OUCH camp: Landis’ new team has a firm eye on Tour of California

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By Fred Dreier

A forecast calling for drizzle and cloud cover couldn’t scare away the 60 or so bike riders who showed up to the Holiday Inn in Temecula to ride with Floyd Landis and the 11 other members of the OUCH-Maxxis professional cycling team. The two-hour spin through nearby Fallbrook came at the beginning of the week long OUCH training camp, and the team organization opened it up to sponsors, media and the public.

For the cycling fans and team sponsors, the ride marked an opportunity to see Landis clad in the red, orange and black colors of his new team. For the media, it was a chance to see whether Landis — whose much-hyped return after a two-year doping suspension begins at next month’s Amgen Tour of California — has gelled with his new teammates.

The feedback to that question painted a positive picture.

“Everyone gets along pretty good,” Landis told VeloNews. “Obviously you don’t know how people deal with stress until you are in a race and everybody is tired. But this feels like a good group of guys. Everyone is motivated. We’ve been having fun.”

Indeed, stories circulated throughout the camp of the team’s Saturday night heroics at a local karaoke bar.

Of course karaoke skills won’t directly help OUCH accomplish what it has set out to do this season: contend with the world’s best in California and then dominate U.S. stage races. But the team’s roster, which, even without Landis packs a serious punch, will.

Landis and talented all-rounders Rory Sutherland and Tim Johnson lead the crew, which includes fast finishers Karl Menzies, John Murphy, Bobby Lea and Andrew Pinfold, and stage racers Jonathan Chodroff, Roman Kilun, Cameron Evans, Patrick McCarty and Bradley White.

“We made sure to build a well rounded crew,” said Johnson, the team captain. “Obviously we wanted to bring on guys who could help support Floyd. If you don’t have guys to help him out, well, that’s just ridiculous.”

On paper, OUCH-Maxxis appears the newest incarnation of the Health Net-Maxxis team that dominated the National Racing Calendar from 2005-08. OUCH is managed by Momentum Sports LLC, the same management team that oversaw Health Net from 2002-08. OUCH director Mike Tamayo directed Health Net in 2007 and 2008. Five of the team’s 12 riders are veterans from the Health Net days.

The idea for OUCH-Maxxis came when Landis approached Momentum Sports in the late summer, when the team knew that Health Net was not continuing its relationship. Landis came on board with his longtime doctor and friend Dr. Brent Kay, whose Sourthern California-based OUCH sports medical center was interested in a title sponsorship role.

But Tamayo said the public should view OUCH-Maxxis and Health Net as completely different animals.

“This is not Health Net redefined. This is a totally new start for us,” Tamayo said. “This isn’t just us adding Floyd Landis to Health Net. That would have been the easiest thing we could have done. I could have just said I have Floyd and these guys, let’s go win some races. It would have saved me some headaches. We’ve chosen to reinvent the wheel.”

It’s no secret that Landis is the reason for the team’s reinvention. Tamayo, who handpicked the roster, knows that the addition of the 33-year-old has shifted his team’s focus away from just the domestic stage races it previously dominated, such as the Tour of the Gila and Joe Martin stage race.

In Landis OUCH has something Health Net never had — the ability to contend at the Tour of California.

“In the past we never had the firepower to win races like California or (the Tour of) Missouri,” Tamayo said. “As much as (Health Net) would have tried, we never had that ability.”

Besides Landis, the squad has brought on a wide spectrum of veteran and novice professionals. Chodroff, 23, joins the squad as a neo pro after winning the 2008 USA Cycling elite national time trial championships. White, a second-year pro, joins OUCH from Successful Living, and finished sixth at the 2008 Tour of the Gila.

Canadians Pinfold and Evans come to OUCH from the now-defunct Symmetrics team. Pinfold has stood on stage podiums at the Tour of Missouri and Tour de Beauce, and owns a dangerous blend of speed in climbs and sprints. Evans is the 2007 Canadian national road champion, and took a slim one-second victory over Oscar Sevilla at the 2008 San Dimas stage race.

Lea is one of the most accomplished track racers of the current generation, and represented the United States at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing in the points race and Madison events.

And McCarty, who was added to the roster in December, is a talented climber who helped support Landis during his California win in 2006. McCarty, who was part of the team time trial-winning Phonak squad at the 2006 Giro d’Italia, joins OUCH after two years with Garmin-Slipstream.

While OUCH-Maxxis has yet to name its full squad for the Tour of California, it’s a safe bet that the team will pick a squad of stage racers to best support Landis.

Whether Landis has the legs and lungs to challenge for the victory is the burning question of this year’s race.

Landis says he’s fit — he’s not the strongest he’s ever been, but definitely not the weakest. His says his times on the nearby climbs, specifically the grueling slog up Palomar Mountain, are reassuring.

“I measure the top half (of Palomar), from the cattle grate to the Yield sign on top,” Landis said. “From the grate I’m around 29 minutes, maybe I could take another minute off that.”

That’s music to the ears of his OUCH teammates. The 12-mile ascent of Palomar, which climbs up 4200 feet, is the dominant feature in the final eighth stage of this year’s Tour of California. The 96.8-mile journey from Rancho Bernardo to the final finish line in Escondido features three smaller ascents, and could play heavily into the final general classification.

“The (Tour of California) is no joke. It’s going to be (really) hard,” Johnson said. “The bike racer in me hopes that (the GC) is settled by the time we get (to stage 8). But the fan side of me wants it to be close, so that the race is absolute chaos up those climbs.”

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