Can Floyd Landis be a great American hero if nobody back home knows his name?
In one of the great sports stories of this or any other year, Landis will ride through the streets of Paris today as the champion of the only bicycle race that really matters.
They call it the Tour de France.
But we own it.
As stirring comebacks go, Landis deserves to be as famous in U.S. sports lore as Seabiscuit. Or the 1951 Giants.
“I could not be happier. It’s one of the best days of my life,” Landis told the media Saturday, after putting the pedal to the metal and claiming the race lead in Stage 19 by staring down his closest rivals in a 35.4-mile time trial of nerves and will.
It’s all over except the sound of champagne corks popping.
What awaits Landis, left for dead in this race after bonking on a steep, hard road last week, is a well-deserved victory parade to the finish line.
But does it really matter to the masses back in the USA?
“I’m very lucky,” said Landis, who fell from first place to out of sight on Wednesday, only to come roaring back with one of the most audacious rises from the ashes in the past 50 years of athletic competition. “I’m a person who works hard and never gives up. Otherwise, I’m just a human being.”
And that’s exactly the problem for Landis.
This country is big enough for only one cycling legend.
Seven-time Tour champ Lance Armstrong, whose popularity was never about his sport, has cornered the market on athletic respect for an activity many Americans ignorantly dis as being as easy as, well, riding a bike.
Armstrong grew famous for beating cancer, making yellow bracelets hip and causing the heart of country-rock crooner Sheryl Crow to swoon.
Think anybody will ask Landis to host the ESPYs?
Don’t bet on it.
If there’s anything your average fat guy snoozing on his sofa in Peoria hates more than being awakened for soccer, it’s cycling.
But I respectfully ask all those folks who regard the Tour de France about as seriously as celebrity poker: If Tiger Woods can be toasted for walking around Scotland without even carrying his own golf clubs, then shouldn’t we all be pretty darn impressed when Landis hauls a painfully arthritic hip all the way across France and back on a bike?
Armstrong is a genuine hero and a remarkable crusader, but there’s little wonder cancer never had a chance against him. The king of American cycling is meaner than barbed wire.
Landis, who grew up a Mennonite with parents who discouraged him from devoting his life to a silly pursuit that most kids master at age 6, will never be the cyclist that Armstrong was, but you would far rather have the new champ as your best friend.
“I said before, the most exciting way to win the Tour would be in the final time trial, but I really didn’t want it to come down to that,” Landis told reporters in France. “It takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice to win the Tour, and on top of that, a little bit of luck. I feel lucky.”
Imagine that. When Landis could have rubbed a yellow jersey in the faces of critics who razzed him for bonking only days earlier, a vindicated athlete responded with good, old-fashioned American humility.
There’s a reason the French are known for their arrogance.
They earned it, one five-star restaurant at a time. The French might not have invented looking down the nose at simpletons like you and me, but they turned haughtiness into an art form.
So it must gall them that the same as French fries and the French kiss, the USA has bought the franchise and put our grimy American fingerprints all over the Tour de France.
I only wish the applause for Landis was loud enough in his home country for the French to hear it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.
His story is ripe for Hollywood.
It has been at least two decades and far too long since the last great American bicycle movie.
Can’t we do better than “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure”?
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-820-5438 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
