The Floyd Landis Interview

Did you know that Floyd Landis rode mountain bikes before he found great success on the road? Yep. Michael O’Reilly interviews his old friend about the good ol’ days.

By Michael O’Reilly

Is 4:30 too early to get up to start writing?I heard that’s what a lot of big-time novelists do so they can avoid the interruptions of the day like crying kids and phone calls. Sometimes things call you to the keyboard that you have no control over—voices, memories, an accretion of thoughts that have built up over ten or twelve years like a reservoir behind a dam and one early morning for no reason the levy breaks and just like Robert Plant says, "you’ll have no place to go…" but straight down to the computer. In this case, the levy broke when I saw Floyd Landis in the 2004 Tour de France cascading down the side of a mountain in the Alps, with Lance on his wheel, as Lance had been all day, along with a couple of other riders, including Jan Ulrich.

I was pulling for Floyd that day. I knew his attack with one kilometer to go simply wasn’t going to cut the Dijon, especially after he jumped on the front of the train that caught him. Alas, the lessons of the sprinter come hard to the domestique. There’s no doubt Floyd has been a diesel engine in every aspect, in every stage, which is probably why he’s already had an offer from another big team for next year. If I knew which team, I’d tell you.

Floyd and I were both on the National Mountain Bike Team as juniors in 1993. We went to France where it rained the entire week before the cross country race, which might as well have been the Cyclocross Worlds. Gangly Europeans sprinting through the mud with clean bikes on their shoulders demolished all the Americans.

The following summer, Floyd and I hung out for a couple of weeks at Mammoth in preparation for the NORBA National there. We sat around the fire at our campsite reminiscing about our junior days, talking about Tomac and Furtado, Missy and Myles. I even interviewed Floyd for a magazine article I never wrote. I guess I just had a feeling he would do something big. We didn’t keep in contact over the years, but I caught up with him by telephone at his house in Temecula, California a few days after he returned from this year’s Tour. Here’s what he had to say:

DR: What do you think you did differently this year that made you such a better climber than you were last year?
FL: Well, that’s where I wanted to be last year, but I broke my hip in January [returning from the gym on his road bike in ’03] and the whole year was a struggle trying to get back, and I never got back to the climbing form that I had and that I wanted to have. The year before was better, but nobody got to see ’cause I just wasn’t ready for the Tour. This year went the way I was hoping last year would go.

DR: What did the Postal team do to celebrate the overall win?
FL: After the last stage in Paris they always have the big dinner with all the sponsors and guys from the team and it ended up being like four hundred people. So that dinner goes to like 2:30 in the morning and by the time it’s over nobody feels like doing anything. At the end of that race nobody even feels like going out to dinner, but you deal with it. Nobody’s in the mood for partying, that’s for sure. I had a flight home to California at 11:30 the next morning, so I got a few hours of sleep.

DR: I know there’s a lot of mountain bikers out there who remember when you were racing mountain bikes.
FL: Those were some good times, man, that was fun.

DR: What are some of your best memories and your favorite courses?
FL: The best races were the ones back at Mt. Snow, Vermont. And the one in Michigan—I don’t know why they ever stopped having that one—that was the best one, up in Traverse City. Those were the fun races, where you didn’t have to climb for an hour. Just up and down and fast the whole time. Mountain biking, in my opinion, is better on the east coast. It’s different on the west coast. It’s dry and sandy. The good trails are in the east where it rains more and it’s green.

DR: If you could have made the same kind of money in mountain biking that you do in road racing would you have stuck with it?
FL: I don’t think so. Not ’cause I don’t like mountain bike racing, it’s just…this is a big show. It’s something to see. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

DR: Mountain biking is probably harder on the body.
FL: I don’t know that either of them is necessarily healthy. Mountain biking is fun and I love it, but racing is just painful. You’re cross-eyed half the time and you just hang on for dear life on the downhills. It’s a lot more fun just to do with some friends—go out and ride around, you know what I mean? At least on the road you’re not bouncing around so bad you can’t see what’s in front of you.

DR: Everybody knows that road biking can help the mountain biker as far as training goes, but can mountain biking help a road racer?
FL: As far as bike-handling skills, yeah, for sure it can. But when it comes to training you just can’t train that hard on a mountain bike. You get too beat up, you can’t train six hours a day, and you can’t race that hard every day. When it comes to pedaling hard, it’s hard to duplicate what you get out of road racing.

DR: What about what these guys are doing these days—jumping off cliffs and the likes of that?
FL: Yeah, those guys have lost their minds. Some of those guys…Probably if I was eighteen I’d think it was fun, and it’s fun to watch, but you won’t catch me doing any of that. I broke my hip, and I know what it’s like to get hurt. I don’t do that nonsense anymore.

DR: What went through your mind when you knew your hip was broken?
FL: I didn’t want to admit to myself my hip was broken, but I knew something was wrong. I couldn’t get my foot out of the pedal—I had to reach down and twist it real hard. Man, that was the most painful thing ever. I just sat there on the side of the road for like ten minutes and thought "Okay, it’s not gonna be so bad. It’ll be alright in a couple minutes, I’ll just sit here." Then it started swelling up and I was like, "Okay, this isn’t working out."

DR: Did you go into shock?
FL: No, I sat there for a while and called my wife and said, "You gotta come and get me." She told me to call an ambulance and I said "No, just come and get me, we’ll go home and I’ll take some Tylenol and see if it gets better." I had never broken a bone before, and that was the most painful thing ever. Then I got home and sat in the garage and I couldn’t even get out of the car. After about twenty minutes of that I said, "Okay, I think I should probably go to the hospital," ’cause it wasn’t looking too good.

DR: Sounds brutal. What do you have lined up next year, as far as racing?
FL: Right now the plan is to do the La Vuelta a Espana and I haven’t heard anything else. So I’ll probably leave and go back to Europe in another three weeks.

DR: What about the New York City race?
FL: Nah, Lance might be doing it, but I haven’t heard.

DR: The rumor on the street is that you’ve got some big offers from other teams. Care to elaborate?
FL: I’ve had some offers but I’m undecided.

DR: Thanks for the interview.
FL: Take it easy.

As we all know, Floyd recovered from that injury, and we can only wonder how well he would have done in the 2003 Tour, had he been 100% from the start of the year.