Floyd Landis part 1: "Doping won't ever stop. We need honesty and transparency"
In the first of a two-part interview - with many of the questions posed by readers of this site - the 2006 Tour de France winner details his rise, fall and lessons learned
Floyd Landis believes drugs are probably still underpinning many achievements in contemporary cycling and as a man who doped systematically for years - and mostly got away with it - he thinks taking drugs and avoiding detection is just as easy these days.
Today, in an interview where many of the questions have come from you, Sporting Intelligence’s readers, he talks at length about his extraordinary Tour de France win back in 2006, and in detail about the drug use that fuelled it, and about his downfall after the one occasion he tested positive.
He recalls stage 17 of the 2006 Tour, which remains arguably the most astonishing day’s riding in cycling history.
He explains why he insisted for so long that he was innocent after having that 2006 TDF title stripped from him, and why he later changed his mind.
He talks about a few dark years from 2010, the year he sent an email that kick-started a chain of events that would bring down Lance Armstrong. And as he battled through those years, mostly away from the sport he loved, Team Sky was emerging as a force, winning seven of the eight Tours de France from 2012 onwards.
“It was tough to watch, that entire team coming out with stories about this marginal gains thing and talking about how they train now and they eat now,” he says.
“And I mean everything is exactly the way everyone's always done it, to this day. None of this has changed. It's just the explanation that changes from time to time but not by enough to explain anything that's happening.”
Landis subscribed to the Sporting Intelligence substack last month to read the “Skyfall” series about doping and alleged doping at Team Sky and within British cycling more widely.
“You made my day,” he said in a WhatsApp message to me after reading the first part of that series, "Living a lie". Part two is here: Injections at Windermere, drugs in the fridge, and lies about coming clean.
Part three told the story of drugs at the TdF, backstabbing, lies, cover-ups and omertà. Part four told the story of British Cycling's nandrolone mystery before London 2012 Olympics. Part five is here: Naming names, Jiffy-gate revelations and the Sutton tapes.
There will be more to come on Team Sky in the future. I’ve received new information even since “Skyfall”. But today is about Landis, now 48.
It’s the tale of a kid raised in Pennsylvania as a Mennonite, and who loved mountain biking but was discouraged from sport by his father. He continued regardless, and by 1999 was a pro road cyclist.
By 2002, he’d been recruited by Armstrong to ride on the US Postal team (pictured below), and he helped Armstrong to win the Tours de France of 2002, 2003 and 2004. With his next team, Phonak, he finished ninth in the 2005 Tour before winning the 2006 event.
Years later, when Landis was a key witness for USADA’s takedown of Armstrong, Landis’s affidavit for USADA on its own made clear the extent of the team’s doping in his years with US Postal. But his whole story is more complex and convoluted than that.