CASE IN POINT: Landis's ninth-place finish in the Tour last year. While it would be easy to chalk it up to a flu-like illness that reportedly hit him during the Tour's final week (which Landis will not admit to), the more pertinent reason was that he lacked what his trainer, Allen Lim, calls the "high-intensity intermittent component." This is a complicated way of saying that, while Landis could keep a steady pace with race leaders up the steepest mountain, they could gap him by putting on short (ten-second-to-two-minute) bursts of maximum-wattage power. They possessed a tool that he lacked, which some call "high-end snap."

"Riding for Lance, Floyd was a diesel engine—he had to go steady and strong," Lim says. "But what we saw when we looked at the Tour numbers was actually encouraging. He hadn't trained going into the red zone much, and this winter he started doing it. A lot."

At home in Murrieta, California, Landis began to finish each climb with a prolonged breakneck sprint. He called it Steep Hill Interval Training—a pleasing acronym—and by winter the numbers began to come. He found he could push 1,250 watts for five seconds, as opposed to 900 the previous year—a 39 percent improvement. Which means that on a steep, Tour-type climb, New Floyd will ride 3.7 miles per hour faster than Old Floyd for those five seconds, enough to open a gap of eight meters.

Landis also enjoyed a stress-free off-season, much in contrast with the previous year. In September 2004, a few weeks after Landis had signed with Phonak, team leader Tyler Hamilton and top support rider Santiago Perez received two-year bans for blood doping. (Perez accepted his ban; Hamilton's final appeal was rejected in February.) The ensuing controversy temporarily endangered the team's status in cycling's ProTour organization and thrust Landis unexpectedly into the leader's role. Last winter, Landis felt like he'd bought a ticket on the Titanic. This winter, however, he simply trained, tracking his progress on the sheets of graph paper he uses for a training log.

Asking most Tour contenders if you can see details of their training files is roughly like asking Coca-Cola executives to divulge their secret recipe. But here is where Landis again proves himself different. All his training and racing data derived from his CycleOps power meter—wattages, intensities, times, cadences—are an open book presided over by Lim, a 33-year-old physiology Ph.D. from Boulder who's quickly developing a reputation as one of the sport's brightest minds. On the Web and in PowerPoint presentations, Lim has shared all manner of Landis data, such as his average daily training between May 15 and June 12 of last year (3.5 hours) and his energy intake over that same period (174,000 calories, the equivalent of about 11 Big Macs per day). While the data holds abundant sex appeal for bike geeks, it's also a sharp piece of psychological strategy. Here I am, the numbers say to the secret-obsessed peloton. Try and match it.

"I don't see what the big deal is," Landis says adamantly. "It's just a number I produced on a certain day. What matters is what happens on the road."

The peloton received its first dose of New Floyd at February's Tour of California, an eight-day, 596-mile race that featured epic, Tour-quality landscape as well as the buzz-worthy presence of top American riders George Hincapie of Discovery Channel, Bobby Julich of CSC, and Levi Leipheimer of Gerolsteiner. All of whom were left behind when Landis utterly dominated Stage 3's 17-mile time trial, hung on in Stage 5's climb, and cruised to overall victory. Afterwards, Landis told Lim, "People keep saying I have good form now, but they haven't seen anything yet."

In Paris–Nice, they did. The eight-day "Race to the Sun" has long served as the unofficial kickoff of the European racing season, providing Tour contenders with a chance to test their engines. On a snowy, windy March day, Landis hit his new afterburners on Stage 3's Col de la Croix de Chaubouret and blazed away from the peloton, leaving in his wake a roster of luminaries like Discovery's José Azevedo (1:26 back), defending Paris–Nice champion Julich (8:47), and Discovery's Tour hopeful Yaroslav Popovych (9:37).

Getting the lead is one thing; managing it is another. Landis spent the next four days employing the sort of race tactics he'd learned at Postal, using the ample horsepower of his Phonak teammates—including Koos Moerenhout of the Netherlands, Alexandre Moos of Switzerland, and Nicolas Jalabert of France—to chase down threats. He also negotiated with other teams that shared interests in winning stages, an act of political control for which Landis required a different sort of afterburner.

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, motherfuckers?" 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.