Synopses & Reviews
THE SERIES OF EVENTS surrounding Floyd Landis's 2006 Tour de France was as improbable as anything in the history of sports: He showed up nine seconds late for the race's opening prologue, donned the leader's yellow jersey twelve days later, and lost his lead only to regain it in remarkable fashion just before the Tour's final stage into Paris. Winning the Tour should have been the culmination of a life's dream, but a mere three days later, Landis was accused of using banned performance-enhancing drugs. Released by his team and threatened with the removal of his Tour title, Landis went from winning the most prestigious race of his career to being unfairly labeled as a cheater, a liar, and a doper.
Positively False is at once a memoir and a powerful indictment of the unchecked governing bodies of cycling that have compromised theintegrity of the sport as a whole. From leaving the Mennonite community of his youth in order to pursue his passion for cycling, to riding alongside Lance Armstrong for three years -- with whom he shared the same work ethic and competitive desire -- Floyd Landis details the highs and lows of his career with unabashed honesty. It is this same honesty with which he will clear his name once and for all, as he lays bare the inner workings of the cycling world -- a place where athletes are subject to the antiquated science, flawed interpretive protocols, and draconian legal processes of the anti-doping agencies -- and finally lays to rest the scandal that threatened to destroy everything he's worked so hard to achieve....
About the Author
Floyd Landis began his professional cycling career in 1995, one year
after graduating from Conestoga Valley High School. In 1997 he was the Men's
Under-23 National Champion. In 1998 Landis made the switch to road cycling.
He has completed the Tour de France every year since 2002. Floyd Landis
lives in Murrieta, California, with his wife, Amber, and their daughter,
Ryan. Loren Mooney is the executive editor of Bicycling magazine.
Her writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Reader's
Digest, New York, and other magazines and books. Mooney covered
her first Tour de France in 2006. She lives in New York City.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1 Breaking Away
Chapter 2 A Bunch of Screwups
Chapter 3 Life with Lance
Chapter 4 Just Barely
Chapter 5 Falling Apart
Chapter 6 To the Limit
Chapter 7 The Strongest One Here
Chapter 8 A Wide-Open Tour
Chapter 9 Stupid for Trying It
Chapter 10 Having It All
Chapter 11 Presumed Guilty
Chapter 12 The System Is Broken
Chapter 13 Whole Again
Chapter 14 The Wiki Defense
Chapter 15 Making It Right
Appendix
Acknowledgments