A very long interview with Floyd Landis
Last May, a couple of days after the first scraps of his doping confession made headlines around the world, I sent an email to Floyd Landis reminding him of some notes I had written on July 13, 2006…
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A few hours later he sent a reply…
I didn’t think I wanted to read more about Floyd Landis, but I’m glad I did. This interview is fascinating on more than one level. Floyd makes sense to me for the first time. I even think he might have credibility with me, also a first. And if he has credibility, Lance is a doper….
Oh, heck. Here’s a few morsels:
So going to public school exposed you to this other world – our world?
Yeah, which I otherwise would not have seen at all. We didn’t have a television, we didn’t have a radio, there was no exposure whatever to anything else. And then all of a sudden I was the odd one and I was forced to look around and say ‘Why am I behaving this way and they are behaving that way?’ And then I just started to analyse everything that I saw.
And
You were riding mountain bikes and had been selected to ride in the World Junior Championships at that point?
Yeah, in ’93, that was the first time I was ever on an airplane and the entire trip was kind of traumatic because I hadn’t really been anywhere on my own or to a foreign country. I had never seen anyone drink alcohol and I was so overwhelmed by the way people were behaving that I could barely race – I think I finished last.
That’s all. The rest has to be read in context. The interview was the basis for an article in last Sunday’s Sunday Times of London, but the article is inaccessible to those without a subscription.