May 15, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Floyd Landis grew up in Farmersville, Pennsylvania, in a Mennonite family. Like the Amish, some Mennonites avoid modern technology. Though his family had electricity, there was no radio or television to occupy young Landis’s time. So he rode his bike. Here's Floyd to share his story!
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Floyd
Landis grew up in Farmersville, Pennsylvania, in a Mennonite family.
(00:30):
Like the Amish, some Mennonites avoid modern technology. Though his
family had electricity, there was no radio or television to
occupy young Landis's time, so he rode his bike. Let's
take a listen to the story.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
My name is Floyd Landis.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
I grew up as a Mennonite kid in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Through a bunch of strange twists and turns in life,
ended up winning the Tour de France. But that's the
end of the story. Where it all started was as
kind of a naive kid and a religious community that
doesn't really embrace professional sports or encourage professional sports. Most
(01:12):
people know about the Amish, the Nights and the Amish
share a lot of the same beliefs and sort of conservative,
hard work approach to life. And so yeah, the first
I guess twenty years of my life, I don't think
I missed a Sunday of church, Sunday night of church,
often Wednesday night, Saturday nights. They spend a lot of
(01:33):
time at church. That's the center of the of the
community and the center of the It's more than a religion.
It's kind of its own little environment. It's own little society, right,
And they're good people. They take care of each other.
They value things that I think most people would value,
which is caring about other people and honesty and hard
(01:55):
work and just living a good life. They of course
tie it to the Bible into religion, but they don't
allow televisions or radios.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
They don't like rock and roll music. Of course, that's
the devil.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Some of the things that I sort of took for
granted as just the way things are ended up seeming
odd when I left Pennsylvania. For example, they really like
hunting in Pennsylvania, and I enjoyed it as a kid
growing up too, just being outside.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
And it's one of the things that there was to do.
You know.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
We didn't have video games to shoot things on, so
we had actual guns, and so my dad, being kind
of resourceful, thought at one point we should go squirrel
hunting and rather than walk around in the woods. We
should just sit in a canoe and float down the river.
And this was very effective. It turns out the squirrels
can't hear you coming and you end up not having
to hunt very long before you have way more squirrels
(02:43):
than you want.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
But he loved it. So that's what that was. My
dad's sort of approach to things.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
He's always trying to find some kind of efficiency, which
kind of ruined the point, which was to be outside
and walk around. Even now, you'll see in the fall time,
when deer hunting season is open, you'll see Amish and
Mennite guys on their bicycles with either a bow and
arrow or a shotgun across their handlebars. And then they'll leave,
you know, four or five in the morning before the
(03:08):
sun comes up, and they'll come back with the deer
on the back on the rack on the back of
their bike, and they're gun or or bow and arrow
on the front. And to me as a kid, that
seemed like something normal that people would do, But I
found out later that that's not necessarily how the rest
of the world goes about their life. With that backdrop,
(03:31):
we're kind of just religious rednecks or whatever you want
to call us, but good people. My parents are wonderful.
I could like, I couldn't ask for better role models
or better parents. And you know, I didn't at the
time appreciate it. I didn't resent them, but I didn't
appreciate the value of the life that they chose to live,
(03:56):
which is quieter and a lot less stressful than what
I ended up having to live through my life. But
but they're good, and I you know, after all these years,
I spent time with them now a lot more than
I used to and sort of appreciate it more. But
for whatever reason, my parents sent me to a public school.
For me, the public school was all right. I actually
(04:18):
I liked it, and I think in the end my
parents probably blamed that to some extent for the fact
that I left. In the end, they sent my younger
sisters and brother to Mennonite schools. But it was, yeah,
it was a for me. It was a bit of
a learning curve because I didn't we didn't have a television,
we didn't have any sort of exposure to popular culture,
(04:42):
and so it's hard when you're a kid that gets
sent to a public school where everyone's got a whole
different a whole different experience in life. Really, the things
they talk about were completely foreign to me.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Everything was kind.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Of a I always felt like I was a step
behind and trying to figure out what was what was
actually happening or people were doing what they were doing.
And I think that's why I enjoyed riding my bicycle,
because it was kind of therapy for me. After school,
I could go try to reconcile in my head what
I was being told as a kid in church and
when I was being exposed to in school. And just
(05:17):
to give an example of how strange, I guess strange
is a good word to you, I don't don't. And
none of these words that I used to describe the
omiss in the Many or the place I grew up
are meant to be pejoratives or judgmental.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Just it really is a strange place.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
The other thing that's kind of unique about that place
is there's a lot of auction houses. My dad would
always spend his day up there trying to find treasures
for cheap, and so he found me a yellow bike
up there in the dumpster one time.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
I don't know how old it.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Was, it must have been four or five that's the
first bike I learned to ride. I remember my older sister,
a couple of years older than me, pushing me around
in the driveway trying to figure out how to ride
this thing. But yeah, bicycles were always a big part
of it, and it changed over time though what the
value that it had for me, you know, initially was
just to get around and to go go fishing or
or in my cousin's pool. At one point, my cousins
(06:09):
who lived in kind of a I don't know, it
was a trailer with some appendages built onto it. And
I always loved going to their house because even though
it's just kind of junk everywhere, they always had cool
things like dirt bikes and four wheelers and washing machines.
In the front yard, they had an above ground pool
and they put they would get fish from the local
river and put them in the pool so you can
fish in the front yard. So yeah, between fishing and
(06:33):
bike riding, that was my kind of my early childhood.
I've just enjoyed being outside and doing doing whatever. I mean,
you don't if you don't have a TV, you don't
video games, you don't have things to do, and it's
like literally nothing to do inside, so you end up
being outside just finding things to do, which is good.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
I loved it.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
I can't say there's anything about my child that that
would change.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
And you're listening to Floyd Landis and is unique upbringing
and why he rode bikes, as he said, to reconcile
what I was learning in church from what I was
learning in public schools. Oh and to get around too,
to fish and play, and to well do things with
his time because he couldn't watch TV and had no
other modern means of communication. When we come back, more
(07:16):
of Floyd Landis's story here on Our American Stories. Liehbibe
here the host of our American Stories. Every day on
this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country,
(07:40):
stories from our big cities and small towns. But we
truly can't do the show without you. Our stories are
free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, go to Ouramericanstories dot
com and click the donate button. Give a little, give
a lot. Go to Alamerican Stories dot com and give.
(08:09):
And we returned to our American Stories. Let's return to
Floyd Landis and where we last left off with him
talking about growing up in a Pennsylvania minnonite community. Here's Floyd.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
My first job I got was at a grocery store
called Oregondry.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
My sophomore, junior, and senior year.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
I'd I had a job working until probably nine at night,
and then i'd get off and you know, early on
i'd ride around.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Just to go hang out with my buddies.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
But after doing a couple of small local races that
through this, uh there was a bike shop in Efforta,
which is a town right where I lived, called Green
Mount Cyclery, and I got to know the guy Mike
that ran it. Eric and I would stop in there
and hang out and just kind of probably be the
annoying kids at the bike shop trying to get them
to work on our bikes for free.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
He convinced us to do this race that he was
promoting nearby.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
I was. I guess it was ten miles away or
so from where the bike shop was there, probably fifteen
miles from my house.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
So I rode out there.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
This must have been like nineteen ninety one, maybe I
rode out there. It was on a Saturday, so I
didn't have to get permission for my parents to try
to race on a Sunday.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
They were completely opposed to that. I think they weren't.
I knew better than to even ask.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Eventually, I just ended up doing it anyway, and they
weren't particularly happy about it.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
But this race was on a Saturday, and so I
rode out there.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
I won the race in like the junior beginner category,
which probably might have been ten people in it ben that.
But I felt like, you know, king of the world,
Like I won this race, and I loved it. I
loved the feeling of it, just the race itself, and
you know, I felt like I was some kind of
champion for winning, and so that kind of got me hooked.
I think that was the only race I did that year,
(09:56):
But throughout that winter I spent a lot more time
just kind of riding my bike rather than riding for
the sake of meeting up with my friends. Instead, we
would go try to you know, get a workout, and
so we'd ride, often late at night after working at
the grocery store, sometimes till midnight one o'clock. I remember
my dad being suspect about the whole thing. At one
point I must have been out till I don't know,
(10:17):
twelve thirty or one, and he never stayed out late
ever because there was not I mean, just that's not
what you do, right.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
You go to bed when it's not when it's dark.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
And he came home about ten or fifteen minutes after me,
and I was trying to figure out what he was doing.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
I was like, Dad, where you are you going? I finally,
because he couldn't, he couldn't lie.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
He got him to admit that he had been following
us around just to see what we were doing, because
he was convinced we were out just partying or or
who knows what, right, doing something we shouldn't have been doing.
But we really were just riding our bikes around. To
him for no reason at all. I mean, to him,
it didn't.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Make sense right. He couldn't.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
He couldn't understand it. My mom seemed more understanding of it.
I don't know that she understood why I was doing
it necessarily, but she didn't think there was anything, you know,
wrong with it. My dad, on the other hand, just
thought it was a complete waste of time and you
should be working and doing something useful.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
With our lives rather than riding bikes around.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
So in hindsight, I guess there's reasons I could have
listened to them and made my life easier. But but
but yeah, it's addicting. Riding bikes is addicting. Yeah, I
don't know. If you don't understand, you don't understand it.
But if you do, man, there's nothing like it. I
remember the first day I got a pair of cycling shorts.
(11:32):
I mean, I had never even born shorts before this,
because you know, even even in school, in gym class,
my parents in that area, there's there are some many
my kids in the public schools, and so they'll give
you an exemption for whatever, and so I didn't I
work parents, even in gym class or whatever we were
doing in school. So I'd never even been outside in
shorts before. And I put these cycling shorts on. Tonight
(11:53):
I went, like the to the woods your by, I
was riding my mount bike. I went to these trails
that I normally ride, and I remember feeling really self
conscios about. There was nobody anywhere around that would have
even seen me, but I just felt really awkward. I
must have been, I guess fifteen or sixteen years old,
but I don't know. I felt like kind of exposed
(12:14):
just because I wasn't used to it. And on top
of that, I've been, you know, kind of taught that
you're supposed to be modest and that it's inappropriate to
wear shorts, let alone shorts that tight. So it took
me a while to actually kind of wear them around
around my family because I knew they were going to
make some comments about it for something. My oldest sister
the first time she saw them said something like, oh,
(12:35):
is out the shortest tights they had? And I was like, no, no,
these are these are I started to try to explain
to her that there was a reason for it for
a second, and I realized that there was no way
she was going to be able to make sense of it,
and so I just decided I wasn't even going to
talk about it, which led to more mockery of the
new wardrobe.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
I convinced my dad.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
In my senior year in high school in nineteen ninety three,
I guess to take my buddy Eric and I and
another friend of ours named Joel that we were all
kind of into riding. I was more into it than
the others, but Eric was pretty much into it as well,
and so we convinced them to drive out to Traverse City,
Michigan for the National championships. But yeah, I ended up
(13:18):
winning the cross country race for the junior national title.
Because of that, I qualified for the World Championships, which
the Bicycle Racing Association actually paid for all of the
travel expenses to go to France for the World Championships.
And I had never been even on an airplane, like
I'd never I had no. I was completely unprepared for
(13:41):
even going to Michigan. I mean that was the furthest
I'd ever been from home, and now all of a sudden,
I I had to go get a passport, I had
to go try to figure out how how I was
going to navigate this.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
I don't speak French, I don't like. This was all
foreign to me, and so when.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
I got there, I to me, at this point, I
had kind of had this vision of bicycle racing that
was going to be other people that had kind of
viewed it like me like this, they're really obsessed with
it and focused on it, and this is what they
cared about, right, But really what it ended up happening well,
and now I understand it now, But I didn't understand
(14:18):
as the time I got there, and it was a
bunch of juniors who didn't have the same sort of
fixation on it that I did, and so they were
there to just like drink and have a good time
and party.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
And I was completely called off guard by that.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
And I mean I didn't really get very much sleep
because the kid they put us in this, these kids
didn't like they didn't sleep.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
I mean it had I guess they had jet like
they decided to stay.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Up and they would be out drinking all night because
there's I mean, in France you can get alcohol if
you're you know, seventeen, if you want it. The whole
thing was ended up being kind of traumatic for me
because I didn't really understand. I wasn't I'd never seen
anyone drink alcohol before, or partying or any of these
things or well, it was completely foreign to me, Like
(15:01):
I just didn't know what I was observing and was
having a real struggle doing it. And so by the
time the race came along, I was not in a
very good headspace to function at all, let alone try
to race. I mean almost have finished three hours behind
the winter. I think I finished last, and I was
just devastated, like I couldn't.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
At this point, all I wanted to do was just
go home.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
The rest of the juniors wanted to just kind of
keep partying and then go have a good time, and
I just didn't want any.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
Part of it.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
I just went back and laid down in my room
and didn't talk to anybody until I guess three days
later and we went home. But it took me a
while and I came back home I think two or
three months. I didn't ride my bike, and I kind
of decided that wasn't for me. But in the end,
after I had a few months off and started riding
my bike again and enjoying it, Yeah, I stuck with it,
(15:52):
and I had a little bit of better understanding, you
know what, I was going to be surrounded by a
bike races, and so I just kind of decided it
was going to be a I'm sure at this point,
I'll take it as it comes and I'll try to
stay focused on the bike race, but that there's probably
going to be things that I'm going to have to
manage in my head.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
And you're listening to Floyd Landis tell the story of
growing up in this very well let's just say self
contained environment, going to public school, where, my goodness, his
life changed dramatically and what he saw in life changed dramatically.
And then, of course, this obsession with biking, not just
your traditional obsession that most kids have, this one goes
(16:30):
beyond to something well, quite special. His father, of course,
worried that his son was up to no good, followed
him around, only to find out, well, his son was
indeed just well, just biking, and that's it. Not thrilled
with that, though not of really good use in the
Mennonite's mind of well adulthood or adult time or preparation
(16:50):
for adulthood. But the father indulges the son in this
trip to Paris for the Junior World Championship, where he
learns he's thoroughly unprepared many ways, many many ways. And
he comes home, takes some time off, probably sulking a
little bit, just having been beaten by hours on end.
(17:11):
And then came the renewal. And when we come back,
we're going to learn more about Floyd Landis's story and
how he rose from really epic defeat to something else
and something better. The story of Floyd Landis continues here
on our American stories, and we returned to our American stories.
(18:11):
We last left off with Floyd Landis coming to terms
with the world outside of his very conservative and religious
Mennonite Christian community. Accompanied by his friend Eric, Floyd set
out to rise in the world of professional mountain biking.
Let's pick up where we last left off, and.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
So Eric and I were together most of the time,
but at one point we split up. He needed to
go home back to the East Coast, and so he
left me in Mammoth, California.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
There was a race, and so I hitched a ride
with these guys.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
I can't remember how I ran into, Like we might
have been out riding the course or something before the
race and ran into these guys who were driving up
to the next race in Washington State. And they had
this company called show Him You're Nuts, which was at
the time, this was when No Fear was kind of
the big, you know brand that was this whole edgy
(19:02):
you know, no Fear nonsense, you know, edgy quotes and
everything else. And so they thought that it would be
cool to make a competing brand called show Him Your Nuts,
which was more of a play on words within a
couple of different ways and they actually were nuts.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
That was the thing. Oh man. I So we left.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
They had a trail like a pickup truck and a trailer,
and I sat in the back seat of the pickup
and we drove from Mammoth, California through.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
The desert, like halfay through the desert, I guess there was.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
We were following this other guy named his name was
Tattoo Lou. He had a van and he had like
two pit bulls and he was covered in tattoos and
he had as he kind of lived in his van.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
So he was driving along with these.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Guys and they stopped in the middle of the desert
and just started smoking wheed and getting high, like staring
at the sky. And I again, now I'd never been
around any kind of at this point.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Alcohol had was traumatic for me to witness.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
So I'm sitting here thinking, man, these guys like hopefully
they're not going to get back in their car and
just drive.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
I'm gonna like, I'm gonna die.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
All I know about drugs is what I've been told
in school is that we're all gonna probably die here.
So they sit there and they stare at the sky
and they're trying to be philosophical and I'm thinking, man.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
You guys sound like idiots.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
But whatever, I'm here for the adventure at this point.
So I sit there and kind of kind of just
take it all in. Then they get back in the
car and we start driving. So I'm like, all right, well,
I'm just gonna lay down the back seat because I
guess this is how it ends.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
And so I just.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
Went to sleep and I wake up six seven hours
later and we're, you know, the southern end of Washington State.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
So we get up there.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
They had like a booth that they set up in
the expo area. At the finish of the race, they said, all,
r We're gonna go down to town and get some dinner,
and do you want to come along? And I said, no,
I want to. I just I wanted to ride a
lap of the course. So I don't know why I
thought these guys would be reliable, but I figured they
would come back up at some point after dinner.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
And so it got to be about I mean, I
went for a ride.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
And for maybe two hours, and it was getting dark
and it was getting cold, and I'm like, man, I
don't know. There was no one else around, like everyone
else had kind of left, and it wasn't some of
these races would be at a resort where you'd have
lodging around the resort. This was pretty spread out and
there was nothing really anywhere near this exportrea they had
set up in this parking lot, and so I was
(21:29):
getting cold, and I'm like, well, I'm gonna at least
have to stay warm.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
So I took down this.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Power bar bantner that they had on their booth and
just laid down under it and I went to sleep.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
I didn't sleep very well, but I didn't.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
I mean, the time kind of passed. I guess I
was half asleep and halfway because I was really cold.
And they got back at five in the morning and
they were like, man, what are you doing? What do
you mean?
Speaker 2 (21:48):
What am I doing? You guys left me here.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
I guess it should have been obvious in hindsight this
wasn't gonna go well. But that was the last time
I hitched to ride with those particular guys. I occasionally
had to hit rides after that, but I have what
it does.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Guys.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
They were funny, I'll give them that, and they I
had some good laughs with them. But if I needed
to be serious and focus on the race. Those were
not the guys to be around.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
The following night. I guess the night after the race.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
It must have been Friday night or even Saturday night,
so I stayed the whole weekend and they had the
Tourter France on, but I was the one that Lance
Armstrong won. To me was just this mythical thing because I,
you know, obviously I knew at that point that the
Twitter France was the biggest bike race and the biggest
cycling event there was, but I hadn't I didn't have
any experience watching it.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
I'd never seen it on TV or didn't know much
about it.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
But I just remember seeing it and having a kind
of profound effect on me, thinking that, like that, that
looks like something where I'd have to deal with let's
show them your nuts people, Like at this point, this
is my goal, Like I just need to get away
from the show and your nuts people to a real
professional sport where I can actually focus on what I'm doing.
So I guess I left Pennsylvania and I moved to
southern California, and so a couple of friends and I
(23:01):
that were also mountain biking who had done more road
racing just said, look, let's put together a small group.
We'll we'll do a bunch of different races that you
can enter as an independent or not on the team,
because road racing, depending on the category of the race,
sometimes you have to actually be part of a team
to be in it. So our goal ended up being
just to try to make their races as miserable as
we could for the pro guys that are out there,
(23:22):
just to see if we could get noticed. Yeah, So
I guess in nineteen ninety seven went to a bunch
of these races, and I got noticed by Team Mercury,
which was Mercury, the car company sponsored. At that point,
it was probably the biggest, well the biggest US team
that wasn't sort of doing any races in Europe. And
so I raced on on the Mercury team for I
(23:44):
guess ninety nine and two thousand. They in two thousand
and one the team put a bunch of effort.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Into trying to kind of make it to the next
level to race.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
In Europe, and so, I guess the first road race
I did in your was called the Tour Lavener, which
is like it's rung by the Tour de France.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Organization.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
It's a ten day race, and I finished third, but
that was kind of where I got noticed for or
by the by the postal service at that time. And
on this team, I mean, by this time Lance had
won three or four Tours and he had a very
very strong team around him. So it wasn't like it
was it was easy for any one of those guys
to make the Tour team.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
And they were they were ruthless about it. They weren't.
They weren't.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
It wasn't about feelings. They just were gonna take the
best eight guys that we have. So whoever that is,
you're you're on the team. And so the first race
I did with Lance would have been Rooted del Soul
or some some race they had it in southern Spain.
And then then we had a week off and then
we went and did the Dauphine, which is a big
race that everyone does to kind of prepare for the
(24:48):
Tours eight day race in France. And because we had
Lance on the team, obviously they're they're looking at Lance
to be the leader of this particular race, and so
there's opportunities for guys like me to try to go
and break aways and make the race harder on the
competition without Lance, happened to actually try to win, and
I got in a good breakaway and I ended up
(25:09):
getting the lead in the race and ended up finishing
second to Lance, and then beat me in.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
The time trial. So that kind of sealed my tour
you know, qualification.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
And for that year and probably for much of the
next year, I was pretty close to Lance, you know.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
We that year between the Rue del.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
Soul and in the Delphinae, he took me back to
sam Maritz with him and we trained together, got me
an apartment up there, he had his family up there,
and so we trained for those couple of weeks between
and then we went back after the Dauphine and trained
right up to the Tory France.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Took a private jet to the start of the tour.
It was good.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
I was, yeah, living like how Lance liked to do it,
which was I mean, he had the resources to do
it with much less stress than anyone else, right, and
he did it. He was good at it, and so
I had great training.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
We had had you know, very little stress in those
couple of months up and then the tour went pretty well.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
It was it's much much harder than any other bike race,
and partly because of the competition.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Everyone's in shape.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Right for that race, because it's the most important race
of the year, especially if you're on the on the
team with Armstrong, who was a superstar at this point.
Even outside of cycling, it comes with all this other just.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Just stress of every kind. Right, there's people around all
the time. It's hard to sleep.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
But I was, you know, I was lucky that that
I was on the first time I ever did it,
that I was on a team that won. Because no
matter who you are in that race, it's three weeks long.
You're gonna have days where you're just tired and want
to quit, and it's just it's a lot easier to
motivate yourself to keep going when you're winning the race.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
And you've been listening to Floyd Landis and well he'd
been wandering around a bit. When you find yourself following
a guy named Tattoo Lou into the desert and you
find yourself sleeping in the back of the car, hoping
the guy's pretty much stone will get you to your destination.
Then maybe you have to have a change of teammates
and a change of plans. So he moves to southern
(27:06):
California and gets serious about this thing called biking and
ends up, of course, biking alongside the great Lance Armstrong.
When we come back more of this life story, this
unusual journey from Mennonite Pennsylvania to the Tour de France.
Here on our American stories. And we returned to our
(27:38):
American stories, let's return to Floyd landis talking about his
time racing the Tour de France with United States Postal
Service teammate Lance Armstrong.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
The next year, which would have been two thousand and three,
I was training in January and I was running by myself,
and I crashed and I broke my hip and it
was broken pretty badly, placed pretty baily and it needed surgery,
and so I missed quite a bit of the spring
season that year. Yeah, I made the team cut there,
but I do think it had it been the year
(28:11):
before the year after, I might have actually not made
the team.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
And we pulled it off. But man, it was.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
That was the closest I think in all of his
seven tours that he ever came to not winning the race.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
But he pulled it out.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
I mean, you can say, you can say a lot
of things about Lance, but he's yeah, he's a bad
when it comes to managing stress, and as an athlete
he's exceptional. I mean, three weeks is a long long time,
even just in ordinary life, but when you're racing your
bike one hundred to sometimes one hundred and fifty miles
a day and sometimes through three or four large mountain
(28:46):
passes over one hundred and twenty one hundred and thirty miles,
I mean, some of these stages take seven hours long.
Just even the winner will be seven hours. But three
weeks feels like eternity when you're faced with that. And
one thing you learn is that it's best not to
look through the whole Tour de France root book. Just
look at the stage right in front of you, and
(29:06):
don't look at what's tomorrow, even because it's so hard
and so stressful that you can easily intimidate yourself into
being scared of actually finishing. I had a contract with
the team that was expiring in the end of two
thousand and four.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Eventually I just I wanted to I mean I wanted
to leave the team.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
I didn't I probably would have stayed had they had
they given me any kind of assurance that Lance wasn't
going to race another year, but I wanted.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
To race and try to win the race myself.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
And they wouldn't make any public comment or any even
internal comment about whether Lance was going to race and
try to win seven.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Because he had the record.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
I mean, five was the record before that, and even
only then, only one person had won five in a row.
He just, yeah, he couldn't help himself. There was too
much money on the line, and so he did it
one more year and he won again. But the problem
was that by that time he was kind of he
can be vindictive, so he was pretty bitter about.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
The fact that I didn't stay on the team.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
So he and the team went out of their way
at most of the races that year just to race
against me, to the point where sometimes they lost races
just to make sure I didn't win. And so I
ended up tenth in the Twitter France that year. For
whatever reason, that's how that's how he motivated himself. He
was more motivated by making sure someone else lost than
(30:28):
him winning, which I never did understand to this day,
I don't understand, but it was kind of one of the.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Quirks that he had.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
And then yeah, then the next year two thousand and
six was I think I left on Tuesday that week
and I arrived in Paris on Wednesday. Then we started
the race on Saturday. Yeah, and I mean there were
some ups and downs in that race, but all things considered,
it went about as well as you could hope for.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
And it's yeah, it was hard.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
For me to get my head around because people were
fired up, like I couldn't believe it. Even after I
went like I was happy, right, I just didn't realize.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
That everybody was that. Yeah, it's a good memory.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
But then obviously everybody knows what happened next with the
whole doping scandal that ensued, and then went through a
couple of years of litigation and fighting it and lost
the title.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
There were some dark days for me.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
I didn't people asked if I would do it again,
if I would take drugs again in it. I don't
know the answer to that, and it's not because I'm
out of some kind of defiance or anything else. I mean,
that's what you had to do to win the race.
In the end, I wish I could have just told
the truth, but then my problem there was there was
no way to tell the truth without exposing the whole thing.
(31:46):
And then these are all people that are for my
friends and people that I was around, and I was
not really in a position to just try to tell
that story without looking bitter myself. Right, it would just
look it would look if I just decided to admit
it and then pointed everyone else it was gonna It
was a fight I had to fight, and I guess
(32:07):
I should have probably just.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
I guess I should have just vanished for ten years.
But I wanted to race again, and the only way
to race is to deny it and follow the party line. Right,
there was no way for me to admit that I
had done that and ever expect the race again. And
I wasn't ready to accept that it was over just
like that, although I should have, because that really was
the end of my career. But I wasn't ready to
face that. I mean, I'd gone from the high point
(32:31):
of my career to have him to contemplate never racing again.
And I just made whatever decisions I thought would at
least give me the ability to possibly come back and race.
But the problem was that it was the way it happened,
and because I had was Armstrong's former teammate, and because
of the spectacle of how I won the race, there
(32:54):
was no way that I was ever going to race again.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
I just wasn't prepared to accept that.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
So I fought it for a while, a couple years,
and in the end probably made it harder to tell
the truth. But once I finally had enough time to
myself and time to reflect on everything, and also time
to actually be back out in the world a little
bit here and there and have to try to face everybody,
every one of them, which would say, you know, we're
(33:20):
sorry about what happened to you.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
We don't believe any of it.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
And I just I realized that there's no way I
was going to be able to get through life like this.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
I couldn't.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
This wasn't a story that was going to go away
like it wasn't like this was a lie that at
some point I could stop telling because no one's going
to ask. That's just what it was going to be forever.
And I couldn't manage it.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
I just didn't.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
I either had to never talk to anybody again or
just tell the truth so I could stop feeling so
bad about it. And then I had the dilemma of well,
what does the truth mean?
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Like?
Speaker 2 (33:47):
What am I going to tell?
Speaker 3 (33:48):
Because if I if I just say well, this is
what I did, everyone's going to know there was more
to the story than that.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
There's no way I invented that.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
And so I struggled with what to do, to the
point where I finally just was in such a bad
place in my head that I didn't really care what
else happened.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
I just decided I'm just going to tell the truth.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Here it is, and whatever happens happens.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
I mean, I knew it was going to be bad.
I knew what Lance would do, and I knew that.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
I was going to have to defend all kinds of
you know, accusations of he's still lying and whatever else.
But to some extent I didn't care. I just wanted
to be able to say, Okay, here are the facts.
From now on, if people want to come up to
me and say they hate me or they love me
or whatever, at least I don't have to just keep
lying about it.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
You can just tell the truth.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
And so I basically had to go through it a
second time just to get the story out. And I think,
you know, a lot of people kind of probably more
people saw that than saw the original bike race itself,
just because of the magnitude of Lance and what he
stood for and to some extent still does stand for.
I mean, some people couldn't separate the idea that he
(34:58):
was inspirational because he had cancer or from any of
the rest of the story, and so some of them
ended up hating me too, and some of them ended
up hating.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Him, which I think is unfortunate.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
I mean, he's not exactly the nicest guy on earth,
but he paid a very dear price for the whole thing,
probably more so because he is such a fighter, which
is what made him admirable in the first place. So
the whole thing is a paradox. But in that period
of time, I sort of kind of got my bearings
on life and grew up a little bit, and five
(35:33):
six years ago started a company. So the name of
the companies called Floyd's of Leadville, and we decided to
embrace the Leadville name because it's a well known sort
of endurance sports. I don't know, Mecca, you could say,
but the Floyd's of Leville brand is primarily.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Promoted as a as a CBD brand.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
We saw it online through bike shops and running shops
and convenience stores things like that. The CBD products are
generally not psychoactive, like they don't have enough seeing it
to be to cause a change of mental state, but
they do have anti inflammatory properties in anti anxiety properties
to help a lot of people with sleep. It kind
(36:12):
of helps your just calm your thoughts, allows you to
fall asleep naturally. It helps me, which is why I
was able to sort of convince myself that it would
be a good idea to put my name on it.
I'm not a great salesman if it comes to just
selling something for the sake of trying to get the
highest price, but it was something that really benefited me
in those years after after the whole Tour de France debacle.
(36:35):
Helped me manage no pain and anxiety, and so it's
a lot easier for me to just tell people, look,
this helped me. Just just try it. It's not magic,
but it does. It does have real benefits for a
lot of people.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
And a great job on the production and the storytelling
by Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to Floyd Landis
for sharing his entire story and my goodness again from
a small insular community, the Mennonite community to another small
insulent community, because let's face it, once you start to
enter into worlds like that biking. I know, my daughter
does a question and it's a small competitive community, and
(37:12):
my goodness, what happened with him and with the entire
community in terms of doping. They all ended up doing it.
And it's no excuse. I often wondered why they all
just didn't do it, because once one cheats, and the
next cheats, and the next cheats, it's the new norm.
So why not just not cheat? But again, talk to
anybody who biked during that year, and everybody doped because
(37:34):
everybody else was doping. And in the end it caused
a period of reflection for him. Ultimately, not telling the
truth war on Floyd more than helling it, and he
finally did. He just couldn't keep lying about what he'd done.
And in that period of time he got his bearings,
(37:55):
got a new life, started a new company, something that
would help with ain dad anxiety than inflammation. Floyd Landis's
story here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Floyd
Landis grew up in Farmersville, Pennsylvania, in a Mennonite family.
(00:30):
Like the Amish, some Mennonites avoid modern technology. Though his
family had electricity, there was no radio or television to
occupy young Landis's time, so he rode his bike. Let's
take a listen to the story.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
My name is Floyd Landis.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
I grew up as a Mennonite kid in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Through a bunch of strange twists and turns in life,
ended up winning the Tour de France. But that's the
end of the story. Where it all started was as
kind of a naive kid and a religious community that
doesn't really embrace professional sports or encourage professional sports. Most
(01:12):
people know about the Amish, the Nights and the Amish
share a lot of the same beliefs and sort of conservative,
hard work approach to life. And so yeah, the first
I guess twenty years of my life, I don't think
I missed a Sunday of church, Sunday night of church,
often Wednesday night, Saturday nights. They spend a lot of
(01:33):
time at church. That's the center of the of the
community and the center of the It's more than a religion.
It's kind of its own little environment. It's own little society, right,
And they're good people. They take care of each other.
They value things that I think most people would value,
which is caring about other people and honesty and hard
(01:55):
work and just living a good life. They of course
tie it to the Bible into religion, but they don't
allow televisions or radios.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
They don't like rock and roll music. Of course, that's
the devil.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Some of the things that I sort of took for
granted as just the way things are ended up seeming
odd when I left Pennsylvania. For example, they really like
hunting in Pennsylvania, and I enjoyed it as a kid
growing up too, just being outside.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
And it's one of the things that there was to do.
You know.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
We didn't have video games to shoot things on, so
we had actual guns, and so my dad, being kind
of resourceful, thought at one point we should go squirrel
hunting and rather than walk around in the woods. We
should just sit in a canoe and float down the river.
And this was very effective. It turns out the squirrels
can't hear you coming and you end up not having
to hunt very long before you have way more squirrels
(02:43):
than you want.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
But he loved it. So that's what that was. My
dad's sort of approach to things.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
He's always trying to find some kind of efficiency, which
kind of ruined the point, which was to be outside
and walk around. Even now, you'll see in the fall time,
when deer hunting season is open, you'll see Amish and
Mennite guys on their bicycles with either a bow and
arrow or a shotgun across their handlebars. And then they'll leave,
you know, four or five in the morning before the
(03:08):
sun comes up, and they'll come back with the deer
on the back on the rack on the back of
their bike, and they're gun or or bow and arrow
on the front. And to me as a kid, that
seemed like something normal that people would do, But I
found out later that that's not necessarily how the rest
of the world goes about their life. With that backdrop,
(03:31):
we're kind of just religious rednecks or whatever you want
to call us, but good people. My parents are wonderful.
I could like, I couldn't ask for better role models
or better parents. And you know, I didn't at the
time appreciate it. I didn't resent them, but I didn't
appreciate the value of the life that they chose to live,
(03:56):
which is quieter and a lot less stressful than what
I ended up having to live through my life. But
but they're good, and I you know, after all these years,
I spent time with them now a lot more than
I used to and sort of appreciate it more. But
for whatever reason, my parents sent me to a public school.
For me, the public school was all right. I actually
(04:18):
I liked it, and I think in the end my
parents probably blamed that to some extent for the fact
that I left. In the end, they sent my younger
sisters and brother to Mennonite schools. But it was, yeah,
it was a for me. It was a bit of
a learning curve because I didn't we didn't have a television,
we didn't have any sort of exposure to popular culture,
(04:42):
and so it's hard when you're a kid that gets
sent to a public school where everyone's got a whole
different a whole different experience in life. Really, the things
they talk about were completely foreign to me.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Everything was kind.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Of a I always felt like I was a step
behind and trying to figure out what was what was
actually happening or people were doing what they were doing.
And I think that's why I enjoyed riding my bicycle,
because it was kind of therapy for me. After school,
I could go try to reconcile in my head what
I was being told as a kid in church and
when I was being exposed to in school. And just
(05:17):
to give an example of how strange, I guess strange
is a good word to you, I don't don't. And
none of these words that I used to describe the
omiss in the Many or the place I grew up
are meant to be pejoratives or judgmental.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Just it really is a strange place.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
The other thing that's kind of unique about that place
is there's a lot of auction houses. My dad would
always spend his day up there trying to find treasures
for cheap, and so he found me a yellow bike
up there in the dumpster one time.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
I don't know how old it.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Was, it must have been four or five that's the
first bike I learned to ride. I remember my older sister,
a couple of years older than me, pushing me around
in the driveway trying to figure out how to ride
this thing. But yeah, bicycles were always a big part
of it, and it changed over time though what the
value that it had for me, you know, initially was
just to get around and to go go fishing or
or in my cousin's pool. At one point, my cousins
(06:09):
who lived in kind of a I don't know, it
was a trailer with some appendages built onto it. And
I always loved going to their house because even though
it's just kind of junk everywhere, they always had cool
things like dirt bikes and four wheelers and washing machines.
In the front yard, they had an above ground pool
and they put they would get fish from the local
river and put them in the pool so you can
fish in the front yard. So yeah, between fishing and
(06:33):
bike riding, that was my kind of my early childhood.
I've just enjoyed being outside and doing doing whatever. I mean,
you don't if you don't have a TV, you don't
video games, you don't have things to do, and it's
like literally nothing to do inside, so you end up
being outside just finding things to do, which is good.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
I loved it.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
I can't say there's anything about my child that that
would change.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
And you're listening to Floyd Landis and is unique upbringing
and why he rode bikes, as he said, to reconcile
what I was learning in church from what I was
learning in public schools. Oh and to get around too,
to fish and play, and to well do things with
his time because he couldn't watch TV and had no
other modern means of communication. When we come back, more
(07:16):
of Floyd Landis's story here on Our American Stories. Liehbibe
here the host of our American Stories. Every day on
this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country,
(07:40):
stories from our big cities and small towns. But we
truly can't do the show without you. Our stories are
free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, go to Ouramericanstories dot
com and click the donate button. Give a little, give
a lot. Go to Alamerican Stories dot com and give.
(08:09):
And we returned to our American Stories. Let's return to
Floyd Landis and where we last left off with him
talking about growing up in a Pennsylvania minnonite community. Here's Floyd.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
My first job I got was at a grocery store
called Oregondry.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
My sophomore, junior, and senior year.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
I'd I had a job working until probably nine at night,
and then i'd get off and you know, early on
i'd ride around.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Just to go hang out with my buddies.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
But after doing a couple of small local races that
through this, uh there was a bike shop in Efforta,
which is a town right where I lived, called Green
Mount Cyclery, and I got to know the guy Mike
that ran it. Eric and I would stop in there
and hang out and just kind of probably be the
annoying kids at the bike shop trying to get them
to work on our bikes for free.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
He convinced us to do this race that he was
promoting nearby.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
I was. I guess it was ten miles away or
so from where the bike shop was there, probably fifteen
miles from my house.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
So I rode out there.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
This must have been like nineteen ninety one, maybe I
rode out there. It was on a Saturday, so I
didn't have to get permission for my parents to try
to race on a Sunday.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
They were completely opposed to that. I think they weren't.
I knew better than to even ask.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Eventually, I just ended up doing it anyway, and they
weren't particularly happy about it.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
But this race was on a Saturday, and so I
rode out there.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
I won the race in like the junior beginner category,
which probably might have been ten people in it ben that.
But I felt like, you know, king of the world,
Like I won this race, and I loved it. I
loved the feeling of it, just the race itself, and
you know, I felt like I was some kind of
champion for winning, and so that kind of got me hooked.
I think that was the only race I did that year,
(09:56):
But throughout that winter I spent a lot more time
just kind of riding my bike rather than riding for
the sake of meeting up with my friends. Instead, we
would go try to you know, get a workout, and
so we'd ride, often late at night after working at
the grocery store, sometimes till midnight one o'clock. I remember
my dad being suspect about the whole thing. At one
point I must have been out till I don't know,
(10:17):
twelve thirty or one, and he never stayed out late
ever because there was not I mean, just that's not
what you do, right.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
You go to bed when it's not when it's dark.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
And he came home about ten or fifteen minutes after me,
and I was trying to figure out what he was doing.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
I was like, Dad, where you are you going? I finally,
because he couldn't, he couldn't lie.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
He got him to admit that he had been following
us around just to see what we were doing, because
he was convinced we were out just partying or or
who knows what, right, doing something we shouldn't have been doing.
But we really were just riding our bikes around. To
him for no reason at all. I mean, to him,
it didn't.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Make sense right. He couldn't.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
He couldn't understand it. My mom seemed more understanding of it.
I don't know that she understood why I was doing
it necessarily, but she didn't think there was anything, you know,
wrong with it. My dad, on the other hand, just
thought it was a complete waste of time and you
should be working and doing something useful.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
With our lives rather than riding bikes around.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
So in hindsight, I guess there's reasons I could have
listened to them and made my life easier. But but
but yeah, it's addicting. Riding bikes is addicting. Yeah, I
don't know. If you don't understand, you don't understand it.
But if you do, man, there's nothing like it. I
remember the first day I got a pair of cycling shorts.
(11:32):
I mean, I had never even born shorts before this,
because you know, even even in school, in gym class,
my parents in that area, there's there are some many
my kids in the public schools, and so they'll give
you an exemption for whatever, and so I didn't I
work parents, even in gym class or whatever we were
doing in school. So I'd never even been outside in
shorts before. And I put these cycling shorts on. Tonight
(11:53):
I went, like the to the woods your by, I
was riding my mount bike. I went to these trails
that I normally ride, and I remember feeling really self
conscios about. There was nobody anywhere around that would have
even seen me, but I just felt really awkward. I
must have been, I guess fifteen or sixteen years old,
but I don't know. I felt like kind of exposed
(12:14):
just because I wasn't used to it. And on top
of that, I've been, you know, kind of taught that
you're supposed to be modest and that it's inappropriate to
wear shorts, let alone shorts that tight. So it took
me a while to actually kind of wear them around
around my family because I knew they were going to
make some comments about it for something. My oldest sister
the first time she saw them said something like, oh,
(12:35):
is out the shortest tights they had? And I was like, no, no,
these are these are I started to try to explain
to her that there was a reason for it for
a second, and I realized that there was no way
she was going to be able to make sense of it,
and so I just decided I wasn't even going to
talk about it, which led to more mockery of the
new wardrobe.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
I convinced my dad.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
In my senior year in high school in nineteen ninety three,
I guess to take my buddy Eric and I and
another friend of ours named Joel that we were all
kind of into riding. I was more into it than
the others, but Eric was pretty much into it as well,
and so we convinced them to drive out to Traverse City,
Michigan for the National championships. But yeah, I ended up
(13:18):
winning the cross country race for the junior national title.
Because of that, I qualified for the World Championships, which
the Bicycle Racing Association actually paid for all of the
travel expenses to go to France for the World Championships.
And I had never been even on an airplane, like
I'd never I had no. I was completely unprepared for
(13:41):
even going to Michigan. I mean that was the furthest
I'd ever been from home, and now all of a sudden,
I I had to go get a passport, I had
to go try to figure out how how I was
going to navigate this.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
I don't speak French, I don't like. This was all
foreign to me, and so when.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
I got there, I to me, at this point, I
had kind of had this vision of bicycle racing that
was going to be other people that had kind of
viewed it like me like this, they're really obsessed with
it and focused on it, and this is what they
cared about, right, But really what it ended up happening well,
and now I understand it now, But I didn't understand
(14:18):
as the time I got there, and it was a
bunch of juniors who didn't have the same sort of
fixation on it that I did, and so they were
there to just like drink and have a good time
and party.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
And I was completely called off guard by that.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
And I mean I didn't really get very much sleep
because the kid they put us in this, these kids
didn't like they didn't sleep.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
I mean it had I guess they had jet like
they decided to stay.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Up and they would be out drinking all night because
there's I mean, in France you can get alcohol if
you're you know, seventeen, if you want it. The whole
thing was ended up being kind of traumatic for me
because I didn't really understand. I wasn't I'd never seen
anyone drink alcohol before, or partying or any of these
things or well, it was completely foreign to me, Like
(15:01):
I just didn't know what I was observing and was
having a real struggle doing it. And so by the
time the race came along, I was not in a
very good headspace to function at all, let alone try
to race. I mean almost have finished three hours behind
the winter. I think I finished last, and I was
just devastated, like I couldn't.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
At this point, all I wanted to do was just
go home.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
The rest of the juniors wanted to just kind of
keep partying and then go have a good time, and
I just didn't want any.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
Part of it.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
I just went back and laid down in my room
and didn't talk to anybody until I guess three days
later and we went home. But it took me a
while and I came back home I think two or
three months. I didn't ride my bike, and I kind
of decided that wasn't for me. But in the end,
after I had a few months off and started riding
my bike again and enjoying it, Yeah, I stuck with it,
(15:52):
and I had a little bit of better understanding, you
know what, I was going to be surrounded by a
bike races, and so I just kind of decided it
was going to be a I'm sure at this point,
I'll take it as it comes and I'll try to
stay focused on the bike race, but that there's probably
going to be things that I'm going to have to
manage in my head.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
And you're listening to Floyd Landis tell the story of
growing up in this very well let's just say self
contained environment, going to public school, where, my goodness, his
life changed dramatically and what he saw in life changed dramatically.
And then, of course, this obsession with biking, not just
your traditional obsession that most kids have, this one goes
(16:30):
beyond to something well, quite special. His father, of course,
worried that his son was up to no good, followed
him around, only to find out, well, his son was
indeed just well, just biking, and that's it. Not thrilled
with that, though not of really good use in the
Mennonite's mind of well adulthood or adult time or preparation
(16:50):
for adulthood. But the father indulges the son in this
trip to Paris for the Junior World Championship, where he
learns he's thoroughly unprepared many ways, many many ways. And
he comes home, takes some time off, probably sulking a
little bit, just having been beaten by hours on end.
(17:11):
And then came the renewal. And when we come back,
we're going to learn more about Floyd Landis's story and
how he rose from really epic defeat to something else
and something better. The story of Floyd Landis continues here
on our American stories, and we returned to our American stories.
(18:11):
We last left off with Floyd Landis coming to terms
with the world outside of his very conservative and religious
Mennonite Christian community. Accompanied by his friend Eric, Floyd set
out to rise in the world of professional mountain biking.
Let's pick up where we last left off, and.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
So Eric and I were together most of the time,
but at one point we split up. He needed to
go home back to the East Coast, and so he
left me in Mammoth, California.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
There was a race, and so I hitched a ride
with these guys.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
I can't remember how I ran into, Like we might
have been out riding the course or something before the
race and ran into these guys who were driving up
to the next race in Washington State. And they had
this company called show Him You're Nuts, which was at
the time, this was when No Fear was kind of
the big, you know brand that was this whole edgy
(19:02):
you know, no Fear nonsense, you know, edgy quotes and
everything else. And so they thought that it would be
cool to make a competing brand called show Him Your Nuts,
which was more of a play on words within a
couple of different ways and they actually were nuts.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
That was the thing. Oh man. I So we left.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
They had a trail like a pickup truck and a trailer,
and I sat in the back seat of the pickup
and we drove from Mammoth, California through.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
The desert, like halfay through the desert, I guess there was.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
We were following this other guy named his name was
Tattoo Lou. He had a van and he had like
two pit bulls and he was covered in tattoos and
he had as he kind of lived in his van.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
So he was driving along with these.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Guys and they stopped in the middle of the desert
and just started smoking wheed and getting high, like staring
at the sky. And I again, now I'd never been
around any kind of at this point.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Alcohol had was traumatic for me to witness.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
So I'm sitting here thinking, man, these guys like hopefully
they're not going to get back in their car and
just drive.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
I'm gonna like, I'm gonna die.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
All I know about drugs is what I've been told
in school is that we're all gonna probably die here.
So they sit there and they stare at the sky
and they're trying to be philosophical and I'm thinking, man.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
You guys sound like idiots.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
But whatever, I'm here for the adventure at this point.
So I sit there and kind of kind of just
take it all in. Then they get back in the
car and we start driving. So I'm like, all right, well,
I'm just gonna lay down the back seat because I
guess this is how it ends.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
And so I just.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
Went to sleep and I wake up six seven hours
later and we're, you know, the southern end of Washington State.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
So we get up there.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
They had like a booth that they set up in
the expo area. At the finish of the race, they said, all,
r We're gonna go down to town and get some dinner,
and do you want to come along? And I said, no,
I want to. I just I wanted to ride a
lap of the course. So I don't know why I
thought these guys would be reliable, but I figured they
would come back up at some point after dinner.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
And so it got to be about I mean, I
went for a ride.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
And for maybe two hours, and it was getting dark
and it was getting cold, and I'm like, man, I
don't know. There was no one else around, like everyone
else had kind of left, and it wasn't some of
these races would be at a resort where you'd have
lodging around the resort. This was pretty spread out and
there was nothing really anywhere near this exportrea they had
set up in this parking lot, and so I was
(21:29):
getting cold, and I'm like, well, I'm gonna at least
have to stay warm.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
So I took down this.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Power bar bantner that they had on their booth and
just laid down under it and I went to sleep.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
I didn't sleep very well, but I didn't.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
I mean, the time kind of passed. I guess I
was half asleep and halfway because I was really cold.
And they got back at five in the morning and
they were like, man, what are you doing? What do
you mean?
Speaker 2 (21:48):
What am I doing? You guys left me here.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
I guess it should have been obvious in hindsight this
wasn't gonna go well. But that was the last time
I hitched to ride with those particular guys. I occasionally
had to hit rides after that, but I have what
it does.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Guys.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
They were funny, I'll give them that, and they I
had some good laughs with them. But if I needed
to be serious and focus on the race. Those were
not the guys to be around.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
The following night. I guess the night after the race.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
It must have been Friday night or even Saturday night,
so I stayed the whole weekend and they had the
Tourter France on, but I was the one that Lance
Armstrong won. To me was just this mythical thing because I,
you know, obviously I knew at that point that the
Twitter France was the biggest bike race and the biggest
cycling event there was, but I hadn't I didn't have
any experience watching it.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
I'd never seen it on TV or didn't know much
about it.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
But I just remember seeing it and having a kind
of profound effect on me, thinking that, like that, that
looks like something where I'd have to deal with let's
show them your nuts people, Like at this point, this
is my goal, Like I just need to get away
from the show and your nuts people to a real
professional sport where I can actually focus on what I'm doing.
So I guess I left Pennsylvania and I moved to
southern California, and so a couple of friends and I
(23:01):
that were also mountain biking who had done more road
racing just said, look, let's put together a small group.
We'll we'll do a bunch of different races that you
can enter as an independent or not on the team,
because road racing, depending on the category of the race,
sometimes you have to actually be part of a team
to be in it. So our goal ended up being
just to try to make their races as miserable as
we could for the pro guys that are out there,
(23:22):
just to see if we could get noticed. Yeah, So
I guess in nineteen ninety seven went to a bunch
of these races, and I got noticed by Team Mercury,
which was Mercury, the car company sponsored. At that point,
it was probably the biggest, well the biggest US team
that wasn't sort of doing any races in Europe. And
so I raced on on the Mercury team for I
(23:44):
guess ninety nine and two thousand. They in two thousand
and one the team put a bunch of effort.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Into trying to kind of make it to the next
level to race.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
In Europe, and so, I guess the first road race
I did in your was called the Tour Lavener, which
is like it's rung by the Tour de France.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Organization.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
It's a ten day race, and I finished third, but
that was kind of where I got noticed for or
by the by the postal service at that time. And
on this team, I mean, by this time Lance had
won three or four Tours and he had a very
very strong team around him. So it wasn't like it
was it was easy for any one of those guys
to make the Tour team.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
And they were they were ruthless about it. They weren't.
They weren't.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
It wasn't about feelings. They just were gonna take the
best eight guys that we have. So whoever that is,
you're you're on the team. And so the first race
I did with Lance would have been Rooted del Soul
or some some race they had it in southern Spain.
And then then we had a week off and then
we went and did the Dauphine, which is a big
race that everyone does to kind of prepare for the
(24:48):
Tours eight day race in France. And because we had
Lance on the team, obviously they're they're looking at Lance
to be the leader of this particular race, and so
there's opportunities for guys like me to try to go
and break aways and make the race harder on the
competition without Lance, happened to actually try to win, and
I got in a good breakaway and I ended up
(25:09):
getting the lead in the race and ended up finishing
second to Lance, and then beat me in.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
The time trial. So that kind of sealed my tour
you know, qualification.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
And for that year and probably for much of the
next year, I was pretty close to Lance, you know.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
We that year between the Rue del.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
Soul and in the Delphinae, he took me back to
sam Maritz with him and we trained together, got me
an apartment up there, he had his family up there,
and so we trained for those couple of weeks between
and then we went back after the Dauphine and trained
right up to the Tory France.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Took a private jet to the start of the tour.
It was good.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
I was, yeah, living like how Lance liked to do it,
which was I mean, he had the resources to do
it with much less stress than anyone else, right, and
he did it. He was good at it, and so
I had great training.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
We had had you know, very little stress in those
couple of months up and then the tour went pretty well.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
It was it's much much harder than any other bike race,
and partly because of the competition.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Everyone's in shape.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Right for that race, because it's the most important race
of the year, especially if you're on the on the
team with Armstrong, who was a superstar at this point.
Even outside of cycling, it comes with all this other just.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Just stress of every kind. Right, there's people around all
the time. It's hard to sleep.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
But I was, you know, I was lucky that that
I was on the first time I ever did it,
that I was on a team that won. Because no
matter who you are in that race, it's three weeks long.
You're gonna have days where you're just tired and want
to quit, and it's just it's a lot easier to
motivate yourself to keep going when you're winning the race.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
And you've been listening to Floyd Landis and well he'd
been wandering around a bit. When you find yourself following
a guy named Tattoo Lou into the desert and you
find yourself sleeping in the back of the car, hoping
the guy's pretty much stone will get you to your destination.
Then maybe you have to have a change of teammates
and a change of plans. So he moves to southern
(27:06):
California and gets serious about this thing called biking and
ends up, of course, biking alongside the great Lance Armstrong.
When we come back more of this life story, this
unusual journey from Mennonite Pennsylvania to the Tour de France.
Here on our American stories. And we returned to our
(27:38):
American stories, let's return to Floyd landis talking about his
time racing the Tour de France with United States Postal
Service teammate Lance Armstrong.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
The next year, which would have been two thousand and three,
I was training in January and I was running by myself,
and I crashed and I broke my hip and it
was broken pretty badly, placed pretty baily and it needed surgery,
and so I missed quite a bit of the spring
season that year. Yeah, I made the team cut there,
but I do think it had it been the year
(28:11):
before the year after, I might have actually not made
the team.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
And we pulled it off. But man, it was.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
That was the closest I think in all of his
seven tours that he ever came to not winning the race.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
But he pulled it out.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
I mean, you can say, you can say a lot
of things about Lance, but he's yeah, he's a bad
when it comes to managing stress, and as an athlete
he's exceptional. I mean, three weeks is a long long time,
even just in ordinary life, but when you're racing your
bike one hundred to sometimes one hundred and fifty miles
a day and sometimes through three or four large mountain
(28:46):
passes over one hundred and twenty one hundred and thirty miles,
I mean, some of these stages take seven hours long.
Just even the winner will be seven hours. But three
weeks feels like eternity when you're faced with that. And
one thing you learn is that it's best not to
look through the whole Tour de France root book. Just
look at the stage right in front of you, and
(29:06):
don't look at what's tomorrow, even because it's so hard
and so stressful that you can easily intimidate yourself into
being scared of actually finishing. I had a contract with
the team that was expiring in the end of two
thousand and four.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Eventually I just I wanted to I mean I wanted
to leave the team.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
I didn't I probably would have stayed had they had
they given me any kind of assurance that Lance wasn't
going to race another year, but I wanted.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
To race and try to win the race myself.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
And they wouldn't make any public comment or any even
internal comment about whether Lance was going to race and
try to win seven.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Because he had the record.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
I mean, five was the record before that, and even
only then, only one person had won five in a row.
He just, yeah, he couldn't help himself. There was too
much money on the line, and so he did it
one more year and he won again. But the problem
was that by that time he was kind of he
can be vindictive, so he was pretty bitter about.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
The fact that I didn't stay on the team.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
So he and the team went out of their way
at most of the races that year just to race
against me, to the point where sometimes they lost races
just to make sure I didn't win. And so I
ended up tenth in the Twitter France that year. For
whatever reason, that's how that's how he motivated himself. He
was more motivated by making sure someone else lost than
(30:28):
him winning, which I never did understand to this day,
I don't understand, but it was kind of one of the.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Quirks that he had.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
And then yeah, then the next year two thousand and
six was I think I left on Tuesday that week
and I arrived in Paris on Wednesday. Then we started
the race on Saturday. Yeah, and I mean there were
some ups and downs in that race, but all things considered,
it went about as well as you could hope for.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
And it's yeah, it was hard.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
For me to get my head around because people were
fired up, like I couldn't believe it. Even after I
went like I was happy, right, I just didn't realize.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
That everybody was that. Yeah, it's a good memory.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
But then obviously everybody knows what happened next with the
whole doping scandal that ensued, and then went through a
couple of years of litigation and fighting it and lost
the title.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
There were some dark days for me.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
I didn't people asked if I would do it again,
if I would take drugs again in it. I don't
know the answer to that, and it's not because I'm
out of some kind of defiance or anything else. I mean,
that's what you had to do to win the race.
In the end, I wish I could have just told
the truth, but then my problem there was there was
no way to tell the truth without exposing the whole thing.
(31:46):
And then these are all people that are for my
friends and people that I was around, and I was
not really in a position to just try to tell
that story without looking bitter myself. Right, it would just
look it would look if I just decided to admit
it and then pointed everyone else it was gonna It
was a fight I had to fight, and I guess
(32:07):
I should have probably just.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
I guess I should have just vanished for ten years.
But I wanted to race again, and the only way
to race is to deny it and follow the party line. Right,
there was no way for me to admit that I
had done that and ever expect the race again. And
I wasn't ready to accept that it was over just
like that, although I should have, because that really was
the end of my career. But I wasn't ready to
face that. I mean, I'd gone from the high point
(32:31):
of my career to have him to contemplate never racing again.
And I just made whatever decisions I thought would at
least give me the ability to possibly come back and race.
But the problem was that it was the way it happened,
and because I had was Armstrong's former teammate, and because
of the spectacle of how I won the race, there
(32:54):
was no way that I was ever going to race again.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
I just wasn't prepared to accept that.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
So I fought it for a while, a couple years,
and in the end probably made it harder to tell
the truth. But once I finally had enough time to
myself and time to reflect on everything, and also time
to actually be back out in the world a little
bit here and there and have to try to face everybody,
every one of them, which would say, you know, we're
(33:20):
sorry about what happened to you.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
We don't believe any of it.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
And I just I realized that there's no way I
was going to be able to get through life like this.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
I couldn't.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
This wasn't a story that was going to go away
like it wasn't like this was a lie that at
some point I could stop telling because no one's going
to ask. That's just what it was going to be forever.
And I couldn't manage it.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
I just didn't.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
I either had to never talk to anybody again or
just tell the truth so I could stop feeling so
bad about it. And then I had the dilemma of well,
what does the truth mean?
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Like?
Speaker 2 (33:47):
What am I going to tell?
Speaker 3 (33:48):
Because if I if I just say well, this is
what I did, everyone's going to know there was more
to the story than that.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
There's no way I invented that.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
And so I struggled with what to do, to the
point where I finally just was in such a bad
place in my head that I didn't really care what
else happened.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
I just decided I'm just going to tell the truth.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Here it is, and whatever happens happens.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
I mean, I knew it was going to be bad.
I knew what Lance would do, and I knew that.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
I was going to have to defend all kinds of
you know, accusations of he's still lying and whatever else.
But to some extent I didn't care. I just wanted
to be able to say, Okay, here are the facts.
From now on, if people want to come up to
me and say they hate me or they love me
or whatever, at least I don't have to just keep
lying about it.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
You can just tell the truth.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
And so I basically had to go through it a
second time just to get the story out. And I think,
you know, a lot of people kind of probably more
people saw that than saw the original bike race itself,
just because of the magnitude of Lance and what he
stood for and to some extent still does stand for.
I mean, some people couldn't separate the idea that he
(34:58):
was inspirational because he had cancer or from any of
the rest of the story, and so some of them
ended up hating me too, and some of them ended
up hating.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Him, which I think is unfortunate.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
I mean, he's not exactly the nicest guy on earth,
but he paid a very dear price for the whole thing,
probably more so because he is such a fighter, which
is what made him admirable in the first place. So
the whole thing is a paradox. But in that period
of time, I sort of kind of got my bearings
on life and grew up a little bit, and five
(35:33):
six years ago started a company. So the name of
the companies called Floyd's of Leadville, and we decided to
embrace the Leadville name because it's a well known sort
of endurance sports. I don't know, Mecca, you could say,
but the Floyd's of Leville brand is primarily.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Promoted as a as a CBD brand.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
We saw it online through bike shops and running shops
and convenience stores things like that. The CBD products are
generally not psychoactive, like they don't have enough seeing it
to be to cause a change of mental state, but
they do have anti inflammatory properties in anti anxiety properties
to help a lot of people with sleep. It kind
(36:12):
of helps your just calm your thoughts, allows you to
fall asleep naturally. It helps me, which is why I
was able to sort of convince myself that it would
be a good idea to put my name on it.
I'm not a great salesman if it comes to just
selling something for the sake of trying to get the
highest price, but it was something that really benefited me
in those years after after the whole Tour de France debacle.
(36:35):
Helped me manage no pain and anxiety, and so it's
a lot easier for me to just tell people, look,
this helped me. Just just try it. It's not magic,
but it does. It does have real benefits for a
lot of people.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
And a great job on the production and the storytelling
by Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to Floyd Landis
for sharing his entire story and my goodness again from
a small insular community, the Mennonite community to another small
insulent community, because let's face it, once you start to
enter into worlds like that biking. I know, my daughter
does a question and it's a small competitive community, and
(37:12):
my goodness, what happened with him and with the entire
community in terms of doping. They all ended up doing it.
And it's no excuse. I often wondered why they all
just didn't do it, because once one cheats, and the
next cheats, and the next cheats, it's the new norm.
So why not just not cheat? But again, talk to
anybody who biked during that year, and everybody doped because
(37:34):
everybody else was doping. And in the end it caused
a period of reflection for him. Ultimately, not telling the
truth war on Floyd more than helling it, and he
finally did. He just couldn't keep lying about what he'd done.
And in that period of time he got his bearings,
(37:55):
got a new life, started a new company, something that
would help with ain dad anxiety than inflammation. Floyd Landis's
story here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
1. Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
2. The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
3. Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.