"This Is As Good As Cycling Gets"
I know most of you don’t understand cycling, but yesterday’s performance by Floyd Landis was the most amazing day of cycling I’ve ever seen, and possibly ever in the history of the Tour de France. What he did just doesn’t happen. I’m trying to come up with an analogy, it’s like pitching a perfect game in game 7 of the World Series, and striking out all 27 batters, after getting shelled in game 4.

This was impossible. He had bonked the day before, lost around 10 minutes to the top riders, and lost the overall leader’s yellow jersey. You can’t make up more than a minute or two on the top riders in one stage when you’re a contender. You can’t break away from the top riders when you’re a contender. You can’t stay away from the top riders over 5 mountain climbs in the Alps over 130 kilometers on your own.

Floyd did. A kamikaze/berserker breakaway with nothing to lose, stomping it up the mountains and descending like a madman down them. None of us who have watched the Tour since the days of Greg LeMond in the 1980s have ever seen a top rider do this – no one has done something like this since Eddy Merckx, the greatest cyclist ever, did so in the late 1960s. I was on the edge of the couch for 4 hours – I couldn’t believe what I was watching.

Even more unbelievable, Landis has been suffering from osteonecrosis in his hip for the last 2 years since a crash in 2004. He can’t walk without severe pain, he can’t run at all, but thankfully for him pedaling a bicycle doesn’t put pressure on his dying bones. He will likely have to have hip replacement surgery sometime soon after the Tour, and that will most probably end his professional cycling career (although yesterday showed that counting him out is not such a good idea).

He hasn’t won yet. He is within a minute of the overall lead, and there is a time trial on Saturday where he should gain 2 or 3 minutes on the other general classification leaders because he is a stronger time trialer than Oscar Perreiro and Carlos Sastre, the riders still ahead of him in the GC. He is in prime position for an amazing Tour victory.

Yesterday was why I love cycling. The strategy, the courage, the pain, the heart, the undying self-belief. I’ll be talking about this one for the rest of my life. Go Floyd!
- posted by Liebs @ 10:05 PM