The Stage That Changed The Tour De France Forever

Rumour has it you'll smash it in work tomorrow if you scroll back up and like the video 👌

Spectacular video and an incredibly underrated channel! Keep up the great work, I’d love to see more videos like this one

😂doped to the gills

I was near the Arrivée in Morzine that day

Genuine question: Why was Landis' bike change suspicious? I thought this happened all of the time. Thanks.

That sport is still not clean….

I think the doping test was wrong testosterone doesn’t work that quick it takes a few weeks for it to build up in the system , not a day was he made a scapegoat for Armstrong which in the end back fired???
Was it motor doping ? Which is more plausible we will never know

great video, I loved Floyd!

Floyd is the Henry Hill of cycling

The most insane ride ever seen on TV…Landis is a KING…Don't care what other people thik about his performance…

LANDIS WAS SO DOPED UP..ITS A JOKE..ONE OF THE BIGGEST DOPERS EVER IN THE TOUR..HE SHOULD BE BANNED FROM THAT FAKE WIN !!!

I saw Landis sitting all alone at the finish of a stage of Tour of California. No one would talk to him at all.

Floyd
Lance Armstrong: How bad do you want to win a stage in the Tour
de France?
Floyd Landis: Real bad.
Armstrong: How fast can you go down hill?
Landis: I go downhill real fast. Can I do it?
Armstrong: Sure you can do it … run like you stole something
Floyd.

People are just looking out for themselves and I understand how
business works and the connections that people like that have,
[they] have very long tentacles. But some people do become nearly
untouchable … It’s hypocritical very, very hypocritical. I’ve come in
contact with journalists with people who are supposed to be anti-
doping journalists or people who are looking for the thing and
there’s stuff smack in their face. They still don’t touch. Do you know
what I mean? There’s two very, very big standards that’s been put
out there and they still won’t touch it. You’re a joke, an absolute
joke. What’s the fastest guy in the world?

When the Mennonite Floyd Landis first left his world to visit ours, so that he
could compete in the World Junior Mountain Bike Championships, he felt like
he had gone to Mars. When he switched to road racing and joined the U.S.
Mercury team in 2001 he admitted to being ‘still completely against’ doping, ‘it
didn’t represent what I felt cycling was to me’. He was ‘really confused as to
how people could just accept that that was the way it is’. He didn’t know then
that ‘the people at the top could actually manipulate’ the anti-doping system.
He learnt soon enough that ‘everyone with any power’ was in on keeping the
lid on the reality of what went on. He didn’t expect that ‘the guys publicly
decrying the whole thing, and stating that they were the ones trying to fix it,
were in fact making it happen’.He soon learnt the attitude of those governing
the sport: ‘We don’t care what the rules are, this is how we do it’. And it was
here that he first learnt to understand the story that Scorsese was telling in the
film Goodfellas.

A year later, in 2002, Landis joined the US Postal team he soon started to talk
to Armstrong about doping and about how the Italian doctor Michelle Ferrari
worked. He also quickly learnt that in order to protect oneself at the top one
had to be able to call on favours from the sports governors. In the course of
this lesson he was told by Armstrong of the UCI’s cover-up of the Texan’s 2001 suspicious test result in the Tour de Suisse. Of his decision to begin to
dope Landis is candid:
I take responsibility for doing it. I made these decisions. I don’t point
fingers and no one forced me to do it but the circumstances were
such that the decision was almost made for me … I just found out
that things were not as simple as I thought they were.

By 2004 Floyd’s relationship with both Armstrong and Bruyneel was in tatters.
He left US Postal and joined the Swiss based Phonak team. Fast forward
eighteen months or so, the year after Lance 2.0 retires, and a few days after
winning the Tour de France in 2006, Landis of course tested positive for
testosterone. He still denies having used testosterone, raising doubts about the
competence of the scientific procedures; however, he does not of course any
longer deny doping.
When faced with the fact that the Holy Grail was being taken from him Floyd
dug in. This was what the sport expected; deny doping, fight the case and if
necessary take the ban. And after that return to the fold. ‘I was assured that,
whatever I do I need to just not talk and I’ll have a team’. The system
demanded silence:
‘… there is a parallel world where the fans see what’s put in front of
them and appreciate it for what they believe it to be and beside it is
the peloton who know the real story … there are no secrets within
the peloton, management, the UCI and anyone with a financial
interest in cycling’.

That’s how Floyd justified the things he said in his defense.
The advice of the former US Postal rider and now boss of the Garmin team,
Jonathan Vaughters, was to ‘tell the truth’. But Floyd and Vaughters had
different conceptions of the truth: ‘in my head the truth is more complex than in
Vaughters’ head’. The truth for Vaughters was only a truth about yourself; one
must never say anything about anyone else. The omerta was and as we shall
see remains strong:
… that’s the problem I have with Jonathan’s statement that I should
just tell what I know about me. That’s not the story at all. That’s not
the truth. There is more to it than just doping. And if you don’t see
the whole picture you don’t know anything.
The omerta entailed only talking about what you as an individual did. This
importantly ensured that you did not ‘spit in the soup’, that you never
implicated another person who was not already implicated. It was this Floyd
began to wrestle with as he began the journey to his coming out in the first half
of 2010.

Floyd is unable to describe how he felt during his years of deceit. In his mind
‘there was no difference between saying “I didn’t do it” and telling a half-truth
like David Millar did: “I did it once and was hoping to get caught …’.

The trophy he had won in 2006 and which he later smashed had turned him into
someone he was not. By 2010 faced with the reality that he was not going to
return to the fold, to the security of the peloton, he had decided that was not
who he wanted to be any longer.
In May 2010 Floyd became the Bartleby of the professional cycling world.
Herman Melville’s character Bartleby is a figure of dissent, a figure that
decided he would prefer not to. For Floyd preferring to not to meant rejecting
the norms and customs of the world that he had found himself within. And in a
world where cycling had seen the return of Lance 3.0 Floyd decided that he
would prefer not to be bound by the truth of the peloton any longer. It would be
the beginning of the unraveling of the myth, which Armstrong may have
perfected, but which he had never himself invented.
It may be that the most decisive moment was not his revelations, his decision
to speak a truth that went beyond himself, but was in fact his response to the
legal threats of the former UCI President Hein Verbruggen and the then
President Pat McQuaid. Both men took umbrage at Floyd’s claim that the
former had been involved in fixing suspicious test results for Lance 2.0. Faced
with legal demands and threats of litigation in the Swiss Courts, Floyd decided
not to play their game. He stepped outside of the law and invented his own,
fake law firm, called Gray Manrod, which was said to be based in New York,
Baghdad, and Djibouti, and specialised in Vegetable Rights Abuse Advocacy
and Pronunciation Mediation, to respond to their correspondence. Floyd had
not only rejected the peloton’s norms, but in response to McQuaid and
Verbruggen’s legal threats he rejected The Law itself. It took a while for the
sport’s governors to cotton on.
In the end it was not evangelical anti-dopers or investigative journalists that
brought down Lance, but it was his own prodigy. Following his positive test
result in the 2006 Tour De France, Floyd Landis had followed orders. He had
stuck to the omerta and done what was expected of him; deny and fight. But
even after serving his time Floyd was still on the outer with no apparent
prospect of ever entering the big time of pro cycling again. He had put together
a small band of supporters and knocked around riding the races he could in
the teams he could. With Lance 3.0 in full flight Floyd sought support to have his team compete in the Tour of California, one of the events outside of old
Europe, like the Tour Down Under that had gained prominence in a global
cycling world. That support was denied.
At the 2010 Tour of California Lance 3.0 faced with Floyd rejecting the omerta
simply stated: ‘We have our truth; we like our truth’.
#giroditalia
#tdf
#vueltaespaña
#cycling
#lancearmstrong
#floydlandis
#bloomsburypublishing
https://www.bloomsburyprofessional.com/uk/governing-the-society-of-competition-9781509936571/

One of the greatest stage wins ever. Drugs, yes, shut up. Everyone else was on them too.

Floyd looked a bit like Daryl Hall. ☺

I walked into work the next day( the tdf is middle of night in Australia) I said to workmates that that was either the best ride we will ever see or it was the other thing; sure enough it was the other thing.

Even my old dad new he was drinking to much whisky

What about a video for Cameron Mason? Made some mindblowing growth recent years and would be interesting.