August 19, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Floyd Landis’s story is one of extremes. Raised in a quiet Mennonite community in Pennsylvania, he trained on back roads without the distractions of modern life. That focus carried him to the 2006 Tour de France, where he pulled off one of the most remarkable comebacks in cycling history. But only days later, a failed doping test changed everything. The champion’s jersey was stripped away, and his name was forever tied to one of the sport’s most infamous scandals. Landis joins us to reflect on his humble beginnings and the hard road back to redemption after the event that changed everything.
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Episode Transcript
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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.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
They spend a lot of time at church. That's the
center of the of.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
The community and the center of the It's more than
a religion. It's kind of its own little environment, its
own little society, right, And they're good people.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
They take care of each other.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
They value things that I think most people would value,
which is caring about other people and honesty and hard
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 rolle 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 and it's one of
the things that there was to do.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Squirrels than you want. 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 amished men
and night 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
(03:07):
before the 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.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Whatever. You want to call us, but good people. My
parents are wonderful.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
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,
which is quieter and a lot less stressful than what
I ended up having to live through my life. But
(04:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
But for whatever reason, my parents sent me to a
public school. For me, the public school was all right.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
I actually I liked it, and I think in the
end my parents probably blamed.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
That to some extent for the fact that I left.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
In the end, they sent my younger sisters and brother
to Mennonite schools.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
But it was it was a for me.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
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, 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. Everything was kind of a I
(04:56):
always felt like I was a step behind and trying
to figure out what was what was actually happening, or
wh people were doing what they were doing. 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 what I was
being told as a kid in church and when I
was being exposed to in school. And just just to
(05:17):
give an example of how strange, I guess strange is
a good word to you.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
I don't don't.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
And none of these words that I used to describe
the omiss in the mint or the place I grew
up are meant to be pejoratives or judgmental. Just it
really is a strange place. The other thing that's kind
of unique about that place, there's a.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Lot of auction houses.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
My dad would always spend his day out there trying
to find treasures for cheap, and so he found me
a yellow bike up there in the dumpster one time.
I don't know how old it 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 the driveway trying
to figure out how to ride this thing. But yeah,
(05:55):
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 who lived in kind of
a I don't know, it was a trailer with.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Some appendages built onto it.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
And I always loved going to the 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 could
fish in the front yard. So yeah, between fishing and
bike riding, that was my kind of my early childhood.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I just enjoyed being outside and doing doing whatever.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
I mean, you don't if you don't have a TV,
you don't have 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 (06:48):
I loved it.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
I can't say there's anything about my childhood 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's 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. Leehabibe
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
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If you love what you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories
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give a lot. Go to Alamericanstories 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. My sophomore, junior, and senior year. 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 just to go hang out with my buddies. But
after doing a couple of small local races that through this,
there was a bike shop in Efrita, which is a
(08:50):
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. He convinced us to do this
race that he was promoting nearby. 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 from 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. But this race was on
a Saturday, and so I rode out there. I won
the race in like the junior beginner category, which probably
might have been ten people in it. Even that, but
I felt like, you know, king of the world, Like
I won this race, and I loved it. I love
the feeling of it, just the race itself, and you know,
(09:50):
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. But
throughout that winter I spent a lot more time just
kind of riding my bike rather than riding him for
the sake of meeting.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Up with my friends.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
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 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, You go to bed when
(10:24):
it's not when it's dark. 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 are you are you going?
I finally because he couldn't, he couldn't lie, and got him.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
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 make
sense right.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
He couldn't. He couldn't understand it. My mom seemed more
understanding of it.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
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 with our lives
rather than riding bikes around. 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.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Riding bikes is addicting.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
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. 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
(11:43):
didn't I were parts even in 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. I went, like to the woods, your boy,
I was riding my mount bike. I went to these
trails that I normally ride, and I remember feeling really
self conscious about There was nobody anywhere around that would
have even seen me, but I just felt really awkward.
(12:06):
I must have been, I guess fifteen or sixteen years old,
but I don't know. I felt like kind of exposed, just.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Because I wasn't used to it. And on top of that, I've.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
So it took me a while to.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
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, 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 seconds,
and I realized that there was no way she was
going to be able to make sense of it, and
(12:47):
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
(13:40):
even going to Michigan. I mean that was the furthest
I'd ever been from home, and now all of a sudden,
I was I had to go get a passport, I
had to go try to figure out how how I
was going to navigate this. I don't speak French, I
don't like. This was all foreign to me, and so
when I got there, I to me at this point,
(14:01):
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 I understand it now, but I didn't
understand at the time I got.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
There, and it was a bunch of juniors.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
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. And
I was completely called off guard by that, 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. I mean they had I guess they
had jet Like they decided to stay up and they
(14:42):
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've never seen anyone drink alcohol before or
partying or any of these things or well, it was
completely foreign to me, Like I just didn't know what
(15:03):
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 I almost have finished
three hours behind the winter I think I finished last,
and I was just devastated like I couldn't. At this point,
all I wanted to do was just go home. The
other the rest of the juniors wanted to just kind
(15:24):
of keep partying and then go have a good time,
and I just didn't want any part of it. 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
(15:46):
again and enjoying it, Yeah, I stuck with it, 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 gonna 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
(16:29):
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 a
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 and 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, there.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Was a race, and so I hitched a ride with
these guys. I can't remember how I ran into.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
I 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 Your Nuts, which
was at the time, this was when No Fear was
kind of the big, you know brand that was this
whole edgy you know, no Fear nonsense, you know, edgy
(19:07):
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 different ways, and they actually were
nuts that was the thing.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Oh man. I So we left.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
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 the desert, like
halfway through the desert, I guess it was. We were
following this other guy named his name was Tattooed 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. So he
(19:47):
was driving along with these guys and they stopped in
the middle of the desert and just started smoking wheat
and getting high.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Like staring at the sky.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
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 (20:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Thinking, man, 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. And so I just
went to sleep and I wake up six seven hours
later and we're, you know, the southern end of Washington State.
(20:45):
So we get up there. They had like a booth
that they set up in the expo area. At the
finish of the race, they said, all we're gonna go
down to town and get some dinner, and you want
to come along, and I said, no, I want to.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
I just I wanted to ride a lap of the course.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
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. And so it got to
be about I mean, I went for a ride 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 at a resort where you'd have
(21:19):
lodging around the resort. This was pretty spread out and
there was nothing really anywhere near this exporria they had
set up in this parking lot, and so I was
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 banner 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 (21:39):
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?
Speaker 2 (21:47):
What do you mean? 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 a ride with those picular guys. I occasionally
had to hitch rides after that, but I have what
it does.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Guys.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
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.
It must have been Friday night or even.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Saturday night, as I stayed the whole weekend and they
had the Twitter 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. I'd never seen
it on TV or didn't know much about it. But
(22:38):
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 was
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 the races as miserable as we
could for the pro guys that are out.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
There, just to see if we could get noticed.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
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
(23:44):
I guess ninety nine and two thousand.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
They in two thousand and one.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
The team put a bunch of effort into trying to
kind of make it to the next level to race
in Europe, and so, I guess the first road race
I did in Europe was called the Tour Lavenir, which
is like it's run by the Tour de France organization.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
It's a ten day race, and I finished.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
They weren't.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
You're you're on the team.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
And so the first reason 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 Dauphinae,
which is a big race that everyone does to kind
of prepare for the Tours eight day race in France.
And because we had Lance on the team, obviously they're
(24:55):
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 having to actually
try to win, and I got in a good breakaway
and I ended up getting the lead in the race
and ended up finishing second to Lance, and then beat
me in the time trial. So that kind of sealed
(25:16):
my tour you know, qualification. 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 Delphine, 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 he trained for those couple weeks between and
then we went back after the Dlphine 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, man.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
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. Everyone's in shape 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.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Who was a superstar at this point.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Race 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 to your destination.
Then maybe you have to have a change of teammates
(27:03):
and a change of plans. So he moves to southern
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 places, pretty bairely, 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
(28:11):
the year 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 bat
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
(28:45):
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. Eventually, I just I wanted to I
(29:26):
mean I wanted to leave the team. 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.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
But I wanted 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.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
It one more year and he won again.
Speaker 3 (29:58):
But the problem was that by that time he was
kind of he can be vindictive, so he was pretty
bitter about the.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Could hope for.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
And it's yeah, it was hard for me to get
my head around because people were fired.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Up, like I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
I mean, that's what you had to do to win
the race. In the end, I wish I.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
Could have just told the truth, but then my problem
there was there was no way to tell the truth
without to exposing the whole thing, and then these are
all people that are for my friends and people that
I was around, and it 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
(32:00):
if I just decided to admit it and then pointed
everyone else it was going to It was a fight
I had to fight, and I guess I should have
probably just.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I don't know. I guess I should have just vanished
for ten years.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
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
of my career to have him to contemplate never racing again.
(32:36):
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
was no way that I was ever going to race again.
I just wasn't prepared to accept that. So I thought
(32:58):
it for a while, a couple of 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 and 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, we don't believe any
of it. 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. I just didn't. 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? Like what am I going to tell
(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's 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. I mean, I
knew it was going to be bad. I knew what
Lance would do, and I knew that 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
(34:28):
to come up to me and say they hate me
or they love me or whatever, at least I don't
have to just.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Keep lying about it. 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 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
(35:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
I don't know, Mecca, you could say.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
But the Floyds of Levelle brand is primarily promoted as
a as.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
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 be benefited
me in those years after after the whole Tour de
(36:34):
France debacle. Helped me manage no pain and anxiety, and
so it's a lot easier for me to just tell people,
look this help 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 its entire story and my goodness again, from
a small insular community, the Mennonite community to another small
insular 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 anxie diety than inflammation. Floyd Landis's story
here on our American Story
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.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
They spend a lot of time at church. That's the
center of the of.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
The community and the center of the It's more than
a religion. It's kind of its own little environment, its
own little society, right, And they're good people.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
They take care of each other.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
They value things that I think most people would value,
which is caring about other people and honesty and hard
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 rolle 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 and it's one of
the things that there was to do.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Squirrels than you want. 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 amished men
and night 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
(03:07):
before the 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.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Whatever. You want to call us, but good people. My
parents are wonderful.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
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,
which is quieter and a lot less stressful than what
I ended up having to live through my life. But
(04:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
But for whatever reason, my parents sent me to a
public school. For me, the public school was all right.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
I actually I liked it, and I think in the
end my parents probably blamed.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
That to some extent for the fact that I left.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
In the end, they sent my younger sisters and brother
to Mennonite schools.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
But it was it was a for me.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
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, 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. Everything was kind of a I
(04:56):
always felt like I was a step behind and trying
to figure out what was what was actually happening, or
wh people were doing what they were doing. 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 what I was
being told as a kid in church and when I
was being exposed to in school. And just just to
(05:17):
give an example of how strange, I guess strange is
a good word to you.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
I don't don't.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
And none of these words that I used to describe
the omiss in the mint or the place I grew
up are meant to be pejoratives or judgmental. Just it
really is a strange place. The other thing that's kind
of unique about that place, there's a.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Lot of auction houses.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
My dad would always spend his day out there trying
to find treasures for cheap, and so he found me
a yellow bike up there in the dumpster one time.
I don't know how old it 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 the driveway trying
to figure out how to ride this thing. But yeah,
(05:55):
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 who lived in kind of
a I don't know, it was a trailer with.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Some appendages built onto it.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
And I always loved going to the 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 could
fish in the front yard. So yeah, between fishing and
bike riding, that was my kind of my early childhood.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I just enjoyed being outside and doing doing whatever.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
I mean, you don't if you don't have a TV,
you don't have 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 (06:48):
I loved it.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
I can't say there's anything about my childhood 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's 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. Leehabibe
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 Ouramerican Stories
dot com and click the donate button. Give a little,
give a lot. Go to Alamericanstories 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. My sophomore, junior, and senior year. 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 just to go hang out with my buddies. But
after doing a couple of small local races that through this,
there was a bike shop in Efrita, which is a
(08:50):
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. He convinced us to do this
race that he was promoting nearby. 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 from 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. But this race was on
a Saturday, and so I rode out there. I won
the race in like the junior beginner category, which probably
might have been ten people in it. Even that, but
I felt like, you know, king of the world, Like
I won this race, and I loved it. I love
the feeling of it, just the race itself, and you know,
(09:50):
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. But
throughout that winter I spent a lot more time just
kind of riding my bike rather than riding him for
the sake of meeting.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Up with my friends.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
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 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, You go to bed when
(10:24):
it's not when it's dark. 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 are you are you going?
I finally because he couldn't, he couldn't lie, and got him.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
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 make
sense right.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
He couldn't. He couldn't understand it. My mom seemed more
understanding of it.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
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 with our lives
rather than riding bikes around. 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.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Riding bikes is addicting.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
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. 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
(11:43):
didn't I were parts even in 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. I went, like to the woods, your boy,
I was riding my mount bike. I went to these
trails that I normally ride, and I remember feeling really
self conscious about There was nobody anywhere around that would
have even seen me, but I just felt really awkward.
(12:06):
I must have been, I guess fifteen or sixteen years old,
but I don't know. I felt like kind of exposed, just.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Because I wasn't used to it. And on top of that, I've.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
So it took me a while to.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
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, 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 seconds,
and I realized that there was no way she was
going to be able to make sense of it, and
(12:47):
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
(13:40):
even going to Michigan. I mean that was the furthest
I'd ever been from home, and now all of a sudden,
I was I had to go get a passport, I
had to go try to figure out how how I
was going to navigate this. I don't speak French, I
don't like. This was all foreign to me, and so
when I got there, I to me at this point,
(14:01):
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 I understand it now, but I didn't
understand at the time I got.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
There, and it was a bunch of juniors.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
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. And
I was completely called off guard by that, 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. I mean they had I guess they
had jet Like they decided to stay up and they
(14:42):
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've never seen anyone drink alcohol before or
partying or any of these things or well, it was
completely foreign to me, Like I just didn't know what
(15:03):
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 I almost have finished
three hours behind the winter I think I finished last,
and I was just devastated like I couldn't. At this point,
all I wanted to do was just go home. The
other the rest of the juniors wanted to just kind
(15:24):
of keep partying and then go have a good time,
and I just didn't want any part of it. 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
(15:46):
again and enjoying it, Yeah, I stuck with it, 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 gonna 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
(16:29):
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 a
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 and 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, there.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Was a race, and so I hitched a ride with
these guys. I can't remember how I ran into.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
I 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 Your Nuts, which
was at the time, this was when No Fear was
kind of the big, you know brand that was this
whole edgy you know, no Fear nonsense, you know, edgy
(19:07):
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 different ways, and they actually were
nuts that was the thing.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Oh man. I So we left.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
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 the desert, like
halfway through the desert, I guess it was. We were
following this other guy named his name was Tattooed 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. So he
(19:47):
was driving along with these guys and they stopped in
the middle of the desert and just started smoking wheat
and getting high.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Like staring at the sky.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
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 (20:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Thinking, man, 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. And so I just
went to sleep and I wake up six seven hours
later and we're, you know, the southern end of Washington State.
(20:45):
So we get up there. They had like a booth
that they set up in the expo area. At the
finish of the race, they said, all we're gonna go
down to town and get some dinner, and you want
to come along, and I said, no, I want to.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
I just I wanted to ride a lap of the course.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
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. And so it got to
be about I mean, I went for a ride 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 at a resort where you'd have
(21:19):
lodging around the resort. This was pretty spread out and
there was nothing really anywhere near this exporria they had
set up in this parking lot, and so I was
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 banner 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 (21:39):
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?
Speaker 2 (21:47):
What do you mean? 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 a ride with those picular guys. I occasionally
had to hitch rides after that, but I have what
it does.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Guys.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
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.
It must have been Friday night or even.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Saturday night, as I stayed the whole weekend and they
had the Twitter 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. I'd never seen
it on TV or didn't know much about it. But
(22:38):
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 was
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 the races as miserable as we
could for the pro guys that are out.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
There, just to see if we could get noticed.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
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
(23:44):
I guess ninety nine and two thousand.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
They in two thousand and one.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
The team put a bunch of effort into trying to
kind of make it to the next level to race
in Europe, and so, I guess the first road race
I did in Europe was called the Tour Lavenir, which
is like it's run by the Tour de France organization.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
It's a ten day race, and I finished.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
They weren't.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
You're you're on the team.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
And so the first reason 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 Dauphinae,
which is a big race that everyone does to kind
of prepare for the Tours eight day race in France.
And because we had Lance on the team, obviously they're
(24:55):
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 having to actually
try to win, and I got in a good breakaway
and I ended up getting the lead in the race
and ended up finishing second to Lance, and then beat
me in the time trial. So that kind of sealed
(25:16):
my tour you know, qualification. 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 Delphine, 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 he trained for those couple weeks between and
then we went back after the Dlphine 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, man.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
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. Everyone's in shape 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.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Who was a superstar at this point.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Race 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 to your destination.
Then maybe you have to have a change of teammates
(27:03):
and a change of plans. So he moves to southern
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 places, pretty bairely, 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
(28:11):
the year 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 bat
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
(28:45):
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. Eventually, I just I wanted to I
(29:26):
mean I wanted to leave the team. 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.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
But I wanted 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.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
It one more year and he won again.
Speaker 3 (29:58):
But the problem was that by that time he was
kind of he can be vindictive, so he was pretty
bitter about the.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Could hope for.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
And it's yeah, it was hard for me to get
my head around because people were fired.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Up, like I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
I mean, that's what you had to do to win
the race. In the end, I wish I.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
Could have just told the truth, but then my problem
there was there was no way to tell the truth
without to exposing the whole thing, and then these are
all people that are for my friends and people that
I was around, and it 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
(32:00):
if I just decided to admit it and then pointed
everyone else it was going to It was a fight
I had to fight, and I guess I should have
probably just.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I don't know. I guess I should have just vanished
for ten years.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
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
of my career to have him to contemplate never racing again.
(32:36):
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
was no way that I was ever going to race again.
I just wasn't prepared to accept that. So I thought
(32:58):
it for a while, a couple of 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 and 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, we don't believe any
of it. 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. I just didn't. 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? Like what am I going to tell
(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's 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. I mean, I
knew it was going to be bad. I knew what
Lance would do, and I knew that 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
(34:28):
to come up to me and say they hate me
or they love me or whatever, at least I don't
have to just.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Keep lying about it. 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 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
(35:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
I don't know, Mecca, you could say.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
But the Floyds of Levelle brand is primarily promoted as
a as.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
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 be benefited
me in those years after after the whole Tour de
(36:34):
France debacle. Helped me manage no pain and anxiety, and
so it's a lot easier for me to just tell people,
look this help 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 its entire story and my goodness again, from
a small insular community, the Mennonite community to another small
insular 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 anxie diety than inflammation. Floyd Landis's story
here on our American Story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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