Originally Posted by Daniel Coyle

The crux moment arrived in Stage 6, on the way to Cannes. Halfway into the race, a group of 19 broke away, and none of the other teams were willing to help Phonak chase them down. With the gap widening and the race becoming dangerously unstable, Landis decided to send a message.

At the base of a climb, he ordered his team to the front and told them to go full throttle. They blasted for three, five, ten minutes, and when everyone behind was gasping and hurting, Landis turned to address the peloton.

"You want more of that, mother****ers?" he asked loudly. "Because if you do, we've got plenty."

The race went smoothly the rest of the way. After it ended, I asked Chechu Rubiera, a former teammate of Landis at U.S. Postal, if Floyd had reminded him of anyone in particular at that moment. Rubiera just smiled.
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When the 2005 season ended and Armstrong retired, the dispute quickly cooled. Both sides went out of their way to extend olive branches, a process that accelerated when Discovery team director Johan Bruyneel, with Armstrong's blessing, took Landis out to dinner and tried to recruit him to join their team. ("Johan even paid!" Landis recalls with a smile.) While Armstrong and Landis are not as close as they once were, things are civil, even warm. When Landis won Paris–Nice, Armstrong e-mailed his congratulations.

"A year of that was too much," Landis says. "I'll take whatever responsibility is mine for what happened. In the race, it can be like a video game—you're killing this guy or that guy. But then afterward you turn it off and everybody's real people again.