Trying Times

The screen saver on the home computer of Floyd and Amber Landis is a picture of the couple embracing on July 22 in a town called Montceau-les-Mines. It was taken on the penultimate day of the Tour de France; Floyd had just ridden into the yellow jersey. "It all seems a little blurry," Amber said last Friday, "like it happened a long time ago."

As the world knows, Floyd went on to win the Tour, only to learn that a urine sample showed an elevated level of testosterone. That result sent Landis into a downward spiral that has been every bit as dramatic as his victory. Landis was fired by his team, Phonak. The Tour announced that it no longer considered him the winner of the race. iShares, which had signed a three-year deal to become the team's title sponsor starting next season, bailed out.

Then came the events of Aug. 15. The same day Phonak team owner Andy Rihs announced that he was disbanding the team--"I've had to do something I've never done in my whole life: give up!" declared the hearing-aid magnate--Landis's father-in-law, David Witt, 57, took his own life, putting a gun to his head. His body was found in his car in a San Diego parking garage.

Before he married Amber's mother, Rose, Witt--an amateur bicycle racer--shared a San Diego apartment with Landis in 1998. "We lived across from a little preschool," Floyd recalled last spring. "Amber's mom was a teacher there. He ran into her one day and started dating her. They introduced me to Amber. We got married, and then they got married. So now I'm related to the guy I shared an apartment with. But he was my friend first."

For the Landis family, grieving was made more difficult by the fresh flurry of media attention. The obvious question--now unanswerable--was, How big a part did Floyd's situation play in Witt's decision to take his own life? But the Landises weren't going there. In a phone conversation two days after Witt's death, Landis politely declined to confirm reports that Witt had been suffering from depression, saying only, "We have no way of knowing how much pain he must have been in." Amber had this to add: "People are going to say that this happened because Phonak fell apart, and that's bull----."

Amber was a welter of emotions, feeling grief for Witt, sorrow for her suddenly widowed mother and anger that people won't leave her husband alone. "Right now," she said, "he's just another guy who lost somebody he loved."