With one remarkable and daring solo ride, Floyd Landis stepped out of the shadow of his former boss, Lance Armstrong, and made sure his own name would be mentioned with the legends of the Tour de France.
On Wednesday, on the final mountain climb of the day, he ran out of gas and lost eight minutes to his biggest rivals.
"I was deeply humiliated, almost in a state of depression," Landis said.
PHOTO: AFP
He also said of himself, "I work hard and never give up."
Those qualities were more than evident the following day when, on the last of three stages in the Alps, the 30-year-old Pennsylvania native attacked early, less than halfway up the first of three big climbs, and took off on what amounted to a furious, all-out solo ride of more than 130km.
At the end of the stage, Landis had regained most of the time lost the day before, won his first-ever Tour de France stage and secured his place in Tour legend.
PHOTO: AFP
Landis then nailed down the Tour de France championship on Saturday, in a 57km time trial, to all but seal victory in the three-week race by 59 seconds over his friend and former teammate, Oscar Pereiro Sio of Spain.
Landis's victory was especially sweet because, as he has said, this may have been his last Tour de France.
As a result of a crash on his bicycle in early 2003, Landis's right hip is afflicted with osteonecrosis, or bone death, a condition caused by a lack of blood supply to the affected area. Later this year, he will undergo hip replacement surgery, without knowing if he will be able to ride competitively again.
When he went public about his condition at the beginning of the Tour's second week, the 30-year-old Pennsylvania native described his discomfort as follows: "Sometimes it's a sharp pain. When I pedal and walk, it comes and goes, but mostly it's an ache, like an arthritis pain. It aches down my leg into my knee ... when I walk it hurts, when I ride it hurts."
There is another personal reason Landis will savor his Tour championship, for a victory in the world's most prestigious cycling event is more than fitting for a man whose entire life was transformed by the bicycle.
Landis was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, into a Mennonite family and community, and grew up not being allowed to dance, watch television or wear certain articles of clothing, such as shorts.
"It wasn't all the rules that got me, so much as the fact that they didn't seem logical to me," Landis said.
"Does God really care if we wear shorts or not?" he said.
He was also told that if he continued racing the mountain bike he had bought at the age of 15, he would go to hell.
"I love my parents, and they're good people. But that didn't make sense to me. So I knew I had to get out, and the bike was the way," he said.
When he was 19, he moved to California, where he tasted alcohol and caffeine for the first time in his life and saw his first motion picture.
Although he has since left the strictures of his upbringing far behind, Landis said that he still believed in the values he was raised with: labor, teamwork and humility.
Landis' 57-second margin over Pereiro, who was second, was the sixth-smallest in Tour history, and the tightest since LeMond's record-low 8 seconds over Frenchman Laurent Fignon in 1989.
Germany's Andreas Kloeden was third, 1:29 behind Landis.
Norway's Thor Hushovd won the final stage of the three-week race, a 154.5km route from Sceaux-Antony to Paris.
He had also won the Tour prologue on July 1.
For the finish on Sunday, Russia's Viatceslav Ekimov, 40, led the peloton as it arrived for the first of eight laps on the famed Paris avenue to honor him as the Tour's oldest rider. It was his 15th Tour -- one shy of Dutch cyclist Joop Zoetemelk's record.
Australia's Robbie McEwen won the green jersey given to the best sprinter for a third time, and Denmark's Mickael Rasmussen earned the polka-dot jersey awarded to the best climber for a second year. Italy's Damiano Cunego, 25, won the white jersey as the best young rider.
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