Tienus said:
The official story was a broken spoke in the rear wheel.
http://www.cyclingnews.com/races/tour-de-france-2006/stage-17/results/
With 8 km to go before the summit, Landis was given a new bike, because one of his rear wheel's spokes snapped. But he continued straight away, and had no trouble getting back to the front.
Not very likely if you ask me. Just before the swap he is in a turn riding with one hand on the bar as he poors water over himself. Not something I would do with a wobble in my back wheel. He throws the bidon away and his ds pulls alongside and tries to hand him a new waterbottle. Floyd then lets his ds know he wants to change bikes. His rear wheel does not look wobbly in the video before he stops on the side.
This is one of the more suspicious bike changes listed in this thread IMO. There is no indication of a problem from Floyd here. Rather, and quite strangely, the team car comes up and appears to say something to him, at which point he dismounts, discards his bike, and quickly remounts.
As you indicate he is riding hard at the front right before this. I don't know how one would determine if he has a wheel wobble or not from his riding style, one could easily have a minor rear wheel issue that wouldn't affect steering or happened quickly enough that he just would immediately jump off the bike. So that claim holds little weight for me, rather it's the odd manner of the change I outline above that is suspicious. He does not at any point indicate he's having a problem, then just discards the bike as if it's totaled. It's odd.
So let's assume he's been given a bike with a motor at this point. Of course I don't know that's true but let's just assume so for the sake of discussion. At this point he already has 5:30 or more on the yellow jersey group, a great bulk of what he'll gain for the day. Does this mean he had a motor from the beginning of the stage and the second bike is a planned, motorized replacement? Let's say that's true because it's rather a bit less compelling to assume he used a motor to finish the race but gained the great bulk of time, a crazy amount of time, with his initial solo attack.
So this begs the question, did he use a motor the whole race? If so, what happened on La Toussuire? He cracked so completely that it's really difficult to imagine that he had a motor on this stage. It would seem that a motor would have kept his losses somewhere south of the 10 minutes or whatever that he did lose. It was one of the biggest collapses in GT stage racing I've ever seen, if not the biggest.
So if that's the case I have to wonder why would he not be using a motor on that stage if it were available to him? It must have been available. Did he use it on other stages? If so, odd that he would not on Stage 16. Did it fail? He looked in extremis on that stage, not tired or just failing to keep up, but really in physiological trouble. So I don't really buy that this stage was the result of a motor failure on a single stage. If that, then did the team just have it in reserve and decided given the events of Stage 16 to use the nuclear option? Why, if there was no talk in the media about motors and certainly no way for the UCI to test them, would they not have a motor available on every stage? Further, why go to all the trouble of doping the way Landis claims to have done? Or are all his tales of doping on Postal and at Phonak lies to cover up motor use? I have a very difficult time believing that.
I'm not suggesting anyone is making any of the above claims, these are simply the questions I have in my head when trying to evaluate the claim of motor-doping. If we're going to say the suspicious bike change is explained by a motor, we have to make sense on some level when and how motors were used by Landis in this race.
For me the more one thinks about how the team might have planned for and deployed a motor, the more sticky questions come up.
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