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Amgen Tour of California: Landis the leader
Editor’s note: When America’s biggest bike race, the eight-day Amgen Tour of California, starts this weekend in San Francisco, some of the world’s leading riders will be starting their 2006 seasons at the head of major ProTour teams. In the current issue of VeloNews, you can read detailed profiles of two of these men: Discovery Channel’s George Hincapie and Team CSC’s Dave Zabriskie. Here on velonews.com, we will feature three of the other major contenders, starting with this in-depth interview with Phonak team leader Floyd Landis.
Floyd Landis, the American leader of Swiss team Phonak, is one of the big attractions of the Amgen Tour of California, which starts in San Francisco this coming Sunday. Landis begins his season at the new stage race, not knowing what to expect of his form. Maybe he will be a major contender to win the inaugural event. What he does know that is that the California stage race will be the first building block of what Landis hopes will be a big year for him, culminating at the Tour de France.
The Temecula, California, resident has enjoyed a good winter build-up to the season, as VeloNews discovered when we met with him last month at Phonak’s annual training camp on the Mediterranean island of Majorca. The 30-year-old Landis worked hard with his teammates in a week of long training rides, physical testing and time-trial-positioning sessions. So when he sat down in the bar-lounge of Playa de Palma’s Barceló Pueblo Park hotel after a hilly group ride that lasted an hour longer than he expected, Landis was weary. "I’m too tired to remember anything at this point," he replied to one question in our lengthy interview.
Weary he may have been, but the native Pennsylvanian was eager to talk about the season ahead, his second one as a team leader at Phonak, and his life as a pro cyclist. After a stressful first year with the Swiss squad, which saw him place top 10 at the Tour de France for the first time, he has earned the respect of his teammates and team directors alike.
| Factfile: Floyd Landis Born: October 14, 1975 at Lancaster, PA. Resides: with wife Amber and daughter Ryan in Temecula, CA. Height: 5 foot 10 Weight: 150 pounds Turned pro: 1999 Teams: Phonak (2005-06), U.S. Postal (2002-04); Mercury (1999-2001). UCI ProTour ranking: 75th Web site: www.floydlandis.com Major performances: 2005: 3rd overall, Tour de Georgia (plus TT stage win); 9th overall, Tour de France; 11th overall, Dauphiné Libéré. 2004: 1st Tour of the Algarve (plus one stage win); 7th overall, Tour of the Basque Country; 8th overall, Critérium International; 23rd overall, Tour de France. 2003: 76th overall, Vuelta a España; 77th overall, Tour de France. 2002: 2nd overall, Dauphiné Libéré; 5th overall, Circuit de la Sarthe; 61st overall, Tour de France. 2001: 13th overall, Critérium International. 2000: 1st overall, Tour du Poitou-Charentes; TT stage win and 5th overall, Tour de Langkawi. 1999: 3rd overall, Tour de l’Avenir; stage win, Cascade Classic; stage win, Three Days of Redding; 16th, GP des Nations TT. |
When Landis moved to Phonak from being Lance Armstrong’s lieutenant at U.S. Postal he was expecting to ride backup to another former teammate, his good friend Tyler Hamilton. Then came the blood-doping "positives" that led to Hamilton and Santiago Perez, Phonak’s best riders in 2004, both leaving the team. There were even doubts that Phonak could continue at the top level when the UCI initially rejected its application to the ProTour because of the "ethical" problems.
After replacing key management — Belgian John Lelangue is now the team manager, Spanish veteran Juan Fernandez the directeur sportif — and following a last-minute appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, Phonak was accepted as the 20th ProTour team in February 2005. Landis, too, had a new role: team leader.
Almost a year into the job, he said he felt more comfortable as the leader "partly because when I came to the team I expected to have another year where I would help Tyler and not have so much focused on me. Then the problems with Tyler started … and we didn’t know who should be the leader, me, [Santiago] Botero or [Oscar] Pereiro, so we went with three…. I don’t mind the pressure, but I just wasn’t prepared mentally for what I was getting into."
Team captain
Turning toward 2006, Landis said, "The whole team feels more connected now. We’re not wondering if the whole thing is going to dissolve any moment, so from that perspective it’s easier for me to take more of a responsibility role, try to be an example to the other guys.
"Everybody seem to fit together well … though there’s always some adjustment when you have a few new guys, and anytime you have 30 [riders] you don’t see each other much, it takes a while."
Then, sounding like a true team captain, he added, "In the end I’ll still just be myself, try and make the other guys better; that’s the main thing a leader can do, should do. They all have their own dreams and their own goals, and in the end if you can help them then they’re really going to help you later on, and everybody wins."
Considering the traumatic changes to the team and his career last year, Landis did well to pull things together. "It was a bit chaotic here last year," he admitted. "We didn’t have the same atmosphere, and partly because of all the peripheral nonsense I started on a lower level."
Given that difficult introduction to Phonak, Landis did well to pull things around and place third at April’s Tour de Georgia (including winning the 29km time trial stage ahead of CSC’s Dave Zabriskie), 11th overall at June’s Dauphiné Libéré and ninth at the Tour. Also, after the chaotic spring, it was probably unsurprising that Landis faded in the Tour’s final week, whereas that was his strongest week the previous year with Postal.
"I raced a lot before the [2004] Tour and I was in good shape all year, which I would ordinarily do," he said. "All things considered, I’m happy with the way the Tour went last year. Obviously, you go there and want to win the race — everybody would like to win the Tour — but it was the first time I was the leader of a [Tour] team. It was a learning experience, and there are things that will change, but I can’t say it was a disappointment.
"It’s much better this year with less anxiety about [the team’s status]. We can focus on what we’re doing, and [so] I’m in better shape now than I was in January last year."
California, Georgia and the Giro
Landis said he was pleased to be starting his season at the Tour of California. "I’m quite happy about that actually as it gives me a good excuse to go back to California, so I get to go home for more time than normal" with wife Amber and 9-year-old daughter Ryan. Landis said that, while he’s in Europe, he talks to his family "every day … many times a day. The good thing is they’re sleeping while I’m training and so in the evening I can talk to them when it’s their morning. It’s tough to go away for long periods of time, but when I’m away for more than a month at a time they come to Europe and see me for a week or two. So it’s not so bad."
But the prospect of racing in his home state is a rare luxury. "I think everybody [on the team] is excited [about the Tour of California]," Landis said. "It wasn’t hard to find people to volunteer and go to the race. Who doesn’t wanna go see California? When the European guys get a chance to go to Georgia or California, it’s not hard to find volunteers."
"We’ll have a good race," added Landis, who said that among his teammates [for California] are South African sprinter Robbie Hunter, Spanish classics specialist Miguel Perdiguero, and his new American teammate Pat McCarty. "I can’t remember who the rest of the list is … but the guys are motivated, that’s the main thing."
"I’m excited that [the race] exists," he continued, "and it’s good for our new sponsor, iShares [the world’s largest family of exchange-traded funds from Barclays Global Investors]. They’re from California, so it’s convenient for them. They can come and see what it’s about — hopefully, it’s a good start for them."
On his return to Europe, Landis rides Paris-Nice and the Critérium International in France before returning Stateside for the Tour de Georgia in late April. Then, for the first time, Landis will start the Giro d’Italia before heading to the Tour. "It’s not a long list," he admitted, "but there’s some long races."
No single-day classics? "It’s not my thing," he said. "I did them a few years in a row, and I liked them; they’re exceptional races. They’re some of the best races to do, but you have to really focus on them…. I’d rather take my chances racing in Georgia and the Giro — I’ve never done it. Two years ago, I was good in the Tour, and then I did the Vuelta. I was a little tired at the end, but I think if I do the Giro the way I plan to do it, it should be good preparation for the Tour."
And what’s that plan? "No stress, or as little stress as you can have in a race. But there’s no pressure on me to do anything [at the Giro]. If I’m good in the mountains, then I can try to do something, but I don’t plan to. I think we’ll just try to win stages. [New Phonak teammate] Axel [Merckx] has motivation for the race, but whoever wants to be [the team leader], raise their hand, and I’ll help them."
Main target: the Tour
As for choosing which riders will be on Landis’s squad for the Tour de France, he said, "It’s a dynamic process…. Obviously there has to be some changes from last year, Pereiro left, but as far as the other guys, we’ll sit down at times throughout the season." At the moment, besides Landis, the shoo-ins are the team’s two Colombian riders, Botero and Victor Hugo Peña.
Peña, who lost most of last season because of a bad injury, is another former Postal team worker. If his season goes better this year, he could be Phonak’s leader at the Giro before going to the Tour to help Landis. Meanwhile, Botero, the former world time trial champion, is again spending February and March at home training in the Andes before he defends his title at April’s Tour de Romandie.
With riders like Botero and Peña at his disposal, along with probable Tour starters José Gutierrez of Spain and Alexandre Moos of Switzerland, Landis has the ability to move up to the top five this year. After all, at last year’s Tour, he was sixth in both of the time trials and sixth on the first Pyrenean stage to Ax-3 Domaines, and he finished the Tour only 1:43 behind fifth-place Alexander Vinokourov.
On the downside, Landis lost a combined 6:44 to race champion Armstrong on the other two mountaintop finishes, at Courchevel (11th) and Pla d’Adet (19th). Clearly, eliminating, or mitigating, the "bad days" is one of Landis’s goals for 2006.
"There’s times when I don’t like [cycling]," he admitted, "but there’s times like that in any job. You don’t stop and just give up; you go on because sometimes those end up being the parts you remember — the miserable parts. You forget how bad it was … and then you go do it again.
"Every year there’s races where, after about three or four kilometers, you realize you probably just shouldn’t be there. But you don’t get in the car; you get through it…. Those are the ones that make you stronger in the end. The best thing for my mental state is to deal with it and get through it. I always feel better afterwards, no matter how bad it feels. I always sleep better afterwards.
"And I’m sure there’ll be some days like that this year. You try to time it so that the [races] you care about aren’t like that, but … those are the worst ones, where you thought you were going to be good and you’re not.
"Once in a while you wanna be good and you’re not. That’s when you second-guess yourself. You look at the big picture if you have to — you do 60 to 100 races a year…. Nobody wins all of them. If you win a couple, then you’re one of the best in the world. There’s always gonna be bad days, even for the best guys."
One of Landis’s ugliest days last year coincided with the Tour stage to Pla d’Adet, the day that his old teammate George Hincapie came out on top. "I knew I was having a bad day from the beginning, so the last climb was like ‘get to the finish,’ the day’s over at that point. Yeah, I’d hoped to be better that day."
"Everybody, even the guy who wins, has bad days in the Tour," Landis observed. "The objective is that they happen when nobody notices them, on days when you can hide. On a day like [Pla d’Adet] … there’s no place to hide. I don’t know how many climbs there were [on that stage], but it seemed like about 50 to me."
Visionary trainer
Landis has used various coaches and trainers since he converted from mountain biking to professional road racing in 1999. His current advisors are Colorado-based physiologist Alan Lim and Chicago-based coach Robbie Ventura.
"Robbie’s an old teammate of mine," Landis said. "He’s had a training business for a while, and he has a lot of information from tests he’s done. Even though it may not be [athletes] at the top level, it’s still massive amounts of information, and that’s what you need to understand how it works. He’s just the most positive guy, and so he’s a big support for me. He can always make things look brighter."
Both Ventura and Lim help Landis interpret and use the read-outs from his PowerTap power meter training rides, and also share the information with his teammates. "The information … is a long-term thing," Landis explains. "The more information we get now, the more it’ll help the young guys on the team. They can look at what I’m doing now [and apply it to their training]. You can’t compare the watts exactly but you can use a formula based on their weight…. There’s no point in keeping it secret, because either you can do [the training] or you can’t. So we share it….
"It’s fun, actually, to look at and compare with the other guys, even when you do training rides like today, just to see what the numbers are. But anything like that, that you can focus on while you’re training, makes training easier. If you’re just out riding wondering if you’re getting stronger or not, things get boring. When you need to do six hours training you’ve got to think about something."
Landis splits his training sessions into various intervals at different wattage levels, but unlike many modern pros he’s not a big fan of timing himself on specific climbs, or making repeated climbs of the same hill. "I would see no point in setting a record when I’m all alone anyway," he said. "That’s what the race is for, so I’ll save my hard efforts for the race."
In that sense, he is not exactly like his former boss Armstrong, with whom Landis often trained during his three years at Postal. But the country boy from Pennsylvania believes he does resemble the seven-time Tour champion in other ways. Asked whether he could envision one day getting the single-minded focus that made Armstrong so successful, Landis said, "Yeah, I’d like to think that.
"Whether I win the Tour or not, I don’t know; but I don’t know if I could ever handle as much stress as he put on himself. I like my chances … but in all fairness, I’m not gonna make any claims that I can do anything. We’ll see what goes…."
Given his growing confidence as a rider and maturity as a leader, Landis might get closer to his goal this year than even he believes possible. But the first stop on the ride is the California prologue up San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill on Sunday.
