I’ve known for quite some time that the current odds-on favorite to win the 2006 Tour de France, Floyd Landis, won the race the UCSD Cycling team puts on, Boulevard. Apparently, it was a big enough deal that it’s listed under his year 2001 results (perhaps because it was his only victory that year).
In the course of digging on the internet for this, I’ve discovered all kinds of history about Tour riders. Here’s an article at cyclingnews about the 2001 Boulevard race. You’ll notice that in second place was Baden Cooke, another Tour de France rider. Two years earlier Floyd did a bunch of Northern California races. Taking a look at the 1999 NCNCA road results we see that Floyd raced with Dave Zabriskie (a Tour rider with Berkeley connections) in the Dinuba Criterum. Floyd raced with David Clinger in that race, too, but he’s not famous for racing in the Tour. A Floyd Landes got 8th place in the Cantua Creek Road Race (scroll down for a “Lance Armstrong” getting 8th place in the cat 4s). Levi Leipheimer (a Tour rider from Santa Rosa) raced in that year’s edition of Copperopolis, a race I’ve done myself.
More local to San Diego, a recent article in the NY Times about Floyd, mentions his hip problems, and the location of his accident which precipitated his hip problems. Floyd hosts a training camp (for a fee, of course) in January, and if you want to try to run into him out on the roads, go look for him (post hip replacement surgery, presumably) riding up Palomar Mountain on Jan 25, 2007. Wear warm clothes!
