was Mr. Armstrong.

Mr. Armstrong's message was simple, Mr. Landis said: If anyone asked if he had taken performance-enhancing drugs, he should respond "absolutely not," and stop talking. Mr. Landis said Mr. Armstrong advised him to get a lawyer and to not say anything else.

On the heels of the press conference, Mr. Landis said, Jonathan Vaughters, a former U.S. Postal rider, invited him to fly to New York and lie low for a while. There, Mr. Vaughters urged Mr. Landis to come clean—about everything he'd done.

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Italian doctor Michele Ferrari, a former training adviser for Mr. Armstrong.
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Mr. Landis was conflicted. If he told the truth about taking blood transfusions, including the one he said he'd just taken during the Tour, he said he would have looked like a "lunatic" for giving that press conference. He said he was concerned the truth would not only jeopardize the careers of his friends and teammates, but might end his own.

At the same time, he felt wronged by the testing system. "I felt the punishment I received for what had happened was unfair, especially considering the magnitude of the problem and the people who were never punished."

By that fall, Mr. Landis had decided to appeal the drug test, he said, because he hadn't taken testosterone during the Tour. That, he believed, meant the whole testing protocol must have been scientifically unsound.

Pat McQuaid, president of the International Cycling Union, which usually oversees testing at the Tour, said Mr. Landis's subsequent appeals resulted in rulings that validated the testing protocol.

During a May 2007 arbitration hearing before the U.S. arm of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Mr. Landis repeatedly lied to a three-lawyer panel. He denied using testosterone or performance-enhancing substances while on the U.S. Postal team, and denied doping while on the Phonak team.

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Mr. Landis celebrates in Paris after winning the 2006 Tour de France.
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That September, Mr. Landis said, he was about to take a morning bike ride in Temecula, Calif., when his phone rang. His lawyer, Maurice Suh, told him the panel was about to make its decision. Mr. Landis said he went into the garage and cracked open a beer. "If there was ever a time to drink in the morning," he said, "that was it."

A couple of hours later, Mr. Suh told him he'd lost.

Mr. Landis said he walked upstairs to find his Tour de France trophy. With the iconic purple chalice in hand, he walked onto the balcony overlooking his driveway, hoisted the trophy over his head and threw it as hard as he could. It hit the pavement and shattered into hundreds of pieces.

In 2008, Mr. Landis appealed his case to the Court of Arbitration in Sport. He lost that appeal, too.

In February 2009, Mr. Landis came back to cycling after a two-year suspension. That same year, Mr. Armstrong also decided to return to the sport after a 3½-half-year retirement. Their experiences could not have been more different. Mr. Armstrong's team was invited to compete in the Tour de France, and he finished third.

Mr. Landis had a terrible showing at the 2009 Tour of California. Later, he fell off a ladder while painting his house and injured his leg. Mr. Landis said he began seeing a therapist—and discovered how liberating it was to tell the unvarnished truth about his career in cycling.

For the 2010 season, Mr. Landis joined the OUCH-Bahati Foundation cycling team, a lower-division club, and set his sights on the Tour of California, the biggest race the team could have participated in. But in March, Mr. Landis said, he found out his team would not be invited to take part. For Mr. Landis, it was the last straw. He decided to go public about cycling.

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Lance Armstrong and U.S. Postal team director Johan Bruyneel in 2002.
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On a sunny, cool morning in late May, Mr. Landis sat on the deck of a small cabin in the San Jacinto Mountains southeast of Los Angeles, drinking coffee and eating an omelette. The cabin, which he bought in 2007, sits among pine trees near the end of a narrow, bumpy road wide enough for one car.

The living room, with its mismatched couches, looked somewhat bare—like a college student's first apartment. A Cannondale bike leaned against a window in the kitchen. On the refrigerator, there were nine stickers—U.S. Anti-Doping Agency notices of passed drug tests, all given since Mr. Landis's return to cycling.

Mr. Landis was about to go for a bike ride. He said he wasn't sure what he was going to do next. He had no races, nothing to compete for. He said he was planning to watch the Tour de France on television.
—John W. Miller, Stacy Meichtry, Ann Zimmerman and Kimberly Peterson contributed to this article.

* The Case of the Missing Bikes

MY COMMENT made earlier

Reply by skippy mc carthy on May 22, 2010 at 1:48am
COMMENT POSTED ELSEWHERE ALSO !!
Worm has stolen from people over last 4 years and is now back at the well again with a bucket?


"HOW can a worm write a book or have it written for him and then after pocketing "Donors money" as well as "Royalties" stand up in the full light of day and shout out
"FOOLS!! TOOK YOU ALL FOR IDIOTS!! NOW HERE IS THE REAL STORY THIS TIME!" PAY ATTENTION THIS IS MY LAST CHANCE!"
ARE any of you listening to this "would be "contrite" if he could be"??
Please folks, there are "bad Apples in any barrel ", but the worm has tried to implicate everyone and says he has no evidence to support his "flights of fancy"!
Motorcycles with fridges are used by tourists, seen them in camping sites, but Pullman Coaches on the side of the road with sponsors as well as racers on board doing WHAT? Are we on Planet flandis, or on planet earth?
Eurosport has an entertaining program "planet armstrong" which i enjoy but i doubt anyone in their "right mind" will broadcast a program with the worm as it's star!
When the book is remaindered someone send me a copy to keep in the "dunny" as i can put it to good use there, as i an an environmentalist in reusing paper!
Those visiting my blog please use "follow" and leave "comments" as the sponsors need to justify their investment in helping "Para Sport"!
Those in the Media use your money supporting "Para Sport" instead of throwing it to low life to support their habit of lying to all

MORE LANDIS than Reality