Riding Dirty

on Floyd Landis in the time between the A and B sample

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You know when you have a great dream, and it seems real, and then you wake up and you're confused and disappointed that your life is just your life? Imagine this happened so much that you became suspicious that everything great was probably a dream, even when you were awake. This is what it's like to be a cycling fan.

Stage 17, where Floyd Landis won the Tour de France, was totally fucking unbelievable. The tour's director called it--I'm translating from the French here, "the greatest bicycle thing ever." I'm not a scientist or anything, but having seen that ride, I'm thinking what might account for the high levels of testosterone in his body is the fact that Floyd Landis has the biggest balls in the world.

On Monday, when Landis wrapped up the tour, I was in Mexico City, driving by the Estadio Olimpico, where they held the Olympics in 1968. Fans in those bleachers witnessed one of the greatest feats in olympic history. Long jumper Bob Beamon ran down the runway, took off, and jumped for like 3 miles. The record had stood at just over 27 feet. In the words of the previous Olympic Champion, he had "destroyed the event."

The 1968 Games also mark the first time the IOC did drug testing. While there were clouds of suspicion hanging over some countries, they were just clouds then. Performances weren't suspect just for being remarkable. Beamon got to celebrate, and the cheers in the stands weren't drowned out by murmurs that his jump couldn't be possible without drugs. As a fan, you live for moments like these--when the unexpected do great things or the great do unbelievable things.

Now, the unbelievable is really un-believable. Take Paula Radcliffe. In the 2003 London Marathon, she ran 2:15:25-I'm such a geek I didn't even have to look that up. That time, if you don't know, is astonishing. Beamonesque, some called it. Seriously. They have these calculators to figure out equivalencies between men and women runners. If you plug in her time, it says that for a man to equal her performance he would need to be a car.

I think Radcliffe is clean--but there are those who don't. Not because she's ever tested positive for anything. She's just really really good at sports.

As for Landis, I'm keeping my fingers crossed. The specific red flag he raised, a high testosterone-epitestosterone ratio, would do nothing for an athlete who wanted to have a great performance immediately, like his Stage 17. For that, you'd want to either dope your blood or be Lance Armstrong.

This was supposed to be the clean tour--they got rid of all the dirty riders before the race even started. The dirty riders were all the best riders--I guess the prettiest girls wear the most makeup--and fans complained that they were watching a "minor league tour." But we still watched, even without Lance. We were transported back in time, to the days of Bob Beamon in Mexico City , when you could (pretty much) trust a great feat.

After Landis' positive A-Sample, not so much. Even if his B-Sample is negative, he's gonna have a scarlet A on his yellow jersey. Maybe to believe some of these guys are actually clean is to live in a dream world. But track is guys running around in circles and cycling is just guys riding bikes up hills; the possibility of the miraculous is all we've got. And it's better than the alternative: doubting all great things. I'm staying asleep unless Landis' B-Sample wakes me up.

THE PARADES HAVE LONG LEFT CANAL STREET, and the beads have been, for the most part, picked up. It's hard to believe, really--because they were everywhere. On Lundi Gras the street was a shiny purple and green gravel road; it crunched under my tires as I drove around the CBD.

Looks like they didn't put FEMA in charge of bead cleanup, at least. At midnight on Mardi Gras, police and garbage trucks swept down Bourbon Street, ending the holiday for good, as they've done every Mardi Gras since time immemorial, when God invented New Jersey and said go forth to New Orleans and see some tits.

This year, it was different. The locals historically flee the city to go skiing or go to Mexico on what is, if your boss does not hate all that is good in the universe, a guaranteed four-day weekend, but this time they've stuck around. And tourists, who usually come to Bourbon Street to act like what they imagine locals act like, have for the most part stayed away. When my flight lands on Monday at Louis Armstrong International Airport, there is an eerie lack of high-fiving. Local time is 10:30 AM. Set your watch back one hour, Philadelphia travelers. Heck, set your watch back six months, and save yourself a little heartache.

The drive downtown is uneventful. I-10 is as miserable a highway as ever, its power to choke the spirit of all who travel it undiminished. Perhaps it's different headed East, out of town, to Baton Rouge--that side has carried most of the load of late and so is more likely to be feeling tired and defeated. Anyway, it is a testament to the bad judgment of Katrina that it destroyed so much but left this highway alone--a hurricane who knew anything about New Orleans would have started here. Nothing's different as I speed along, but for the sea of blue FEMA tarps you can see on every third house from here to the horizon.

When I lived in New Orleans in 2000, the city was just fine--as far as New Orleans goes, many locals might hasten to add--but I was a mess. I was in a job I hated, in love with a girl in Philadelphia, and though I loved New Orleans I was depressed to a degree that even its policy allowing its citizens to walk around with an open beer could not fix me, though how I did try.

I did make some good friends here, namely my boss Jason; our bond was strong enough that it withstood my utter incompetence. After fifteen or so years in the Crescent City, Jason applied for immigration to Canada the day George W. Bush was re-elected, and a week after Katrina petitioned the sympathies of the Canadian parliament to have him and his girlfriend Laura moved up the eleven-month waiting list. A few weeks later, they were living in Toronto.

Last week I wrote Jason and Laura and told them I expected New Orleans to be generally sad, but that it would add an acute sting to be there without them. They wrote back: "we're here." They were among many evacuees who came home for this. Everyone knew there would be a time to go visit their sick friend-city in the hospital; Mardi Gras was visiting hours.

After settling in, I find Jason and we head to Lakeview dead set on a little Devastation Tourism. We pass a helicopter taking off from the jerry rigged emergency medical center they have set up in the parking lot of the Superdome.

There are so many things here that you can't tell if they are actually worse or just seem worse in a post-Katrina context--New Orleans didn't exactly have its shit together before the flood. Did the street lights ever work before? Was this building abandoned? Was that one? Did the Superdome feel so much like a tomb? No, that I remember, we always said it looked like a giant spaceship.

Lakeview: a white FEMA trailer in every direction, and shipwrecked pleasure boats in the neutral ground (the locals call medians "the neutral ground" and I find anything that sounds like we're talking about a war zone feels right). When the 17th Street Levee broke, the floods headed across Lakeview and onto other parts of town. We're the only ones in the neighborhood, so far as I know. It's just home after home, empty and marked with spray paint. Every building has an "X" like the one you see to the left--the numbers and alphabet soup tell you how bad the damage is, whether or not anyone will be inhabiting the home again, and how many bodies were found inside. The number on the top of the X is the date the home was surveyed. I saw 10-10 on one, meaning no one got there till October 10th.

In areas with people, you see t-shirts commemorating Katrina everywhere. The official "New Orleans: Proud to Call it Home" tee is worn with new resonance, and some say "STILL Proud to Call it Home." There's "NOPD: Not Our Problem Dude," and the locals seem really fond of "FEMA: Fix Everything, My Ass." I tell Jason I think it'd be really cool to make t-shirts with the spray-painted X on them. He agrees. An hour later we see some guy wearing one. If there is a clever way to face the hurricane, someone here has already thought of it.

Everyone wants to know if there will be a New Orleans in five years, in ten years. For the locals, it seems like a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma: if everybody stays, things will probably be okay, and if some people leave, but some people stay, the place people are staying in will fall apart. But maybe people are bluffing when they say they're sticking around. Some are taking steps to communicate their devotion to their neighbors. Take this house in Lakeview:


This guy wants his neighbors to know he's invested in staying. That red stop-sign-looking sign says "Santa Stop Here," which when you look through this house and see clear through to the backyard, you feel was pretty unlikely. The fact that people were celebrating Mardi Gras at all this year, and the way they were celebrating it, was a big sign in the front yard of New Orleans : We're back, We Have Electric + Roof, Please For the Love of God Don't Give Up on This Place.