Landis' collapse puts Tour victory out of reach

	Floyd Landis is wearing yellow no more after his Stage 16 collapse dropped him to 11th place, more than eight minutes behind the leader. Bryn Lennon/AP
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LA TOUSSUIRE, France -- And then there were none.

A Tour de France that began with giddy talk of possibly two or three Americans on the podium took a stunning turn on Wednesday afternoon on the steeps of an Alp called La Toissure. One moment, Floyd Landis was pedaling up the six-percent grade of the Toissure with a hard-earned, two-minute lead over his closest competitor. The next, he was a soup sandwich, cast into a world of hurt by an acceleration he could not come close to matching. The guy who had not shown a moment's weakness in 17 days of racing became the picture of weakness, sweating profusely, his face losing color, his cadence labored. "Hey, people have bad days in this sport," said Robbie Ventura, Landis's coach, afterward. "There are days when you crack, but on those days, you lose one, maybe two minutes. This wasn't a crack, it was a detonation."

That blow-up dramatically rearranged the general classification. In finishing more than 10 minutes behind stage winner Mickael Rasmussen, Landis dropped to 11th overall, 8:08 behind his former teammate Oscar Pereiro, who now races for Caisse-Epargne. (As recently as four days ago, Pereiro was allowed to take the yellow jersey when Phonak chose not to chase down a breakaway he joined. That group was allowed to build a half-hour lead on the field, Phonak director John Lelangue having concluded that Pereiro was no threat to Landis in the GC. As Homer Simpson might say: "Doh!")

Carlos Sastre, who never looked back after dropping the hammer on Floyd early on La Toissure, simply tore up the rest of the climb, closing on but failing to overtake Rasmussen, who'd broken away much earlier in the day. With his second-place finish, the Spaniard only trails Pereiro by 1:50. Thirty-nine seconds behind him is Andreas Kloden, the German who must have been shocked to see Landis crater: the Phonak leader had sat on his wheel looking almost bored for the duration of the previous day's climb up the Alpe d'Huez.

Now, as his chest heaved and his face lost color and he labored to turn over his pedals, he appeared to be going backwards. The fissure Sastre had opened became a rift became a gulf became a chasm, and in 10 minutes time -- a seemingly insignificant blip in a three week race -- Landis had lost the Tour. Rider after rider cruised past, some registering surprise, some too absorbed in managing their own agony to acknowledge the broken figure before them. In one of the race's more poignant moments so far, Discovery's classy Jose Azevedo slowed to ride beside his ex-teammate, offering moral support and, it appeared, condolences.

The irony is that the new co-favorites, Kloden and Sastre, arrived at this race thinking they'd be working for someone else. But their respective team leaders, T-Mobile's Jan Ullrich and CSC's Ivan Basso, were sent home in disgrace on the eve of the Tour. It's very likely that one of them will ride into Paris in yellow. "I had a bad day on the wrong day," he told reporters at a hastily called press conference outside the Phonak team hotel, a half-mile from the finish line. "I suffered from the beginning. I tried to hide it, but in the end I couldn't go."

Was it a blood sugar issue? Had he bonked? No and no. "Sometimes you don't feel well, and it's on the wrong day," Landis explained with a rueful smile. "A lot of times you feel that way in the beginning [of a stage] and it comes around," he added. This stage, the most difficult of the Tour, packed in 17,000 feet of climbing, beginning with an ascent of the legendary, hors categorie Col du Galibier, and never let up. "There was never 15 minutes of flat [roads]," Landis recalled, "so I never recovered."

Asked if his compromised right hip had been bothering him -- the hip he will soon have replaced -- Landis said no. Asked by this reporter if he would tell us if his hip had been bothering him, Landis said no.

He went out of his way to thank his fellow Phonaks. "I'm proud of my team for standing behind me the whole time," he made a point of saying. Landis' biggest problem in this Tour was that his teammates didn't just stand behind him; they spent the majority of the mountain stages riding behind him.