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Del Mar, California Floyd Landis is a quiet, unassuming kid from an even quieter, less assuming Mennonite family. He is also the unlikely winner of the 2006 Tour de France. At face value, he doesn't resemble a heroic athlete in the same vein as seven-time Tour champion Lance Armstrong, or other sports figures of some repute. Floyd hails from a town by the name of Farmersville. He's nice to a fault, slightly naïve and drives a small SUV. As the second oldest of six siblings, Landis might've grown up to be a cabinet-maker after a stint in the Peace Corps. He might've gone on to teach anthropology at a small community college in upstate New York. But something went terribly wrong. In an incredible display of tenacity and courage, the goofy kid with the young wife and stepdaughter won the most famous and grueling endurance sport in the world. And lots of people just don't know what to make of it. Even after hall of famer Armstrong's record breaking run, professional cycling still faced cultural thresholds and ideological barriers in American sport. But Lance had at least opened our minds to the possibility, the concept that cycling as a competitive arena was not reserved for dilatants who consider football garish and basketball too ethnic. While Americans may not really understand cycling, they have come to expect that we could be competitive with the best European teams. It didn't matter that the Continent had dominated the sport for 100 years. We'd sent a Texan with a cartoon superhero name. What kind of athlete goes by Mario anyway? And we'd begun to export our own brand of sporting neo-colonialism to the storied climbs of the French Alps and Basque Pyrenees. College coeds in lavender bra-tops and red, white and blue pom-poms lined the narrow roads up to Courchevel and Lézat-sur-Lèze. Bike racing was on prime time TV. We might as well own it. But a winner with a scruffy red beard who grew up, ah...fishing?  After chasing the limelight for so long, Landis hopes to prove the shadows it casts are only illusions. Americans can be very picky with their heroes. But even a hero with the name of Floyd is better than no hero at all. Or worse yet, a Frenchman who ought to be in Iraq liberating the country along with our own boys. And he did win Le Tour in an amazing devil-may-care style. Okay, so we let young Floyd into our fraternity and recast his likeness and our own expectations. For the briefest of periods, the Madison Avenue image-makers photo-shopped, and PR-schlepped the soft-spoken kid with a sister named Charity. And Floyd Landis, the unlikely champion, couldn't quite see what all the fuss was about. He knew he had a chance. His teammates knew. Insiders and competitors alike had covered his every move from the opening prologue. But ever the game player, before he faced major surgery to replace a degenerative hip, Floyd Landis fought to become the graceful champion that he actually was all along. Still, something was terribly wrong. No one could quite put a finger on it. Even his Phonak Team was playing something very close to their corporate vests. That's when the sky fell – Floyd Landis had failed a drug test. News at 11. That's where the story of Floyd Landis and his Technicolor Dream gets curiouser and curiouser. This is where the lessons (and there are many), the lies (you think cycling is full of Mother Teresas?) and the liabilities begin. This is where cycling becomes more of a chess game than a pack sprint. This is where Floyd asks us to make a choice. And then the lawyers take it from here. It's doubtful that we will ever know if Landis knowingly and willingly used synthetic testosterone to gain an unfair advantage. Even the most astute follower of the case may only reach a judgment call at best. Perhaps it was all a horribly executed plan, an accident costing seven figures of Landis and Co. Perhaps he was set up by a country – an institution – that had come to despise the brash Armstrong, a man it had unsuccessfully tried to pin a drug charge on, and now found a less-formidable opponent in the likeable country-kid. When you ask the body to do the things required of it to win the Tour, and you allow some meds for things like "dead hips," who's to say what kind of results a lab will find?
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