Solving The Mystery of the $5 Floyd Landis Yard Sale Bike

We know a Kentucky man paid just $5 for Landis's road-used custom mountain bike, at the World Longest Yard Sale. But how did it get there? It literally fell off the back of a truck. We heard from the guys driving.

Our story starts in 2008, when Landis ran the National Ultra Endurance series, eight races under the auspices of USMTB. The first race was the Cohutta 100, a hundred-mile course through the forests of Georgia and Tennessee. Having been suspended from professional competition the previous September for allegations of doping, it was Landis's first big race in a while. He finished 26th.

The bike then went to Scott's Bicycle Center, in Cleveland, Tenn., to get tuned up before being transported to the Mohican MTB100 in Ohio. One of the employees at Scott's sent along this photo of the bike, and his account of losing it.

State troopers searched for a long time trying to find this bike after it fell of the back of a car that was transporting it to a race in Ohio (where Floyd was flying in from California). While it may have value to some (due to it being owned by Floyd Landis), most avid cyclists hate dopers and hate snitches, so it probably won't have any value there. The bike by itself is about a 2008 BMC - probably worth in the neighborhood of $4-5000 new, but now worth $2000. A great buy at $5, but given Floyd's recent difficulties with honesty and his (unsubstantiated) accusations of so many cycling heroes, I'd think it would be hard to get an inflated value for the bike. After the bike fell off of transport we called many shops and got Floyd a HiFi Pro from Gary Fisher to ride for the race. We always wondered what had happened to the bike when it was lost. Never thought it would surface.

Well, it did. It was found by the yard sale seller just where he said: on the side of the interstate. Huh, we just assumed that was a euphemism for "he stole it."

The folks at Scott's Bicycle Center want their bike back, so Michael Estes should probably lower his asking price from $6,000 and get what he can for it ASAP.