Both men could have vouched for Landis long before that. Armstrong because he plucked the then 26-year-old rider off a failing team and made him a key member of the winning U.S. Postal Service teams from 2002-04; Merckx because his son, Axel, is part of the Swiss Phonak squad that Landis willed to victory after he left USPS determined to become the leader of his own team.

“Floyd won this race,” Armstrong said Sunday afternoon from a Paris hotel room where he watched the finish. “His strength was not his team, his strength was his mind and his will.”

Landis flashed those qualities even as a teenager, coming to cycling not as a pedigreed insider, but as a rank outsider and the most willful of Paul and Arlene Landis’ six children. Raised in a strict Mennonite home in a small town in Lancaster County, Pa., he began riding with pals just to get around. It quickly became an obsession.

“They weren’t really all that thrilled about it,” Landis recalled in an interview with The Associated Press last Monday. “Their life was based around working — always hard work — and the rest of the time spent in church. They gave me things to do — they probably would’ve done that, anyway — but it’s possible they gave me more because I would’ve been riding my bike otherwise.”

But he did all the chores, then donned sweat clothes instead of a racing outfit to avoid offending the community’s sense of modesty and took off for long solo rides into the hills at night. He became an accomplished mountain bike racer by age 18, spending less and less time in Dutch country before making a clean break two years later with a move to California. Soon after, Landis stepped out of the Mennonite religious fold, too.

“I wanted to get away and find out what there was in life, on my own,” he said. “And the bicycle was a way of doing that.”

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What Landis didn’t leave behind, though, was a voracious appetite for work. He made the segue from mountain bike competitions to road races because it was the only way to put food on the table. But in that endeavor, too, he carried over a piece of the past that would forge a champion — the willingness to go it alone.

Good thing, too, since both his calamitous fall from the lead and his phoenix-like rise the next day were accomplished with precious little help from his teammates.

Half a world away Sunday, back at the Martindale Mennonite Church that Landis’ family still attends, the Rev. David Sensenig explained celebrating individual accomplishment is frowned upon in the faith. But on the lawn outside the Landis home nearby, alongside a sign that read, “To God be the glory” was another that acknowledged the long, difficult ride one of their own had completed with his virtues intact.

It said simply, “Floyd’s the man.”