He's returning to professional cycling on US soil this weekend, and already the drama has begun.
I'm not talking about Lance Armstrong; I'm talking about Floyd Landis.
Floyd Landis returns to professional cycling in Sacramento on Saturday for the 9-day Amgen Tour of California, but he almost didn't make it. He crashed on Thursday.
Landis has served his two years in purgatory after lab tests during the 2006 Tour de France showed that he doped. Now Landis is leader of the OUCH pro cycling team, which was invited to join the peloton that will be racing around California from Saturday through Feb. 22.
But Landis crashed on Thursday during a training ride. He couldn't make the early evening in press conference where some of the race notables, such as Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer, and Tyler Hamilton, were present. [Read about the press conference at VeloNews.]
According to information posted on the OUCH team website:
“After evaluation by OUCH medical staff, his injuries were determined to be minor and limited to bruising. His surgically repaired hip is fine and he is looking forward to starting the Amgen Tour of California on Saturday in Sacramento.”
It's almost like Landis is starting the Tour of California the way he ended the 2006 Tour de France. In one of the latter stages, Landis held a press conference to say that he was riding in extreme pain caused by deterioration of his hip joint. The hip had degenerated because of a bicycle crash he suffered in early 2003 on a training ride.
You can see why they would check his hip after such a crash on Thursday.
In September 2006, Landis underwent a Smith and Nephew Birmingham hip resurfacing procedure. It survived his crash during Colorado's Leadville 100 in 2007, and it survived his crash on Thursday.
I'm glad to hear that he'll be able to race. He won the first Tour of California in 2006, and it will be interesting to see if he can make a run at it this year as well. I'm betting that the crash did nothing more than help Landis focus on the task at hand.
The Amgen Tour of California prologue is a 2.4-mile individual time trial around downtown Sacramento. It runs from about 1:30-4 p.m. (PST) on Saturday.
See the Versus TV schedule and Tour Tracker schedule for the Tour of California.
Photo above taken by Jonathan Devich for the OUCH pro cycling website.
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