By Austin Murphy

"Let's live as well as we can today," he implores the members of his tribe. The lack of a cure can't stop them from enjoying what he calls "curative moments -- small victories when we're not thinking about PD [Parkinson's disease] because we're purely happy right now." Even with the Body Snatcher lurking, he insists, "life is pretty damn rich."

After confiscating those scissors from his father at the Carson velodrome, Taylor takes to the track for his qualifier, in which he destroys Ireland's David O'Loughlin by more than five seconds.

Watching trackside is Vaughters, the extravagantly sideburned Slipstream director. "Two years ago," he marvels, "this kid wasn't even racing."

A former prodigy himself, Vaughters isn't sure how Taylor's talent will ultimately manifest itself. He suspects the kid may end up too big to be an elite climber, which could dampen his prospects for winning one of the grand tours. (Taylor rejects that speculation -- his training for pursuit, he says, has given him more confidence in his climbing. In both, he points out, "you're going all out as hard as you can. There's not really any place to hide.")

Asked to hazard a guess, Vaughters predicts a career for Taylor similar to that of Switzerland's Fabian Cancellara, the reigning time-trial world champion, who is also scary strong in one-day classics like Paris-Roubaix and Milan-San Remo, both of which he has won. For the foreseeable future, Taylor will continue to ride for Slipstream, whose depth and talent is sometimes overshadowed by its commitment to drug-free performance, which has put the Argyle Armada out front in the battle to clean up the sport.

In that night's final, Taylor promptly falls a half-second behind Jenning Huizenga, a Dutchman who finished fifth at the 2007 worlds. No biggie. Halfway through the race Taylor finds an extra gear, closes the gap, then pulls away as if his Felt TK1 track bike were equipped with a twist-grip accelerator.

On the podium Taylor leans over to accept a bouquet from a flower girl, then thrusts his arms up into a giant V. It is a galvanizing moment. That upper-case V was Davis's signature gesture during his career.

Busting that move, to hear Davis tell it, is a thrill that falls somewhere between sex and found money. "One of the beautiful things about being a bike racer," Davis tells audiences, "is that when you cross the line first, you get to throw your arms up." For a few electrifying, life-affirming seconds, he says, "it's like you're tapping into the current of the earth itself."

In February he stood before close to 500 people at a Stanford symposium on exercise and the brain. After reminding his audience to get off the couch, go for walks and celebrate small victories, he delivered these instructions: "On the count of three, let's all close our eyes and win our own personal bike race. One . . . two . . . three!"

Up shot nearly a thousand arms, a vast field of V's, many of them palsied and tremoring and imperfect, all perfectly defiant.