Garrett Lai

Absolutely unpredictable. If this year’s Tour had a theme, that would be it.

With Lance Armstrong out of the field this year, and no clear favorites, everyone thought this year’s Tour would be hard to call. But nobody — not even Eddy Merckx himself, history’s greatest-ever racing cyclist — foresaw just how chaotic, how wildly exciting this year’s Tour would turn out to be.

In the Armstrong era, the Tour outcome was almost boringly clear once the initial time trial and first mountain stage were over. This year it was the exact opposite — everything was up in the air. The organizers could barely muster up a final start list until less than 24 hours before the start, thanks to the fallout from the Spanish doping raid that took out heavy favorites Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, and disqualified Alexandre Vinokourov’s team (because they couldn’t muster up the six-rider minimum, not because Vino was implicated). And we didn’t know who would win until the very end of Friday’s penultimate stage, when the last rider had crossed the line.

Had Ullrich and Basso made the start, the race would have undoubtedly come down to a contest between the German and the Italian, with everyone else vying for third. But in their absence, minus the race-aggressive, animating presence of Vinokourov, the first two weeks of racing made it look like it could be anybody’s race. Floyd Landis was a favorite, especially after his strong showing in the first individual time trial on stage 7, but his Phonak team didn’t have the collective muscle of Ullrich’s T-Mobile or Basso’s CSC squads, who had strong riders waiting to assume team leadership. And Levi Leipheimer took himself out of the running with a disastrous, 96th-place finish in stage 7’s time trial.

The yellow jersey changed hands so many times it was worn by seven different riders, one short of the Tour record for overall race leaders. But this Tour will be defined not by the number of leaders, but by the dramatic way the leadership was won — and by how it was lost, then regained.

On stage 13, we saw an incredible shakeup in the overall when the Tour’s contenders were caught napping and they allowed a five-man breakaway to move up the road. It shouldn’t have been a threat — the highest-placed rider, Oscar Pereiro, was in 47th on the overall and nearly a half-hour behind Floyd Landis’ yellow jersey, 28:31 in arrears. But the break gained time on the rolling course, finishing 29:57 ahead of the main field and putting Pereiro into the maillot jaune with a 1:29 margin over his friend and former teammate, Landis.

While an extremely low-placed racer might, very rarely, catapult himself a couple dozen places in the standings from a big break, I’ve never seen anyone advance themselves into the yellow jersey from so far back. But it was nothing compared with what we’d see later in the Tour.

Slide show 2006 Tour de France Landis finishes first in race that had heroics, crashes and a drug scandal that rocked the race even before it began.

Stage 15’s mountaintop finish on l’Alpe d’Huez promised to be epic, coming after the Tour’s second rest day. It was the first of three days in the Alps, and promised to reveal, finally, who the Tour’s strongmen really were. The race stayed together until the last climb, when it became a free-for-all. CSC’s Frank Schleck won the stage, but Floyd’s fourth-place finish was enough to put him back in the maillot jaune, and it looked like it was his for keeps. He was the only rider who didn’t ride to his redline, the only one who never showed his limits. I said the jersey was his, and even Eddy Merckx was quoted as saying the maillot jaune was the American’s. And then came the meltdown on stage 16.

Stage 16 was slated to be a tough day, the hardest of the Tour. Two hors categorie climbs, a category 2 ascent and the mountaintop finish at the end of a category 1 climb would really put the riders to the test. As expected, the leaders stayed together until the final climb. Some small moves were made on the lower slope of the final climb, a small surge went off the front, and all of a sudden there was Floyd Landis, struggling alone in the maillot jaune as the race rode up the road away from him.

It was a terrible sight — there was no smoothness to his pedal stroke, he was clearly suffering, and at one point it looked like he might even abandon the tour while in the yellow jersey. He lost 10 minutes by the summit, backsliding to 11th on the overall, out of contention by 8 minutes, 8 seconds — an eternity. Nobody knew what happened to him, but he looked so utterly depleted I even wrote that I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a non-starter for the next stage. Boy was I wrong.

MICHAEL VENTRE ON TOUR DE FRANCE Take THAT, France! Continued U.S. dominance of Tour must bug the French MSNBC.com

The next day’s stage defined Landis’ race, and framed him as one of the toughest, gutsiest bike racers in history. It was the most exciting bike race I’ve ever seen, the most dramatic turnaround of racing fortune imaginable. Floyd Landis rode himself back into contention, and he did it alone.

Stage 17 was a very tough 200.5 km course with five categorized climbs, the final one the hardest of all. Early on the very first climb Landis launched himself from the main field, 130km from the finish. It was a foolhardy move. Without help, it was almost inconceivable that Landis could bridge the six-minute gap to the breakaway up the road, but he caught them. And then he rode them into the ground, moving right to the front and driving the pace until they wilted, dropping one by one from the group. To a man, nobody took a pull, nobody helped. All they could do was try to hang on.

Floyd was on a furious mission, and as the teams in the main field looked to each other to start chasing, he rode his way to a 9-minute lead, making him the overall race leader on the road, more than 50 seconds ahead of Pereiro’s maillot jaune. By the final climb only T-Mobile’s Patrik Sinkewitz remained with Landis, and he couldn’t hold the American’s wheel.

By this point T-Mobile had organized and chased. CSC took up the charge, and so did Rabobank. And while they pulled back some time they couldn’t close on Landis. He finished the stage — the most exciting, most inspiring piece of riding I’ve ever witnessed — more than seven minutes ahead of Pereiro. In a single stage he’d taken back almost all of his deficit, rebounding from 11th to third overall, and with the time bonus for winning the stage he closed to just 30 seconds out of first.

Interactive AFP - Getty Images Americans in Paris From LeMond to Armstrong, a look at all 10 Tour de France wins by U.S. cyclists.

There’s never been a successful move like this in the modern era. With live television in every team car, and team directors in constant contact with their riders, any dangerous moves are simply shut down before they develop. The only reason Floyd was allowed to go was because everyone believed he was done.

Tactically, it was a perfect, calculated move. The mountainous profile reduced the drafting advantage to almost zero — racers could stay together on the climbs if they only rode at the slowest rider’s pace, and that was considerably slower than Floyd. And the technically tricky descents meant the pack would be strung out single file, unable to paceline themselves closer to Landis, who’s a fearsome descender.