Every Second Counts-Lance Armstrong(2)

I've never wanted to look over my shoulder. Occasionally, friends asked me why I wasn't more
curious about the past. “I don't like going backwards,” I said. “It just creates a headache.”
Looking backwards went against my nature; I did my self-seeking on a bike, facing front, at
high speed. What I knew how to do best was move forward.
When I was young, I rode to amount to something. Then, later, I rode to prove I could survive,
and to astonish all the skeptics who'd left me for dead. But what would be the motive now?
What would keep me in the saddle in the fifth and sixth hour, when the snow turned black?
That was the question I'd confront in the 2000 Tour de France. I had every intention of winning
the Tour again. It never occurred to me to rest on my past victory. An athlete doesn't particularly
want a past; that means he's done. He only wants a present and a future.

I know this much about myself: the surest way to get me to do something is to tell me I can't.
Explain to me that I can't possibly win the Tour de France again, and I have no choice but to try
to win the Tour de France again. That winter and spring, most people doubted whether I was
capable of it, for various reasons. The rewards of winning the Tour had ruined more than one
rider, made them complacent and killed their careers, and now I knew why.
Generally, one of the hardest things in the world to do is something twice. When you've done it
once, there's less reason to do it again, because there are so many other things you might be
doing instead. This was truer than I liked to admit. I was struggling to maintain a balance
between home, work, training, and commercial endorsements. The days only got busier, not less
busy, and I struggled to adjust to new responsibilities, to my family, cancer advocacy, cycling,
and endorsements. Whenever I overcommitted to any one of them, I seemed to be neglecting
something else, especially Kik and Luke. None of this was to mention routine errands, and
business headaches, traffic jams, the daily work of living that could clutter up a day, and obscure
that sparkling awareness I thought was mine.
I knew I was dividing my energies too many different ways one afternoon, when I found myself
on a golf course, trying to play nine holes and relax. As I was lining up a putt, I held a cell phone
to my ear, trying to handle a business matter involving new cycling tires. “Hold on,” I said. I put
the phone down in the grass, hastily missed the putt, and then resumed the conversation.
On another day, I found myself sprinting through theOrlandoairport, pouring sweat, with my
bike in a cardboard box, as I tried to make a flight toNew Yorkfor a business meeting. I was
thinking maybe I could get in a couple of hours riding inCentral Park. In the end I had to ditch
the bike at the airport, because I was so late for the flight. I dropped into my seat drenched, after
arguing my way past a stewardess.This has to stop , I thought.
In its own way, too much success could deaden you, I realized. I preferred the immediacy of
simply trying to stay well, be a good parent, and ride a bike. I didn't want to get too distracted
by opportunities and obligations.
I went to my friend Lee Walker, and we had a talk about tradeoffs, how to juggle commitments
without cheating myself or the people around me. Lee helped me understand that a schedule
was not a trivial thing.
“Schedule,” Lee likes to say, “ishow we make our intentions manifest in the world.”
I knew Lee Walker the way everybody around town knew Lee. He was one of the town's more
indelible characters, a former president of Dell Computer who had walked away from it all and
now ambled around in a pair of worn jeans, old sneakers, and a wide-brimmed hat, giving away
money and good advice. Lee had spent every day in a suit and tie until he awoke one morning
with a searing pain in his back, from spinal meningitis. While he was ill, he realized he hated his
life, and half-hoped the illness would kill him.
After he got well, he started a second life. He left Dell, sold his big house inWest Austin, got a
new job teaching at theUniversityofTexas. He lived near campus in a pretty old house with a
wildgarden, and a cottage-office out back with a huge blackboard and bookshelves to the
ceiling. He was a benefactor to a lot of causes and young people inAustin, including me.
When I first knew Lee, pre-cancer, we talked mostly about money. It was my primary topic; I
wanted to learn at the knee of a fortune-making wizard. I'd print out my portfolio so he could
look it over and advise me. “What are you holding that shit stock for?” he'd ask. We'd talk
about what I was selling, why I was buying,real down-and-dirty stuff. Happiness to me was
making money and acquiring stuff.
But whatever I imagined happiness to be, pretty soon I wore it out, took it for granted, or threw
it away. A portfolio, a Porsche, these things were important to me. So was my hair. Then I lost
them, including the hair. Sold the car, dropped a good deal of money, and barely hung on to my
life. Happiness became waking up.
After that, everything changed between me and Lee. We never talked about money anymore,
except in a theoretical sense, as we'd both come to understand it: wealth couldn't equal health.
We talked about our pitched-back experiences, and about the basic riddle of survivorship: how
do you hold on to the lessons of mortal illness and yet still resume your ordinary life, with all of
its mundane duties? Lee liked to quote the poet Mary Oliver. “What will you do with your wild
and precious self?”
Now, as a Tour champion and a cancer activist, I had too many confusing new choices and
roles. Lee persuaded me that the important issue was not money, but time. I began to ask, what
did I really want? I wanted to make money, sure, but I didn't want to be exhausted by it, or
worried about brand strategies. I didn't want to see my face on a cardboard cutout at a
convenience store, and I didn't want to make a movie with Tweety Bird. “I don't think you want
to maximize your wealth; I think you want to maximize your name,” Lee said. I settled on a few
meaningful endorsements and tried to remember that my pressures were a privilege, and that
they came with a rare dose of public goodwill. On balance, I just hoped to stick to what I cared
about and believed in, without letting it slip personally or professionally.
Meanwhile, everyone in cycling watched and wondered what the wealth, endorsements, and
publicity maelstrom would do to me. Miguel Indurain, the great Spanish cyclist, said, “Every
rider who wins has the same problem. It changes life forever.”USA Today printed a story about
my endorsements, and called me Lance Inc. The French newspaperL'Equipe reprinted it, with a
commentary in italics, suggesting I'd spent too much time making money and not enough
training.
Most of my opponents in the cycling world regarded the '99 Tour as a fluke–a sensational fluke,
but a fluke. The cycling world had refused to believe in me in the first place, and now they
suggested that a second victory was implausible. But they did me a favor when they wrote me
off, because they gave me my new motive. That, alone, made me want to win another one.
As the skepticism grew, the 2000 Tour became a hugely important race to me, perhaps more
important even than'99 . Anything less than another Tour title was, to me, a failure. “Watch,” I
told my friends. “I'm going to win it again. And you know why? Because none of them think I
can.”
I beganlooking for reasons to be aggravated on the bike; I catalogued each expression of
skepticism, every disbelieving remark or expression of uncertainty by an opponent, and used
them to challenge myself. I kept a list. It was an old competitive habit that went back to my
childhood inPlano, when I'd never had as much money as the other kids, or played the right
sport. (They didn't force you to play football inTexas, but they sure wanted you to.) I didn't have
the right conventional parents, either. I'd always been underestimated, and I knew how to put it
to good use. I thrived on long odds.
“I'm just a regular guy,” I said that winter. “And I'll show you what a regular guy can do.”
The first thingI did in trying to defend the Tour de France, though, was nearly kill myself.
The world is full of people who are trying to purchase self-confidence, or manufacture it, or who
simply posture it. But you can't fake confidence, you have to earn it, and if you ask me, the only
way to do that is work. You have to do the work, and that's how the 2000 campaign started,
with backbreaking work.
In early May, the U.S. Postal team went into the Alps and Pyrenees for a series of
labor-intensive training camps, the idea being that if I rehearsed the pain, punished my body
enough and did enough work, maybe it wouldn't hurt so bad during the Tour itself. We traced
the routes we'd ride in the Tour, scouting the stages.
The 87th annual edition of the race would cover 2,274 miles and 23 days, counterclockwise
aroundFrance. It was an admittedly illogical undertaking, but then, the Tour evolved from a
bizarre stunt in the first place: in the early dawn of the Industrial Age, a French newspaper
offered a cash prize to any fool who could beat other fools in an attempt to circle the country on
a bicycle. From the outset the event was plagued by cheating, accidents, and absurdities. Since
then, however, it has grown into a full-fledged sport, and a beloved national ceremony.
Bike racing is a peculiar sport by American standards, with a strange ethic and an intricate code,
and there are as many unwritten rules as there are written ones. It's actually a high-speed chess
match on bikes, and reconnoitering the route was important.
The various members of the U.S. Postal team had different roles along the way. Some of them,
like my close friend Kevin Livingston, were strong climbers and it would be their job to help me
through the mountains, riding in front to shield me from the wind, and pace me up the climbs,
while others, such as my great friend George Hincapie, would help me sprint through the flats.
Most of my teammates, like Hincapie, Tyler Hamilton, and Viacheslav Ekimov ofRussia, were
extremely accomplished riders and very capable of winning big races in their own right, and it
was a testament to their dedication that they rode so hard on my behalf. Then there were
younger and less accomplished riders who were called “domestiques,” whose jobs would be to
do everything from ride interference to ferry food and water and equipment to me if I needed it.
Our tactician, ordirecteur sportif , was Johan Bruyneel, a dashing former cyclist
fromBelgiumwith a reputation for giant-killing: he'd once won a famous Tour stage by beating
Indurain. He is an unexcitable man with steady gray eyes and a cleft chin, and as our director he
has enormous patience, a talent for devising race plans, and meticulous attention to details. It
was Johan who insisted that we hold those camps and familiarize ourselves with the routes.
We rode for hours on end through the raw European spring. In early May, the weather in the
jaggedPyreneesalternated between icy and sun-scorched, and it was on the backside of one of
those desolate peaks that I nearly lost the Tour before it started.
We had just climbed a mountain called the Col du Soulour, in order to practice a high-speed
descent that might be important. As we went up, the mountain sun baked us. I took my helmet
off my sweat-soaked head and hooked it over the handlebars. At the top, I paused while one of
our mechanics made some adjustments on my handlebars. Then I pushed off, crouched over the
bars, and dived down the mountain–with my helmet still dangling from the handlebars. It was
an elementary mistake.
The descent was narrow and winding, with a steep drop into a valley below to my right, and a
brick retaining wall to my left. I concentrated on cornering, without losing speed. I rounded
corner after corner, enjoying the rhythm . . .
. . .my front tire hit a rock.
It blew.
The handlebars swung crazily, like somebody had wrenched them out of my hands. When a
front tire blows while you're going 40 miles an hour, you can't steer. What seconds before had
been a high-performance rubber tire generating a secure centrifugal force was now shredded on
top of a flat carbon rim. The bike shuddered wildly, and my front wheel veered toward the brick
wall. I thought,IfI just get it straight, maybe I can slow down enough . . .
The wall came too fast. There was a ditch just in front of it, and my front wheel plunged into it.
I catapulted off the bike–and hit the wall head-first. It was as though the daylight suddenly
exploded, and the sky cracked in half.
I lay in the ditch, stunned and bleeding. Johan had been driving in a car behind me, and now he
came around the corner to see me lying in a pool of blood. I had a deep cut in my jaw, my head
was swelling and I was barely conscious. I'd taken the entire impact on my head. Weirdly, I
didn't have a scratch on me anywhere else. I didn't even tear my racing jersey.
I heard people running. Then I heard some voices–Johan, and strangers. Two French-Canadian
doctors had just happened to be picnicking in the grass near the brick wall, and they'd watched,
aghast, as I piled into the wall and fell in a heap.
I tried to sit up. “Non, non,” one of them said, and pressed me back down. The other leaped up
and ran to their car for some ice, which they put on my head. I was conscious and awake but I
couldn't see out of the ditch. I remember overhearing Johan, speaking with the doctors.
“You know,” one of them said, “when we saw him, and heard the impact, we expected to walk
over and find a dead man.”
I passed out, I think. At some point, an ambulance came and took me down from the mountains
to a hospital inLourdes. It was the first time I'd needed hospitalization since the cancer, and as
the doors swung open, I inhaled the scent of medicines and disinfectant, and felt the old, scared,
fluttery sensation in my chest.
I took some stitches in my head and my jaw, and they kept me overnight for observation. I didn't
sleep. I kept feeling that plastic mattress-cover underneath the sheets, which I managed to soak
with perspiration.
The next morning I flew home to Nice. Kik met me at the airport. My head was about three
times larger than it should have been, and I had two black and puffed-out eyes, along with
scrapes and cuts all over my face. Kik gasped.
“You look like the Elephant Man,” she said.
For weeks I sat on the sofa at home, unable to train or race, waiting for my head to regain its
normal shape. I had plenty of time to think, and it left me with the conviction that I didn't need
to make any more foolish mistakes or take unnecessary chances. I liked descending, and I liked
cornering, but now I decided that if I lost 30 seconds, that was okay. I could make it up.
Finally, carefully, I resumed training. The crash had prevented me from making perhaps the most
important reconnaissance, of a climb called Hautacam. It was a famed ski station at the top of a
mist-shrouded mountain nearLourdes, and it would be the first mountain stage, as well as one of
the most difficult.
So I went back. The weather was blustery and I rode the exact route we would take, only there
were no spectators and I was alone except for Johan in a follow car. I arrived at the foot of
Hautacam, and I began to jog atop the pedals, working my way up the steep hillside. I studied
the road as I went, trying to decide where I might attack, and where I'd need to save myself. It
was pouring down a mixture of snow and sleet, and my breath streamed out in a white vapor.
After about an hour, I reached the top. Johan pulled up and stuck his head out of the car
window. “Okay, good. Get in the car and have some hot tea,” he said. I hesitated. I was
unhappy about the way I'd ridden.
“I didn't get it,” I said.
“What do you mean you didn't get it?”
“I didn't get it. I don't understand the climb.”
A mountain could be a complicated thing. I didn't feel like I knew Hautacam. I'd climbed it, but
I was still uncertain about how to pace myself up it. At the end of a rehearsed climb, I wanted to
feel that I knew the mountain so well that it might help me.
“I don't think I know it,” I said. “It's not my friend.”
“What's the problem?” he said. “You got it, let's go.”
“We're going to have to go back and do it again.”
It had taken an hour to get up, and it took about 30 minutes to get back down. And then I rode
it again, straight up for another hour. This time, at the end of the day, in the driving rain, when I
was done, I felt I'd mastered the climb. At the top, Johan met me with a raincoat. “I don't
believe what I just saw,” he said.“All right. Now let's go home.”
That night, I sent my physiological data from the climbs to Chris Carmichael, my coach. After
each day's training session, I studied the readouts from a small computer mounted on my bike,
which told me my watts, power, cadence, and heart rate. Those figures showed me where the
mountain was hardest for me and where it was easiest. It was my habit to e-mail the figures to
Chris, and he would make notes and comments and send them back to me.
That night Chris opened the file I sent and looked like at my figures. The next morning, he
called me. “It looked like a tough day, seven hours in that weather, but your power was still
impressive,” he said. “One thing, though. I think the file got corrupted, because the numbers are
funny.”
“Funny how?”I asked.
“There are two sets of them,” he said.
“That's right.”
“You did the climb twice?”
“Yeah.”
Chris was quiet for a moment.
“You sick fuck,” he said.
Istarted the2000 Tour with a bull's-eye on my back. At least, that's the way I felt.
The Tour field would be one of the strongest in years, and they were all marking me. It was said
that I'd been lucky to win the '99 Tour, because two notable champions had been absent from
the field. But now the two former Tour winners, Marco Pantani ofItalyand Jan Ullrich
ofGermany, who had sat out the '99 race for their own reasons, would both be on the start line.
The field would be full of champions.
Ullrich was probably the most physically gifted cyclist in the world, a large man who rode with a
compelling muscularity, churning big gears. He'd missed the '99 race with injuries and struggled
to regain his fitness, but now he was hungry, and a hungry man was dangerous. Pantani, a lean,
sharp-featured man with a shaven head over which he liked to wear a piratical scarf, was hungry
in a different way. He'd sat out '99 in the wake of a doping scandal and was fighting to regain
his standing in the sport community.
The course would be another opponent: it promised three big mountaintop finishes, sweltering
heat, dust, mud, sheets of rain. That wasn't to mention the cramped hotel rooms in remote
villages.
The race began with a prologue, a 10-mile sprint through a theme-park town, Futuroscope. The
prologue was essentially a way of seeding the 200 riders, determining who would ride at the
front. The result was a surprise: I finished second to David Millar. Millar was a very good friend
of mine and an adventurous young British rider who liked to spend every New Year's Eve in a
different country. He beat me by two seconds, with a time of 19 minutes, 3 seconds. When the
results were announced over the loudspeaker, David burst into tears. I was disappointed for
myself but delighted for him. That night, he slept in the yellow jersey.
We set off on a series of flat, uneventful stages. They were fast-paced and wet;
fromTourstoLimogesto Dax, we rode in a relentless downpour almost every day. All I needed to
do was stay in contention and out of trouble until we got to the mountains.
In the mountains, the real race would begin for some, and end for many. Everything else, by
comparison, was jockeying for small advantages and increments. The mountains, according to
the French, were “the essence of bike riding and the essence of tragedy.” They were where the
real separations would occur: when you had one last mountain peak to ascend, the strongest guy
would propel himself upward faster. I loved the mountains.
The first mountain stage would take me to Hautacam.
On the morning of the stage, I awoke to a freezing rain. I hopped out of bed and threw back the
curtains, and I burst out laughing. “Perfect,” I said. It was suffering weather, the kind that could
defeat a lot of guys as soon as they got up in the morning. The conditions on Hautacam would
be blustery and mist-shrouded, just as they had been when I'd climbed the mountain twice in
one day during training. It had been the ideal dress rehearsal.
On the team bus, I told Johan “This is going to be epic.”
At the start line you could feel other riders in the peloton dreading the day. They dreaded the
pain, and you could feel the fear beat some of them before they ever pushed off. They murmured
and hung their heads in the rain and frowned at the weather. I felt ready. I announced to my
teammates, “This is a day at the beach. Bring it on.”
But that didn't mean it was easy. The terrible rainstorms didn't relent, and a tough Spanish rider
named Javier Otxoa surprised the field with a breakaway just 50 kilometers into the ride. He
built a huge lead that would last all day. None of us chased him, conserving our energy for the
big climbs.
The long day wore on our legs, and my teammates dropped away, one by one. Up to that point
they'd served almost like booster rockets, propelling me to the front. Now they were gone, and I
was alone, except for a handful of riders from other teams.
As we approached Hautacam, we'd been on the bike for four hours, ridden 119 miles, and
climbed two mountain passes. Ahead was the last steep, monstrous climb, of eight and a half
miles. It rose at a 7.9 percent gradient–an average of 7.9 feet up for every 100 feet traveled.
I rode with Ullrich, Pantani, and Alex Zulle ofSwitzerland, who had been the Tour runner-up in
'99 and who might have beaten me, some said, if not for an unlucky crash early in the race. Also
just ahead of us were Richard Virenque of France, a wildly popular rider to his countrymen, and
Fernando Escartín ofSpain. All of us were chasing Otxoa.
We reached the foot of Hautacam–and Pantani stood up on his pedals and attacked. He swung
to the inside of the road and accelerated. Zulle immediately reacted and went with him . . . and
so did I. For a moment I struggled to keep up and thought,Oh no, I'm toast . But Zulle tailed
off, and I moved in front of him. I settled into a tempo, fast enough to hurt anyone who wanted
to keep up.
I checked over my shoulder, and Zulle was gone. Now it was me and Pantani. I had to be
careful; it was important to pace myself, because efforts on a mountainside were like gaskets, as
Zulle had just proven.
We reached a slope I knew well, Pantani just ahead of me. I thought,All right, baby, I'm gonna
light your ass up right here . I stood up and drove my feet down on the pedals. My bike leaped
ahead of Pantani's. Johan came on the radio and said, “He's hurting. He's coming off your
wheel.” I glanced back and saw him sliding away behind me. Another moment, and he lost
contact with my bike altogether.
I swept up the hill. I hadn't just trained my legs for this push upHautacam, I'd also trained my
expressions. I wanted the other riders to see strength in my attitude on the bike, because there
was something dispiriting about watching another rider move past effortlessly while you
suffered. The only giveaway to how hard I was working was the flaring of my nostrils.
By the time I crossed the line, I was the leader of the Tour de France. I'd started the day in 16th
place, more than six minutes behind, and now I was in first.
Ullrich, Pantani, Virenque, Zulle, and Escartín were all at least seven minutes behind me at the
finish. Pantani, down by10:34, went to his trailer wordlessly and slammed the door. Virenque
shook his head and said, “Armstrong came on us like an airplane.”
There was one rider faster than me that day though: Otxoa. He had hung on to finish 42 seconds
ahead, and was the stage winner. I'd managed to wipe out more than ten minutes of road
between us, but I couldn't close the final gap. I wasn't sorry; it was a great, courageous ride by
Otxoa, one I applauded. I had what I wanted, the overall lead and the yellow jersey.
It was a good day, a big day, and a day that had perhaps demoralized the other riders. Some said
I had blown the race apart. Walter Goodefrot, Ullrich's team manager, said, “If Armstrong has
no weak days then he will win inParis. No one can fight him.”
But the racewasn't over. Any of the big mountain stages could crack you, and the others
wouldn't give up until we sawParis. I'd learned not to count on anything, and that night at
dinner, I balked when Johan asked if the team wanted some champagne. “If we win inParisthere
will be champagne,” I said. “Parisis a long way off.”
The truth was,I didn't know if I had another solo ride like that in me. Those efforts burned you
up inside, and you simply couldn't do too many of them. The other riders knew as much, and
they would try to isolate me and wear me out.
The 12th stage was likely to be a decisive one: it was a 93-mile journey to the top of Mont
Ventoux, a desolate summit that loomed overProvenceabout an hour outside ofMarseilles.
Ventoux was the hardest climb of that year's Tour, or any other: just 14 miles from the finish
line we'd be at barely 900 feet above sea level, but by the end we'd be at 16,000 feet. The place
didn't look like anything else. It looked more like a moonscape than the mountains. What's
more, Mont Ventoux could literally kill you.
Some of the greatest climbing legs ever had been ridden to the summit, but it was also the scene
of a tragedy. In 1967, British cyclist Tommy Simpson, riding under a broiling sun, had weaved
across the rode and fallen off his bike. Spectators urged him to quit, but he said, “No, put me
back on my bike.” He got back on, and tried again for the summit, but he collapsed again and
died near the peak; later, stimulants were found in his blood. The Ventoux was a dangerous,
difficult, haunting climb.
We began the stage by riding into themistral , a powerful north wind that beleaguers the entire
region, blowing over our shoulders from the front. We rode for more than three hours until we
reached the Ventoux, where the temperature suddenly dropped into the 30s.
The ascent itself would last about 13 miles–throughmistral gusts of 40 miles per hour to a
windswept peak. For the first few miles, Pantani probed, trying to see if he could open a lead.
He would surge, and then fall back, and surge, and fall back.
With roughly three miles to go, as we neared a memorial to Tommy Simpson, I stood up and
moved past Pantani. As I did, I turned and spoke to him.
“Vince!” I said, in my poor Italian.
Meaning, “Come on, come with me.”
I meant to urge him on, to invite him to ride with me, because I intended to help him to the
finish line as the stage winner. Why? At that moment, I felt Pantani deserved the win. He'd had
a long, hard year trying to reestablish his confidence after the drug-testing affair. I thought he
was one of the sport's more interesting figures, a swashbuckling sort, in an electric-pink cycling
suit, a bandanna, and an earring. That day he'd been behind again and again, and come back. I
respected his effort, and it seemed only right that a superb climber like him should win on the
Ventoux, especially since I had a ten-minute lead after almost two weeks of racing, and could
afford to finish second.
Such a concession is unheard of in other sports, but it wasn't at the Tour. In fact, there could be
a strange honor in it. For me, as the overall leader, to win stages I didn't need was an affront to
other riders, and potentially harmful to their careers and incomes; they all had incentive clauses,
and stage wins were prestigious in and of themselves. Sometimes it was the role of the leader to
be agrand seigneur –that is, generous. This was something I learned from Indurain, winner of
five straightToursfrom 1991 to 1995: it wasn't good to win every day. There were 200 riders in
the field, all working hard, and each deserved recognition for his efforts, and there were no
losers at the end of a day when you had climbed the 10 percent grade up Mont Ventoux at the
top of Provence, where a rider had once died making the ascent.
But Pantani misinterpreted me. He thought I said, “Vitesse,” meaning, “hurry up.” It was a
matter of interpretation: “vitesse” was an insult, as if I was telling him he was riding too slowly,
and to get out of my way. He thought I was antagonizing him.
We pedaled side by side toward the finish line, in the fierce wind. I had a choice: I could sprint
to try to beat him to the line, or I could choose not to contest the stage, since my overall lead
was safe. I didn't contest. A pedal-stroke from the finish, I let up.
All that mattered was that I had widened my lead over my real competition, Jan Ullrich, by
another 31 seconds.
But in giving the stage to Pantani, I was doing something that didn't come natural to me.
Indurain could give it and people could accept it. But when I did it on the Ventoux, it infuriated
Pantani. He felt I'd patronized him.
“When Armstrong told me to speed up I think he was trying to provoke me,” he said afterward.
“If he thinks it's over, he's wrong.”
I was offended in turn–and I answered back. “Unfortunately, he's showing his true colors,” I
snapped. I also publicly called him Elefantino, a nickname he hated. It referred to the way his
prominent ears stuck out from under his bandanna.
That set off a feud that lasted for a week. The next day Pantani bolted to the front and won a
mountain stage without my help, and afterward made it plain that he hadn't appreciated my
sense of etiquette. “It's much more satisfying to finish alone,” he said, pointedly. “There's a
different taste of victory when you leave everyone behind.A taste of triumph.”
Now I regretted Mont Ventoux, and it ate at me. My friend Eddy Merckx, the great Belgian
five-time Tour winner, scolded me. “That was a big mistake,” he said. “The strongest rider must
always win Ventoux. Younever make a gift of Ventoux. Who knows if you'll ever have another
chance to win it?” I felt I was the strongest rider, but I'd let sentiment get in the way. If I was
ever in a position to give Pantani a gift again, I thought,he ain't getting it .
Over the next few days I was angry and distracted. Anger, however, is not sustaining; you can't
ride on it for long, and in this case, it cost me my good judgment. First, I gave in to sentiment,
and then I let a quarrel distract me, and neither served me especially well.
We arrived at the final mountain stage, the last dangerous part of the Tour. It was a
comparatively short but difficult ride of 122 miles, to the top of a mountain called Joux-Plane. It
was the kind that could lull you; because it wasn't an especially long stage, it was tempting to
think the ride wouldn't be as difficult. Wrong. Shorter stages arefaster, and therefore sometimes
harder.
Pantani went out hard, specifically to bait me–and lured me into one of the worst mistakes of
my career. “I wanted to explode the Tour without worrying about the consequences,” he
admitted later.
The attack put our U.S. Postal Team under pressure, and Johan and I talked back and forth on
our radios, discussing strategy. How much should we let Pantani get away? I badly wanted to
beat him to the finish this time. The action was intense, and my resentment was very high. For
50 miles Pantani stayed ahead, with me chasing.
But we were riding strong, and I felt good on the bike. So good that I passed my last chance to
eat, and spun through a feed zone without a second thought. It was a feeble mistake, an
unthinkable one for a professional, but I made it. We were so focused on tactics and on Pantani
that I forgot to do the simplest thing. It never occurred to me what the consequences of not
eating could be.
Finally, I caught him on the approach to Joux-Plane. There, he began to fall back with stomach
pains, and eventually lost 13 minutes. But he had done what he had set out to do: ruin my day.
We hit the foot of Joux-Plane, and I went up hard, drafting behind Kevin Livingston as we
climbed. Other riders dropped off, unable to match our pace. It was just us. Then Kevin, worn
out, fell back too.
All of a sudden I was alone. And all of a sudden I didn't feel very good. It started witha telltale
tiredness in my legs, and then a hollowness in my stomach. I had no water, no food, no protein
bars, nothing–and no way to get anything, either.
I could feel the power draining from my body.
Virenque and Ullrich caught up to me . . . and then simply passed me.
At first I tried to stay with them, and push through the pain, but my speed slowed, and then
slowed some more.
Soon, it was as if I was sliding backwards down the hill.
Ullrich and Virenque turned around, surprised. I could tell they were thinking,What'she doing?
Is he faking? Initially, I'd ridden away so easily from them, but now I was in trouble and it was
written all over my face.
There were ten kilometers to go, six miles. But it felt like sixty. Johan came on the radio–he
could tell exactly what was happening from my slow pace. Johan, as a former cyclist, knew
what could happen if a rider broke. His worst fear wasn't that I would lose the lead. It was that I
might collapse, or quit altogether, lose the entire race right then and there.
Johan kept his voice casual on the radio, even though he must have felt the pressure. Not only
was I bonking, but riding in the car with him as a VIP guest was the prime minister ofBelgium.
“Don't worry, you have a big lead,” he said mildly. “You can afford to give some of it back.”
The smart play, Johan advised, was to back down my pace and allow myself to work slowly up
the hill, limiting the loss. The worst thing I could do was push harder, because that could mean
going to zero, totally empty. And that was when people failed physically and fell over sideways.
Every revolution of the pedals sapped me more, and put my body at a greater deficit. It was a
question of fuel, of calories or the lack thereof.
That kind of depletion could make strange things happen. As the body broke down, so did the
mind.
You went cross-eyed, or the snow turned black. You hallucinated. You tried to talk through
your ears. Or you got off your bike. You coasted to the side of the road and stopped, because
you simply could not pedal.
If you got off the bike, you were done, out of the race. And I was not that far from completely
stopping.
I'd seen riders lose as much as ten or even 15 minutes in that situation, with a long, hard climb
ahead and nothing left. I'd seen them drool. I'd seen them disintegrate, and never be quite the
same riders again. Now it was happening to me. Steadily, I deteriorated. It was my darkest day
in a race.
I began to lose any sense of where I was, or what I was doing. One of my few rational thoughts
was,Alead of seven and a half minutes is a long time; don't lose all of it .
Johan kept talking steadily into my ear, saying the same thing. “Just relax, ride your pace, don't
push it. You can lose a minute, twominutes, three minutes, four minutes, and you are okay.Just
don't stop .”
Up at the finish line, Bill Stapleton and a group of friends who'd come over to see me race sat in
a VIP luxury trailer. They sipped wine and snacked while they followed the action on TV. At
first no one noticed that I seemed to be slowing. But then I fell off the front and began to fade.
Ullrich and the others began to put real time on me. Suddenly the noise in the trailer went from
happy chatter to confusion. Somebody said, “Oh my God, what's going on?” And then there
was silence, just absolute silence.
On the bike, I couldn't think straight anymore. I was so dehydrated that my body temperature
went funny. I got the chills. My limbs felt hollow, empty.Empty, empty, empty. A Sunday cyclist
on a casual ride could have passed me.
Standing in the crowd on the mountainside watching me labor upward was Bart Knaggs. By
this time, there wasn't much that Bart and I hadn't been through together, along with our other
great friend, College. As I say, you define yourself partly in relation to other people, and Bart
and College had been there for some of my defining moments. They'd sat with me when a
doctor gave me a probable death sentence and informed me that even if I lived, I'd crawl out of
the hospital. They'd been at my bedside again after brain surgery. Bart and his wife, Barbara,
who had twin baby daughters, had been close confidants when Kik and I went through the
in-vitro fertilization that made Luke.
Bart, College, and I had ridden together across miles and miles ofTexashill country, laughing
and trash-talking, or just talking. I liked to taunt them on the bike, ride even with them for a
while, and then light them up. But when we weren't horsing around, we helped each other, too.
One day we took an exceptionally long ride to Wimberly and back, over miles of rolling
highway. Finally, Bart had enough and pulled off, and took a shortcut home, but College tried
to stay with me. He did okay until we got to Dripping Springs, when he hit the wall. His body
started salting up, and he got weak. I gave him a Coke, which revived him a little, but that
didn't last, so I started screaming at him to get on my wheel, and pulled him for a while. But
when we were only about five miles from home, he could barely pedal anymore. He screamed
back, “I can't do it,” and I screamed, “Yes, you can.” Then I started laughing, and I said, “Oh, if
you could see yourself now.” He was pale, white, and slumped over his handlebars. As we hit
the last big hills coming intoAustin, I put my hand on his back, and pushed him up the slope
toward home.
Not long after that, I got the cancer. I kept trying to ride, though, and Bart and College would
go with me. Now they were the ones who could leave me in the dust, because I was so weak.
One afternoon, when I was bald and thin and yellow from my third chemo cycle, I wanted to
ride. I should have been in bed, resting, but I insisted, so Bart and College went with me. We
only went three or four miles when we came to a hill. I started failing. “I can't go on,” I said. “I
gotta go back.”
College reached out and put a hand on my back and pushed me up that hill. I almost cried with
the humiliation of it, but I was glad for the help. Those were the things we did for each other.
What goes around comes around: we all need a push sometimes. If you're the one pushing others
up the hill, there may come a day when you need a push, too. Maybe when you help someone,
you're that much closer to the top yourself.
Now here was another defining moment. On Joux-Plane, Bart, who knew me better than
anyone, stared at my ashen face and my eyes, which now were red-rimmed and badly bloodshot.
He saw how the bike swung unsteadily underneath me, and he knew exactly what had
happened.
He couldn't push me up the hill. So he did the next best thing.
He started to run alongside me, screaming encouragement. “Go, go, go, go,go !” he screamed.
“You can do this! Don't youstop! ”
I didn't acknowledge him. I just stared straight ahead. Bart kept running, uphill, and screaming,
“Come on,just get to the top!” Finally, the pitch of the mountainside got the best of him, and he
couldn't keep up.
I never really knew he was there. I don't remember even seeing him. All I remember, vaguely, is
the sound of his voice. It seemed as if it was lost in static, but it was there. I thought it was
coming through my radio.
Now Johan's voice crackled in my ear. Apparently I had gone long minutes without responding
to him. I don't know if my radio reception had failed in the mountains, or if I had simply been
unconscious on the bike.
“Lance, talk to me,” Johan said, crackling through the radio. “Where are you? Why aren't you
responding?”
“It's okay,” I said.
“You have to talk to me,” Johan said.
“It'sokay, it's okay,” I babbled. “I talked to Bart.”
“What?”
“I talked to Bart,” I said, woozily.
I was delirious.
I don't know exactly what kept me on the bike, riding, in that state. What makes a guy ride until
he's out of his head? I guess because he can. On some level, the cancer still played a part: the
illness nearly killed me, and when I returned to cycling, I knew what I'd been through was more
difficult than any race. I could always draw from that knowledge, and it felt like power. I was
neverreally empty. I had gone through all that, just to quit? No. Uh-uh.
But Bart kept me there, too. If there was any question in my mind of stopping, Bart's voice
interfered. I could not have finished the stage alone–and didn't.
Whatever I was as a cyclist was the result of a million partnerships, and entanglements, and any
cyclist who genuinely believed he had done it all by himself was destined to be a lonely and
losing one. The fact is,life has enough lonely times in store for all of us.
If I had any doubts on that score, they were settled by what happened next. About halfway up
Joux-Plane, I got some added, unexpected assistance from two riders who came up behind me,
Roberto Conti and Guido Trentin. They were good, strong, respected riders who I was fairly
friendly with. They saw immediately what state I was in. What happened next was a classic case
of cycling sportsmanship, and one I will never forget: they stayed with me, and helped me to the
top. Without being asked, they moved in front, shielding me from the wind, allowing me to
draft on them, and sparing me untold amounts of work. It was a gesture typical in the Tour; we
were competitors, but we shared a mutual compassion for extreme physical suffering. Without
Conti and Trentin, who knows how much time I'd have lost before I got to the top?
Fortunately, the last few miles of the stage were all downhill. Once Bart and my other friends
had pulled me to the top of Joux-Plane, I sagged over the handlebars and coasted to the bottom.
In the end I lost only 90 seconds off my lead. But I might easily have lost everything, and I knew
it.
“I could have lost the entire Tour today,” I told the press frankly afterward.
When I saw my friend Jeff Garvey fromAustin, I said, “So how'd you like amateur hour at the
Tour de France?”
I have very little recollection of anything else I said or did between the time when I first began
to suffer, and when I finally crossed the finish line. For instance, Chris Carmichael came over to
the hotel and met me in my room.
I said, “Where the hell have you been?”
“What do you mean?” he said. “I was there, right there when you crossed the line.”
“You were?”
That night at dinner, I apologized to the entire Postal team. I had nearly wasted the efforts of
everyone involved. “I will never, ever do that again,” I promised. In retrospect it was a great
lesson: the mountains were so unforgiving that in one bad hour, or one bad minute, you could
lose it.
The next question was,would I be able to recover? How much had it torn me apart getting up
that mountain? It was like driving a car with no oil in it; the potential damage to my body could
have undermined the whole transmission, ruined the fitness I'd worked for months to build.
Sometimes riders had terrible stomach problems–like Pantani, who had cramps and awoke the
next morning unable to race, and dropped out. If I wasn't able to revive myself, I could have
another disaster. But to my relief, I felt fine that night, and just wanted some hard sleep.
Back home, Kik had to watch the whole thing on TV, and it was wrenching, because she knew
what must be happening and how much I was suffering.
I called home. “Well, that was the worst day I've ever had on a bike,” I said. “I almost lost the
Tour de France today.”
Kik said, “But you didn't.”
It was mylast doubtful moment. All that remained were the flats, uneventful stages towardParis,
and as we neared the finish, I finally allowed myself to accept that I was the winner. But I
wasn't quite satisfied. I wanted to make up for the stage win I'd given away. I still cringed over
that.
On July 22, I did what I'd failed to do previously, and finallywon a stage, a 36-mile individual
time trial between the French and German borders from Fribourg toMulhouse. I went all-out, as
the leader in the traditional yellow jersey should. I wanted to represent the jersey, and to feel like
an outright winner. I crossed the line spent. My eyes were glazed, and spit was hanging out of
my mouth. When someone asked me a question, I couldn't even respond verbally. I just moved
where I was directed. I was barely conscious of what I'd done: I'd won with the second-fastest
time in the Tour's 87-year history, in one hour, five minutes and one second, averaging about
33.5 miles per hour.
InParis, a largeTexasflag flew from the Hôtel de Crillon. During that last ride, I finally let myself
have champagne, and sipped a glass as we rode along. Finally I crossed the finish line with a
time of 92 hours, 33 minutes, and 8 seconds for the 2,270 miles. On the podium, Kik handed me
our nine-month-old son, and I raised him up, with tears in my eyes.
Ullrich was a generous runner-up. “Armstrong earned it,” he said. “He met our every attack.” It
meant a great deal after all the remarks by other cyclists who said I couldn't repeat. You could
field a whole team with the people who thought they could win the Tour and beat me.Well,
they're all here now , I thought. But it wasn't about revenge anymore; I'd left my taste for
revenge on Joux-Plane. There comes a time in every race when a competitor meets the real
opponent, and understands that it's himself.
That night, we had a huge victory dinner at the Musée d'Orsay, in a private ballroom with a
frescoed ceiling. There were hundreds of people there, including about 80 who had flown in
fromAustin. Finally I stood up and spoke to my teammates. The reason we were celebrating, I
said, was because we had worked harder than anyone else, and the result was that we were no
longer the long shots, the flukes; we were established champions. “I feel like we know how to
do this now,” I said. “We learned how to do it, and now we can do it again and again.”
I no longer viewed my cycling career as a one-time comeback. I viewed it as confirmation, and
continuation of what I'd done in surviving cancer. But in repeating the victory, I made a
pleasant discovery: no two experiences are alike. Each was like a fingerprint, fine and distinct.
How were they different? I'd suffered more in winning the Tour a second time, experienced
more physically taxing moments. I could tell that from the thinness of my neck, and the way my
ribs and shoulder blades jutted out of my shirt. But in a way, suffering made it more gratifying.
Suffering, I was beginning to think, was essential to a good life, and as inextricable from such a
life as bliss. It's a great enhancer. It might last a minute, or a month, but eventually it subsides,
and when it does, something else takes its place, and maybe that thing is a greater space.For
happiness. Each time I encountered suffering, I believed that I grew, and further defined my
capacities–not just my physical ones, but my interior ones as well, for contentment, friendship,
or any other human experience.

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