Every Second Counts-Lance Armstrong(3)

The real reward for pain is this: self-knowledge. If I quit, however, it would have lasted forever,
that surrender, even the smallest act of giving up, would have stayed with me for the duration.
When you felt like quitting, you had to ask yourself which you would rather live with.
After it was all over, someone gave Bart a picture. It was of me, pale and delirious as I suffered
on the climb up Joux-Plane. In the background, Bart is running alongside me, urging me on.
Behind Bart is a guy dressed up as the Devil, one of those costumed characters who haunt the
roadsides of the Tour and give it a circuslike atmosphere. It was as if they represented the two
choices, either to keep on or to quit.
To me, it was a classic photograph of Bart, because that's the kind of friend he is, the kind who
is there on your worst day ever.Your very worst, not the glory day. That day, my worst, one of
my best friends was right behind me, on foot, screaming at me to keep going. Maybe it was the
real victory to have the same people around me, whether it was a day spent in a hospital bed, or
a day when I almost lost a race.

Bart signed the picture and gave it to me. “Lance, we've been to a lot of places . . . but let's not
go back there again, OK?” he wrote.
I framed it and hung it on my wall.
CHAPTER 3
The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday
Some things you can't win, though I don't like to admit it. I'm not used to losing much of
anything, whether it's a race or a debate, but among the things I've nearly lost are my life, my
neck, and my good name, and I've gained a realization: a life of unbroken success is not only
impossible, it's probably not even good for you.
Some losses are more tolerable than others, and some things are unrecoverable, and the echelons
of loss change in crisis. It's surprising what you can let go of, depending on the circumstances.
When I need reminding of this, I think of Sally Reed's hair.
When Sally was undergoing cancer treatment that summer of '99, she watched me ride in the
Tour de France. She was in bed, sick and exhausted for an entire week after an infusion of
chemo, but she'd turn the TV on and follow the stages, as I rode through the mountains and in
the lead of the Tour. She'd go into the bathroom and get sick, and then get in bed again, and
watch me ride an alp. Then she'd get up, go into the bathroom and get sick again. “I'd get sick
and then come back to the TV to get my hope back up,” she says.
I won the race on her 50th birthday. On the morning that I crossed the finish line inParis, she
was 50, and losing all of her hair. It was falling out in handfuls. But because I had won the
Tour, she didn't mind the loss anymore. She was so full of . . .something . . . that she didn't care.
Instead, she and her daughter went out on the deck, and as the breeze blew the loose strands of
her thinning hair around her face, she stood there and gently pulled the rest of her hair away.
She turned and threw the strands into the wind.
“Let the birds make nests out of it,” she said.
Any temptation I have to brood over losses is tempered by the knowledge that I can afford to
lose just about anything, except my life and the lives of the people I care for. The
less-than-excellent season of 2000–2001 would include losses, both on and off the bike, but it
would have been immeasurably harder without that context. Like Sally says, my house is
burned, but I can see the sky.
That year saw the beginning of a long, hard defense of my character. I'm surely the most
drug-tested man on the planet. I'm tested anywhere from 30 to 40 times a year, both in and out
of competition, and I welcome it, because frankly, it's the only proof I have of my innocence.
How do you prove a negative? All I can do is to submit to the endless needles and cups, no
matter what the time of day or how disrupting to my private life. Innocence is something I've
had to declare and demonstrate on an almost daily basis, and not always successfully, either.
“Doper,” the French scream at me. That's okay. I have an easy heart.
I've never once failed a test. Not one. Nor do I intend to, ever. You know why? Because the
only thing you'll find evidence of is hard work, and there's no test for that.
But no matter how many tests I took, there were still those who considered me guilty, a
doper-mastermind who outwitted scientific communities across the globe, and the suspicion
reached a height in 2000–2001.
For a while some people even believed I was given a miracle drug during chemo. Reporters used
to call my oncologist, Dr. Craig Nichols, and grill him about what he had done to me: exactly
what medications had I taken, and what were their effects?
Finally, one day, while yet another reporter was interrogating him as to how he had
Frankensteinedme, Dr. Nichols wearied of all the questions.
“I put in a third lung during surgery,” he said.
He waited for laughter. But there was none.
Dr. Nichols decided that much of the skepticism was based on disbelief that someone could not
just survive cancer, butprosper . Most people thought if you had it, you were going to die, and
even if you survived the treatment, it was inconceivable that you didn't come out a cripple. But I
challenged that assumption by returning to a full, productive life. I had behaved, Nichols said,
“as if death was an option.”
“The treatment is very rigorous,” Dr. Nichols said. “There are some risks.”
“Such as?”
“Well, something as simple as an infection could become life-threatening.”
“You can't kill me,” I said.
“I assure you I can.”
In some ways, fighting cancer and winning bike races were much simpler, more direct
confrontations than the ones ahead in the coming months. How do you fight an invisible
opponent like suspicion? You can't; but that sort of acceptance doesn't come easily to any of us,
and sometimes the hardest thing in the world to do is . . . nothing.
How do you learn to cope with doubt, and, more important, self-doubt? And how do you learn
how to lose?
Trouble is,you're going to lose more than you're going to win, no matter who you are. Most of
us overreact when we lose, and over-celebrate when we win, and I'm no exception. I have a
love-hate relationship with losing: it makes me brooding and quarrelsome. But the fact is, a loss
is its own inevitable lesson, and it can be just as valuable as a victory in the range of
experiences, if you'll examine it.
When you ride a bike for a living, you see a lot of stuff, and after a while you understand that
the races aren't really races but expressions of human behavior; and that behavior can be brave,
fraudulent, funny, seeking, uplifting, and downright parasitical. Some of what you see you like,
and some of it you don't like very much, andit's all very interesting, and telling, but it ain't war
and it ain't death and it ain't childbirth, either, and what losing does is, it restores the
perspective.
In August of 2000, I had yet another crackup on my bike. InItalythey say a cat has 12 or 13 lives,
instead of nine. I must be an Italian cat, because it was my second life-threatening crash in a
year.
I was out on a training ride in the hills above Nice with my Postal teammates Frankie Andreu
and Tyler Hamilton, just a cruise to get our legs back after the Tour and begin preparing for the
Olympics inSydney,Australia.
A single lane ribboned up into the mountains above the city, and we followed it until it grew so
narrow it didn't have a center line. It was remote, which was why we chose it: you could ride it
for hours and not see a single car. It was purely a chance deal that one ran straight into me.
We whirled around a blind left-hand curve, me in the lead. Meantime, a French couple in their
car sped into the curve from the opposite direction–and halfway around the turn, we piled into
each other head-on. Behind me,Tylerswerved into a ditch. Frankie managed to steer clear.
There was a metallic clap, and my bike disintegrated. I sailed into the air over the hood of the
car.
Frankie watched the wreckage of my bike as it clattered along the asphalt, a heap of broken and
twisted metal tubes,a couple of them with Trek stickers.
I lay on the ground, dazed. Slowly, I sat up. I stared at the pieces of my bike. The frame itself
was in three pieces, the fork was in two pieces, and the wheels were everywhere. The rear part
of the bike had been torn from the chain, which was snapped in two.
I wondered if my arms and legs were in similar condition, and began a mental checklist of my
body parts. My shoulder and neck hurt, bad. I glanced down and saw my helmet lying next to
me. It was cracked in half like a walnut.
I moved a little, and felt an incredible stabbing pain in my back. It was as if a bone was trying to
poke through my skin.
“Frankie, look at my back,” I said. “Is anything sticking out?”
“No, there's nothing sticking out.”
“It's got to be sticking out. I can feel it.”
Suddenly, I felt like lying down again. “Unnhhhhh,” I said, and fell back on the tarmac.
A Frenchman had gotten out of the car, and now he started yelling at us. Frankie and Tyler
asked him for help, but it quickly became clear he wasn't going to do anything but yell. Frankie
and Tyler tried their cell phones, but the reception was lousy in the mountains and they couldn't
get through. They eyed the Frenchman. He wasn't going to let us use his cell phone to call
somebody, either.
Frankie and Tyler squatted in the dirt next to me, and the three of us conferred. We
decidedTylershould ride down the mountain, until he either found help or until his cell phone
worked and he could call Kik to come get us.
Tylerrode off, and as I lay back down in the road, something occurred to me.
“Frankie,” I said, “slideme out of this road, so I don't get run over.”
Frankie and I just sat there. To tell you how remote the road was, we didn't see another car for
the next two hours–and then it was Kik's. That's how desolate the road was, and how unlucky
we were.
Meanwhile, Kik was experiencing her own drama.Tylerfinally got through to her and explained
what had happened, but she couldn't hear well enough to make out the name of the village
closest to us. The phone connection started breaking up. Kik heard, “We're in (crackling noise),
a place called (crackling noise).” Then the phone went dead.
Kik opened a map and stared at the tiny printed names of villages, trying to find one that
sounded sort of like what she had heard. Finally, she saw it, and jabbed a pen at it.
She grabbed her keys and raced to a taxi stand, and found a driver we'd gotten to know, and
asked if he would show her the way. He jumped in his car, and they took off, winding through
the mountains. Finally, after about an hour and a half, they found us.
We were still sitting by the side of the road when Kik pulled up. She did a good job of seeming
calm as she surveyed the wreckage, and loaded me and the remnants of my bike into the car.
As we drove down the mountain she asked, “Where does it hurt?” I said, “Right where my back
meets my neck.”
Kik drove me straight to a local hospital for anX ray–but it didn't show anything. “It's just
strained,” the doctor told me. I said to Kik, “That can't be right,” but I went home and took
some aspirin and waited for the pain to go away. Instead it got worse.
I went to a chiropractor, thinking maybe my back was out of alignment, but as soon as he
touched me it felt like my spine was breaking in half. As I lay on the table, I began to cry. I
couldn't remember the last time I'd cried because something hurt–I must have been a boy. That
did it; I went back to a hospital, this time a modern clinic inMonaco, for a CT scan.
The doctor said, “You've got a big problem here.” There on the screen was an unmistakable
crack, and he explained that I'd fractured the C-7 vertebra of my spine, the link between my
back and my neck.
“What's that mean?” I said.
“Your neck is broken.”
I had no trouble believing it, after all that pain. I asked what it meant for my cycling. I explained
that I planned to ride in the 2000 Olympics and was about to start my most important training.
How long would I be off the bike? Would I be able to ride inSydney?
The doctor looked at me skeptically. “You better think long and hard about that,” he said. “I
wouldn't advise it. You just won the Tour, what do you need the Olympics for? And if you fall
on this injury again, it could be devastating.”
He explained the risks: it might be weeks before I regained range of motion in my neck and was
able to fully turn my head. Without peripheral vision, all kinds of crashes could occur. It would
be a day-to-day thing whether I'd be healthy enough to train, and even then, he didn't think I
should risk it. I told him I'd consider what he'd said, and went home to rest.
I had a decision to make. To me, it wasn't a hard one: if I could ride, I was going. Crashes were
unavoidable in cycling, and so was bad luck, and if you worried about falling off the bike, you'd
never get on. I simply couldn't pass up the Olympics; they were too meaningful. I could win
sixTours, and yet if I lost the Olympic gold medal, people would say, “What's wrong with this
guy? I thought he was supposed to be a good cyclist.”
They were personally meaningful, too. So far, the Olympics represented nothing but failure and
loss to me, and I wanted to change that. I hadn't competed well in them in two tries.
I rode miserably as an inexperienced hothead in the 1992 Barcelona Games. I'd gone into the
Atlanta Games in 1996 as an American favorite, but I rode disappointingly and finished out of
the medals again, 6th in the time trial and 12th in the road race. It felt like I was dragging a
manhole cover. I assumed it was the result of nerves, or because I hadn't trained right, but
shortly afterward I was diagnosed: it turned out I'd ridden with a dozen lung tumors. Cancer had
cheated me out of a chance to win an Olympic medal on native soil.
There was an additional motive for going toSydney. The Games would end on October 2, an
important anniversary, four years to the day after the initial cancer diagnosis. To be at the
Olympics on that day would be another way to kick the disease. Also, the coach of theU.S.team
was my close friend Jim Ochowicz, who had sat at my bedside during all of my hospital stays
and chemo treatments. It was Jim who, early in my career, shaped me into a champion cyclist,
and he was also Luke's godfather. I wanted to ride for him again, and I wanted to celebrate the
cancer anniversary at the Olympics, with a gold medal as the centerpiece.
After a couple of weeks, my neck was still stiff but getting better, and I was able to ride, so I
began training. Meanwhile, some prominent track stars dropped out of the Games, and there
were suggestions in the press that they'd done so to avoid drug testing. I began to get calls from
reporters, wondering if I would show up inSydney. The implication was clear: a no-show would
suggest that I had something to hide. What no one knew was how hectically I was trying to
train to get there.
I arrived inSydney, thrilled to seeAustraliafor the first time. I felt I was in decent shape, and I
still had every expectation of winning: to me, there was no other real reason to be there. I'd been
to the Games twice before and come home without a medal–and I wasn't inSydneyfor a
vacation, much as I loved the Australian scenery.
The first event was a 148-mile road race, and it would be the more difficult of my two events.
The course was a long, flat one that didn't especially favor ourU.S.team, because there were no
hard climbs on which to separate from other riders, which meant a pack finish. The winner
would have to fight through a dense crowd of riders, and the field included Jan Ullrich and his
German team.
Nothing went right, from the start. Our team was plagued by problems with our radios, and they
went out at a crucial moment when we needed to communicate, screwing up our tactics. For a
good portion I didn't know where Ullrich was on the course. I thought he was behind me, so I
bided my time, pacing myself. Late in the race I pulled up to my great friend and teammate
George Hincapie, thinking that a big surge could win it.
“George, George, is anybody away?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
I got ready to make my final push. Then we passed one of the big Jumbotron monitors out on
the course. It showed Ullrich–pulling for the finish line. It turned out he was in front of me–way
in front. He had gotten away from me and I never even knew it.
“George, who's that?”I asked.
Ullrich sailed across the finish line for the gold, while I faded and crossed the finish line in 13th
place. I had to laugh at the mishap. I wasn't too disappointed, because we had been an outside
shot at the medals to begin with. It was in the next event, the time trial, that I had the best,
most realistic shot at a gold medal.
The 29-mile course snaked through the streets ofSydneyand finished at a historic old cricket
ground. Time trials were my strength; they required a rider to be as precise and technical as he
was fast, and I'd won four of them over the last two years to claim Tour de France stages.
But again things just didn't go quite right. There was no huge breakdown, just some minor
slippage in form that cost me. After the first lap, I was a second off the lead pace, and the gap
just widened from there. By the end of the second lap, I was six seconds down and clearly out of
the running for the gold.
I finished more than a half a minute behind the winner, Viacheslav Ekimov.
There was some consolation: Eki was my U.S. Postal teammate and a man I was inordinately
fond of and who I deeply respected. Ullrich got the silver medal. I got the bronze.
As upset as I was to lose, I was that happy for Eki. I'd lobbied hard to get him on our Postal
team and he'd put it all on the line for me at the Tour, done hours of thankless work while I got
the glory. Our friendship and respect was mutual. “Today I'm gold and he's bronze,” Eki said.
“He understands. Next year we're together.”
I'd simply been beaten. I'd gone as hard as I could: my heart rate was pegged at a maximum rate
of 190, which told me I'd gone all-out. When you prepare for an event and you do your best and
then you don't get it, you just have to say, I didn't deserve to win. Someone was better.
“I felt good,” I told the press. “I can't say that I had any major problems. No mechanical
problems, no discomfort on the course, no problem with the neck. My preparation was good. I
have no excuses. I gave everything and I got third place. The two riders in front of me were
better and faster and stronger.”
After the medal ceremony I walked past my bike and kissed my family. Kik swore she had never
been prouder of me. My mother summed up how she felt to a reporter.
“The thing is, he's just lucky to be here,” she said. “Nothing can compare to that fact alone.”
But I couldn't see that yet, I was too disappointed in myself. That night, we went out on a boat
inSydneyHarborwith several of our closest friends, and as I sat on deck and sipped wine, I felt as
if I'd let down everyone who believed in me. I'd asked USA Cycling for a lot: extra bikes, extra
mechanics, and special accommodations, and then I didn't win. I stood up and offered a toast,
and an apology.
“I just want everyone to know how sorry I am,” I said. “I know how much effort you all put into
helping me get here, and into being here. I appreciate everything everybody did, and I just want
you to know that. I couldn't have gone any harder, any faster. And I'm sorry that I didn't win.”
The next day was October 2, and Kik planned a trip for us into the Australian wine country, but
by then my disappointment at losing the gold had seeped into me. I tried to enjoy the day,
sampling the local wines, as we had lunch on a beautiful terrace overlooking the countryside.
But I struggled to make conversation, and by the end of the day I was all but wordless.
The next morning I flew toSan Franciscofor a long-standing speaking engagement. I was still
upset with myself when I landed, and when I called Kik to check in, she could hear it in my
voice. Suddenly, she was upset, too.
“You know, I've never been more proud of you than when you lost,” she said. “But you just
don't get it. You don't get it at all. You're just being moody to everybody around you. You took
a perfect day, when we had everything to be thankful for, and you ruined it.”
She was right, and I knew it. I apologized, and gave some thought to winning and losing, and
how to handle each. When you win, you don't examine it very much, except to congratulate
yourself. You can easily, and wrongly, assume it has something to do with your rare qualities as
a person. But winning only measures how hard you've worked and how physically talented you
are; it doesn't particularly define you beyond those characteristics.
Losing, on the other hand, really does say something about who you are. Among the things it
measures are: do you blame others, or do you own the loss? Do you analyze your failure, or just
complain about bad luck?
If you're willing to examine failure, and to look not just at your outward physical performance,
but your internal workings, too, losing can be valuable. How you behave in those moments can
perhaps be more self-defining than winning could ever be. Sometimes losing shows you for who
you really are.
The following day I flew home to begin the off-season with an attitude adjustment. Luke took
his first steps, and we celebrated his birthday at Chuy's Mexican restaurant. “He told me that's
where he wants to eat,” I said. Luke scribbled on the menu, crushed tortilla chips all over the
floor, and ate quesadillas, while Kik and I had long-awaited margarita swirls.
Kik surprised me by hanging the bronze medal in a place of honor. She continued to insist that it
was one of her favorite days. I looked at her like she was crazy.
“My goal was the gold,” I said.
“My point exactly,” she said.
Maybe the difference between a boy and a grown man, and the difference between a chipped
shoulder and nice smooth lines, is the way you handle yourself when you don't get what you
want. “I was never prouder,” she said, “not for one single second. Not even on the
Champs-Elysées in the summers of 1999 or 2000. It was one of the happiest things I've ever
seen in my life. Because you wanted that gold medal really bad, and you'd never really tell
anyone that. But you wanted it.”
She was right about that. “Yeah, but I didn't get it,” I said. I'd failed.
“You know what?” she said. “A day will come when Luke will miss the mark, and fail. He will
be brokenhearted, and he will think his champion dad will never understand. But there will be
this videotape, of a day inSydneythat he was too young to remember, but where an example of
how to lose was set. And I'll show it to him, and tell him that I never loved you more.”
On Thanksgiving Dayof 2000, shortly after I got back from the Olympics, French authorities
announced I was under criminal investigation for doping.
I was dumbfounded. I wasn't just being called acheat, I was being called a felon, under formal
investigation.
I picked up the phone and called Bill Stapleton, who was taking a holiday walk in the park with
his wife and family. “What the hell is going on?” I said. Bill promised to find out and get back
to me. After a while, he called back. “It's ridiculous,” he said. “But we're going to have to be
patient.”
What happened was this: during the Tour, someone surreptitiously videotaped two of our
medical staff as they threw away a couple of trash bags. The tape was sent anonymously to a
government prosecutor, as well as to theFrance3 television station. Now the station was airing
the tape while sensationally reporting our “suspicious behavior” as we disposed of “medical
waste.”
French authorities had responded by launching a full-scale judicial inquiry.
I made some calls, and tried to figure out how we could be in such a situation. According to our
team doctor and chiropractor, after a Tour stage in Morzine, they had bagged up the garbage left
over from our medical care as they normally did. They didn't want to leave it at the hotel where
we had stayed, however, because the more unsavory media was always picking through our
garbage in its relentless hunt to prove me a doper, and we resented it. So they decided to
frustrate the press by taking it from the hotel in Morzine and throwing it away in a roadside
garbage can. This was their “suspicious behavior.”
The “medical waste” consisted of some wrappers and cotton swabs and empty boxes, nothing
more. InFrance, as in this country, there are strict rules about how to properly dispose of any
serious medical products such as syringes and IV needles. Those had been handled as required,
placed in yellow biohazard containers that were picked up by a French medical-waste service.
I immediately issued an angry denial through our Postal spokesman, Dan Osipow. Our team had
“zero tolerance” for any form of doping, we said. It sounded like the usual clichéd statement,
but we meant it. We were absolutely innocent.
But it quickly became apparent that innocence might not matter. The judicial system
inFranceseemed to be the reverse of American law, with no presumption of innocence, and what
little I knew suggested that French legal authorities didn't need much evidence to act. I worried
that when I returned to my home inFrance, they could decide to handcuff me, in front of the
world, and haul me off.
Our first concern was to obtain a French lawyer, a gentleman named George Kiejman, and he
explained the system to us. There was ajuge d'instruction , or examining judge, who evaluated
evidence and functioned similar to a grand jury inAmerica. This judge, Sophie-Hélène Chateau,
had broad subpoena powers.
She promptly subpoenaed all of my urine samples from the 2000 Tour as well as those of the
rest of the U.S. Postal team. She appointed an assistant prosecutor, François Franchi, to conduct
an investigation. We were charged with suspicion of using doping products, inciting the use of
doping products, and using toxic substances.
At first, I tried not to take it personally, and to understand the motives behind the investigation.
When an athlete doped, the competitors, spectators, and journalists were defrauded.
International cycling had recently been through a drug scandal, and the French were protective
of the integrity of the Tour, which was more than just a race, it was a national symbol, and they
didn't want it junked up by needles and vials. But I didn't like being accused on no evidence.
Part of the problem, I realized, was a fundamental lack of awareness among the public (and the
prosecutors) about just how grueling cycling really is. Medical treatments were an absolute
necessity. The Tour de France is not a natural event. We ride more than 100 miles a day for
three straight weeks, through incredible and changing conditions. Some cars wouldn't hold up
under that physical stress, much less a human body. We needed help, in the form of IVs of
vitamins, minerals, and phosphates. You simply can't eat or drink enough to make up for that
kind of depletion, to replace all the things you expend.
Those IVs and syringes were health essentials. What's more, every Tour rider suffered cuts,
scrapes, and bruises from crashes, not to mention all the assorted rashes, like road rash and seat
rash, and then there were the aches, sprains, tendinitis, etc. We were asking something inhuman
of our bodies, and we simply couldn't do it without medical assistance.
There was a double standard at work: when a football player got cramps and went to the locker
room for a drip, and then returned to the field, everybody called him a hero. But because we
were cyclists, we were suspected of doping if we showed a needle and vial.
Suspicion was the permanent state of affairs in the sport, and with reason. Unfortunately,
cycling had a long history of doping. It had happened time and again: athletes had lied, had
cheated, had stolen. In the 1998 Tour, which I missed while recovering from illness, a drug
scandal resulted in multiple arrests and suspensions when a team car was found to be carrying
large amounts of the blood-doping agent erythropoietin (EPO). Since then, Tour officials had
worked with the International Cycling Union to develop new drug tests, and to restore public
confidence in the race.
Drug inspectors arrived at each team hotel between 7 and9A.M.on the day that the Tour started
and drew blood from the crooks of our arms. After that, there were surprise drug tests–you
never knew when someone would bang on your hotel-room door and ask for blood. There were
also daily urine tests in a mobile trailer after each stage. (Sometimes there was a long line, so
often I would hold my water for the last hours of the stage, to be sure that I had some to give
them. At the finish line I would literally leap off my bike and run to the trailer.)
Even out of season, I was, and am, tested by the United States Anti-Doping Agency. It's a
moment of wearying familiarity: I'm sitting in my kitchen early oneTexasmorning in the
off-season, sipping coffee and whispering so as not to wake assorted children, when there's a
loud ringing at the doorbell. Standing on the front step of my home is a representative from
USADA, coming on like John Wayne, holding out a piece of paper like a warrant and telling me
to take a drug test, or risk being banned from my sport.
The drug testers inAustinwere the same people every time, a husband and wife. I didn't know
their names, and wasn't especially cordial with them, because they were never cordial with me.
They would ring the bell, I'd open the door, and they would announce, “Random drug control,”
and hand me a piece of paper instructing me on my rights. Or lack thereof: if I declined the test
it was considered an automatic positive, and I would be banned.
What's more, I was required to inform the USADA of my whereabouts at all times. No matter
where I went. Anytime I changed locations, I was supposed to fax or e-mail them as to my
movements. It was like being under constant surveillance.
But no matter how many tests came back clean, skepticism about my performances persisted,
especially inFrance. The European media had been full of suspicion ever since I won my first
Tour in 1999. Throughout that race, some in the French cycling and the French press
communities suggested that my victory was too miraculous; that I must be on a drug, and had
seized on a technicality and run with it: I used an analgesic cream that contained corticosteroid
to treat a case of saddle sores, so the press reported that I tested positive for a banned steroid. It
was untrue. I had received permission from race authorities to use the cream, disclosing its
contents. In fact, all of my tests were clean, and I asked the Tour to release the results, which
they did.
During the 2000 race, skepticism persisted. A headline inL'Equipe over my picture had said,
sarcastically,LES DEUX VITESSES.“The Two Speeds.”The insinuation was clear: that I was riding
at a different, unnatural speed.
Hautacam was greeted as a classic climb by some, but to others it was more evidence that I was
using some mysterious performance-enhancing drug.Daniel Baal, the president of the French
cycling federation (and the man who is scheduled to become the next director of the Tour de
France), intimated as much to the press that afternoon after watching me.
“I would love to know what is happening today,” he said. “I do not know if we must speak of a
new method, or a new substance. I saw many riders in difficulty on the climbs and that is good.
But . . . must I have enthusiasm for how the race is being won?”
As much as I tried not to take the investigation personally, I couldn't help resenting it. The
French press had made a seamy habit of lurking outside my home in Nice, year-round, even
when I was away and Kik was there alone. They smoked, stared at my windows, and engaged in
their favorite sport: brazenly picking through my trash in plain view.
Unfortunately, there was no question in my mind that the investigation was launched in part out
of anti-American sentiment. The Tour was as French as sunflowers and wine, and I wasn't
French. Worse, I was Texan, and only the second American ever to win since the race was
founded in 1903. I'd won two consecutiveTours, while native Frenchmen had fared poorly in
the race. It was hard not to feel I'd been singled out because I was successful and American. I
rode for an American-owned team, on an American-made bike, a Trek. I wore a red, white, and
blue Postal uniform, with the flag all over me.
“Why?” I asked my teammate Cédric Vasseur, a Frenchman. “Why are they doing this?”
Cédric said, “InFrancethey don't like the winner. They like the runner-up.”
For some reason, the French believed that I, the winner, was doped to the gills–while the guys
who got second and third didn't take anything? That didn't make sense. But there it was.
Back inAmerica, the only other American ever to win the race, Greg LeMond, jumped in and
began making comments questioning my innocence. He suggested that I was one of the greatest
“frauds” in the history of cycling. The investigation, he said, was the French way of guarding
the Tour, which he said was more than just a race, it was a beloved French ritual based “on a
deep love of the sport.”
I snapped back, “Their love of the sport is not greater than mine.”
I was mystified and disheartened by the hostility. I lovedFrance, and I wasn't one to say I loved
something when I didn't. I was entranced by the beauty of the country and I'd made a part-time
home on theCôte d'Azursince 1997. Kik and I had been newlyweds there, and Luke had spent a
portion of his first year there. I'd made a life inFrance, and done so happily. I spent far more time
there than inAmerica. I rode in French races to tune up for the Tour, I honored their present and
past champions, and I made an effort to learn French and to speak it in public, even though I
sounded foolish.
It didn't matter; nothing worked. Michael Specter ofThe New Yorker magazine would eventually
write that the French didn't love me for two reasons: they resented that my drug tests were clean
when French cyclists had tested positive, and I was too robotic on the bike. French spectators
loved the faces of pain going up the mountainside, and there was a whole lore to suffering. They
recited certain stories over and over, such as the one about the guy who had to weld his frame
together in the 1910 Tour. Those things they never forgot. But I didn't give them enough of
those moments; I wasn't expressive, and I very often saw no reason to comment, and I tried to
look impassive on the bike.
It wasn't my job to satisfy the French sensibility, to dramatize, to attack in the first kilometer
and maybe lose the whole race just to make the French feel good. I lovedFrance, but I didn't
love the French press, or the fanatics, and now I didn't love the French bureaucracy, either.
The investigation gathered momentum in December, and so did the press reports. Their focus
was a mysterious substance called Actovegin, an empty box of which had been found in our
roadside garbage. Almost all of the reports were sensational and erroneous: Actovegin was
variously described as an experimental Norwegian medication and as calf's blood, and,
according to one especially silly report in theTimes ofLondon,it had never been used on humans
before.
I had never heard of it.
I'd never used it, and to this day I still haven't. On checking, none of my teammates had heard of
it, either. Still, the press chattered on: it was a red-blood booster (it wasn't), it was banned (it
wasn't), it emulated the effects of the banned erythropoietin (it didn't).
I've since been forced to learn about it. In fact, Actovegin had been around and in use since the
1960s. It was a calf's-blood extract, and there was a good deal of debate in the medical
community as to what it was good for, if anything. It was mainly used in European countries to
treat diabetes, but it was also used for bad scrapes and cuts, rashes, acne, ulcers, burns,
tendinitis, open wounds, eye problems, circulation disorders, and senility. There was nothing to
suggest it was performance-enhancing, and it wasn't on anybody's banned list. I want to say that
again. It was legal. It was not banned.
Our team doctor had included Actovegin in his medical kit before the race. He kept it on hand
because one of our team assistants was diabetic, and also in case of traumatic skin injury–the
kind that can happen when you fall off a bicycle onto an asphalt road while traveling at 50 miles
per hour.
The head of the French Sports Ministry, Marie-George Buffet, announced that all of our Postal
team's urine samples from the 2000 Tour would be turned over to the French judicial
investigators and submitted to forensic testing by law enforcement, and so would the garbage
that we had thrown away during the 2000 Tour.
That was actually good news. Iwanted all the tests, because I knew they would come back pure.
They were my only means of vindication. “It's the best news in a long time,” I said. “Because I
know I'm clean.”
More good news came when the International Cycling Union announced it would conduct its
own tests. The ICU had quietly decided to preserve 91 frozen urine samples taken from the
2000 race, without the cyclists' knowledge, in hopes of eventually submitting them to a
brand-new test for EPO.
Prior to that, there was no real way to tell if an athlete was using the drug. EPO is an artificial
hormone originally developed for patients on kidney dialysis, but athletes desperate to win had
discovered that it could be performance-enhancing, especially in cycling, swimming, rowing,
and running. EPO was the most helpful drug to a cyclist because it boosted hemoglobin,
allowing more oxygen to flow to the muscles. It was the drug that had caused the 1998 Tour
scandal.
The new EPO test could detect whether you had used the substance within the past 72 hours,
by testing blood viscosity, counting red blood cells. More red cells make your blood thicker and
give you more hemoglobin. The test was designed to compare an athlete's blood viscosity to
that of an average person; if the test result exceeded certain parameters, it was considered an
indication of EPO use.
The blood-thickening side effect of EPO was considered extremely dangerous in the long term,
and some even speculated that it could cause strokes. About two dozen cyclists were suspected
of having died from its effects, according to theNew York Times . Anyone who thought I would
go through four cycles of chemo just to risk my life by taking EPO was crazy. It was one thing
to seek to maximize performance, or explore a pharmacological gray zone. It was another to
court death.
I practiced another, more natural way to oxygenate my blood, and that was to train or live at
altitude. I stressed altitude training–it was a big part of my regimen, and it was safe, but it was
no fun. It was lung-searing, and dizzying, and inconvenient, but it was legal and it worked.
Here's how: with less oxygen intake, your body becomes more competent and efficient and
produces more red blood cells. I went toSt. Moritzfor a month out of every year to train, and
when I wasn't in the mountains, I spent a lot of nights sleeping in an altitude tent.
An altitude tent, as you can imagine, is not the most romantic thing you can bring to a marriage.
It's a regular tent, but it's got a device attached to it that's essentially a filter to suction some of
the oxygen out of the air to simulate high altitude. I used it inEuropea lot, and I kept one at
home that I sometimes used too, though it meant sleeping without Kik, and with a humming
machine noise. Sometimes Luke played in it and I'd find it filled with toys and broken goldfish
crackers.
One night, Kik and I tried sleeping in it together. Kik said, “This is so romantic, let's go
camping.”
We lasted about three hours before the alarm went off–signaling serious oxygen depletion. We
woke up gasping, and with splitting headaches.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn't know it wasn't meant for two.”
“You better get a double,” she said.
The vague, distant nature of the investigation inFrancestill frustrated me, but now that there
were specific tests, I felt better. If I was a cheater, then it would be apparent when they unfroze
the samples I'd given in the 2000 Tour, before the EPO test existed, and when I had no idea
they'd been kept and frozen.
Three forensic doctors would conduct tests for French law enforcement. Every drop of my urine
and every trace of my blood, and those of my teammates, would be put through exhaustive
analysis. Until now, we'd been in a position where we couldn't defend ourselves. But according
to the authorities, the tests should be completed by January, and that meant I would be cleared,
soon. I looked forward to the big moment: total exoneration.
But it nevercame. January came and went, with no test results, and the investigators refused to
clear me, or to say why.
The winter wore on, uncharacteristically dreary. I called it “the winter of discontent.” One
setback seemed to follow another. I was beginning to feel harassed: our trash had been picked
over, and my blood and urine microscopically examined, and now, the French government
started looking at my tax returns as well.
That spring, Johan Bruyneel was ordered toParisfor questioning and found the police station
surrounded by press. Every journalist in town was there with a microphone or camera. Inside, he
was questioned for three hours. “I felt like a criminal,” he said later.
When his interview was finished, Johan asked one of the officers why the investigation was
taking so long. Johan said, “All the tests have been done, everything has been done, and there is
nothing, nothing, nothing.”
The police investigator was sympathetic, almost apologetic. He told Johan, “The scientific
expert who does the tests thinks he has overlooked something. He says it's not possible that
there is nothing.”
Johan was incredulous. “What?”
“He says the performance is on such a high level that it's not normal. This guy wants to find
something.”
So there was our problem. We weren't guilty, but that wasn't necessarily good enough for the
French scientist who wanted us to be guilty. All we could do was try to forget about it and go
on about our business. But it felt like they were trying to make life difficult in every way they
could. Finally, I'd had it. I decided to leave, and I began to scout for a new home, inSpain.
Life inFrancehad in some ways been peaceful, with the Mediterranean pace and the metronomic
routine of training, and I'd miss the baguettes, the flowers, the friends, and the view of the
mountains against the sea. I'd miss sitting on our terrace and watching the sunsets over the city
lights. But I wouldn't miss the trash scavengers and the prosecutors.
Meanwhile, the investigation threatened to seriously mess with my reputation. Bill Stapleton
was finding it difficult to conduct business. Coca-Cola was running scared of me, and so were
other sponsors.
Bill finally said to them, “Look, he doesn't take drugs, okay? I will stake my entire career on it.”
We wrote in anti-drug out-clauses in our contracts: if I tested positive, I'd give the money back.
Bill had also begun trying to negotiate a new four-year deal with the U.S. Postal Service, the
contract that was my chief income. But now Postal was wary of re-signing the entire team, and
even briefly considered not renewing its team sponsorship.All because of a French fishing
expedition. It was hard not to take that personally.
But another, far more personal blow came when Kevin Livingston, one of my closest friends,
left the U.S. Postal squad. He wanted more money and independence, and decided he was tired
of cycling on my behalf. So he defected. He accepted a larger contract offer, first from a team
sponsored by the Linda McCartney food company. But that team proved short-lived and failed
financially, so he accepted an offer from Deutsche Telekom, to work for my archrival, Jan
Ullrich.
I couldn't believe it. Kevin and I had spent almost a decade cycling together. I'd ridden next to
him, trained with him, climbed mountains with him. As a cyclist I felt I'd done a lot to help him,
and as a friend I'd have killed for him, and I envisioned riding with him together to the ends of
our careers. I felt totally betrayed: I was of the belief that when you had been friends for a
decade, you didn't do what he did. “Colin Powell might as well have signed on to help the
Chinese,” I said.
Kevin and I stopped speaking, and the silence lasted for a while. Finally, we began to chat a
little bit on the bike or when we ran into each other. Finally, through mutual friends acting as
intermediaries, we sat down together and talked, finally cleared the air over an out-of-season
bender. A couple of beers greased the skids to get two friends back together. The problem,
perhaps, was that my expectations for Kevin weren't his own. It wasn't my right to determine
what was best for his career.
But we have never cycled together again as teammates, and I still believe he never should have
left. He ultimately fell out of love with the bike, and he quit the sport. (In fact, his retirement led
to a kind of revenge on the drug testers. Early one morning in the fall of 2002, they showed up
at his house, knocking on the door with their piece of paper. Kevin obliged them by peeing in a
cup, and handed it over. “Here,” he said. “I really hope you find something in it. I'm retired.”)
We still hadn't hit the low point of the winter. That came when Kik and I failed in our attempt
to have another child. In February, Kik underwent in-vitro fertilization, unsuccessfully.
It's hard to describe for the uninitiated how arduous the process was, the pills and
self-administered shots and exams, with Kik cringing at the needles, only to hear that it hadn't
worked. We'd assumed it would be as easy as when we had Luke. Nothing happened.
I took the call. Kik was looking right at me as I got the news, and she knew the answer was no.
She could tell by my face and my tone. I said, as plainly as I could, “Okay, all right, thanks.”
I hung up. “It's not the answer that we wanted,” I said.
Kik teared up. “It's going to be okay,” I said. But we were both crushed. “Well, look,” I said.
“We'll just try it again.”
But trying again meant Kik would face constant needles, pills, sonograms. It meant she would
have to stay home while I traveled, because she would have so many medical appointments. It
meant longer separations, and all for another potential disappointment.
For a few days, we considered waiting another year. But that was doubly depressing, so we
decided to start the cycle all over again.
The timing was hard: I was scheduled to go to an annual series of Postal training camps in
preparation for the 2001 Tour, and in combination with Kik's IVF that meant more time apart
from my family than ever. Luke was changing all the time, and I missed things. He chattered
away about “Da DEE this, and Da DEE that,” and pointed to bicycles and said, “Da DEE?”
And then finally, stated morosely, “Da DEE bye-bye.”
I went to camp inSpain, and on my days off I looked for a new place to live. I finally found it, an
ancient apartment in the town ofGirona, a popular cycling haven. One of Kik's oldest friends,
José Alvarez-Villar, lived 45 minutes away, and he helped with everything from finding a realtor
to closing the deal with translators and attorneys.
I'd always lovedSpain, and now I threw myself into renovating a lovely apartment that had been
part of an old palace and needed special care. I set about finding artisans who could restore it–it
gave me something to do other than simmer about the investigation.
We felt buffeted, between the separations, the investigation, the departure of my best friend to a
rival's team, the decision to move, the difficulty of finding a new home, and a disappointing IVF
treatment. But as lousy as those months were, Kik and I tried not to get too discouraged,
because we always had illness as a context: career reversals and the indignities of a drug
investigation couldn't scare us.
Whenever we needed a reminder of the difference between the small troubles we were
experiencing and truly terrible vagaries, there was a cancer checkup.
I still visited my oncologist, Dr. Nichols, twice a year for blood work and scans, and it was
always an uneasy experience. I wouldn't be declared formally cured until the five-year mark.
That fall, Kik and I had flown toOregonfor my four-year exam.
The funny thing was,everyone thought I was done with cancer. They thought I'd beaten it,
whipped it, willed it away. But surviving cancer was an evolution, rather than a limited
experience confined to a time span or a location.
Some days the disease seemed like it had happened ages ago, and other days it seemed like it
had happened yesterday. I had the odd sensation that I was still expelling poisons from my body,
that there were still toxins in me. My body had been suffused not just with the scourging
poisons of chemo, but also with anesthesia during two surgeries. Anesthesia could linger in the
cells. It was a near-death experience; you were flooded with drugs, brought to a state of such
deep, gassed unconsciousness that you were within a millimeter of death. And then they just
held you there, chemically.
My head was shaved, and covered with small markers. The surgeon explained the procedure, as
if he were talking about a piece of lumber.
“We're just going to cut a little hole, pop it out, remove the lesions, put it back in, and cover it
up.”
He was talking about my skull.
I still worried continually about my health. Little things other people might blow off, a bump, or
an ache, provoked the thought, “My cancer is back.” The slightest head cold was trouble around
our house, and cause for in-depth analysis, deep pondering, and distress.
Even a little fatigue was a matter for concern and phone calls to my doctors and trainers. I was
always putting socks on, never running around in bare feet, always with something on my neck.
A sniffle was a case for long discussion, a bowl of hot soup, and a nap. If I didn't feel quite right
or simply had a tired day on the bike, I was withdrawn, and you could feel the tension radiating
off my body.
Kik and I arrived at theOregonHealthSciencesUniversityinPortlandfor the battery of cancer
tests. We always tried to treat the visit to Dr. Nichols like a routine checkup, but it wasn't. The
results would be either perfect or terrible: I would be cancer-free or not. If the cancer came back,
the only defense the second time around would be even more intense chemotherapy, and it
wouldn't have very good odds of success.
Iwas tiredwhen I woke up, tired when I ate, tired when I took a shower. I slept 20 hours a day; it
was like taking the strongest sleeping pill known to man. One morning I was too tired to make it
to the bathroom alone. “I think I'm going to be sick,” I told my mother. She helped me out of the
hospital bed and I leaned on her as I hobbled across the room, bent in half, my gown falling
open.
I swore silently at the nurses who poked me with needles, drew blood, or took my blood pressure.
I lay in bed, hemmed in by the colorless walls of the hospital room, a 10-by-14-foot rectangle
with a window looking out on a brick building next door, with gray-green linoleum, beige walls,
and light-brown blankets, but I was too tired to get up and do anything about it. Stapleton and
Och and I played cards, games of hearts, until my eyes involuntarily closed again. We played so
many card games we made up our own language. Jacks were Hooks, Kings were Cowboys. I
stared balefully at the TV mounted in the corner. “I hate baseball,” I said. I watched it anyway. I
was too tired to change the channel.
The annual checkups always made Kik and me tense, but on this occasion we were especially
so, given all that was going on in our lives. The doctors and nurses were far more confident
about my health than I was, so perhaps they didn't realize how anxious we were.
A camera crew was on hand, doing an educational film about cancer, and they asked if they
could film me as I went through the various cancer screenings. I agreed, but regretted it almost
instantly. I underwent a chest X ray, and thought,Look,we don't know how this is going to come
out. Get your camera out of here .
As I went from scan to scan, there seemed to be people everywhere, nurses with a hundred
things to sign, technicians who wanted to chat. Nobody seemed to realize that in a flashing
moment on a CT scan screen we could see catastrophe. They were standing around, eating
doughnuts, asking for autographs, taking pictures. To them, my good health was a foregone
conclusion.
Suddenly, I wanted to be alone. I felt exposed. Rationally I knew the chances of the cancer
coming back were negligible, but I still dreaded the test results. I'd do anything for the cancer
community, show up anywhere, sign anything, or talk to anyone, but I didn't want to do it at
that moment, because that moment still scared the crap out of me.
I just wanted to be a normal patient, to have some privacy and room for whatever might happen.
Whether it was cause for relief, or something awful, I didn't want that moment captured.
The tests were fine.
“Everything looks good,” Dr. Nichols said. Kik threw her arms around me, and I smiled with
relief.
I never got accustomed to the attendant sensation: it was of sheer cleanliness. I was clean. MyX
rays and scans were the pictures of my well-being, literally the proof that my being was well.
That sort of exposure I didn't mind. They showed the pictures of a man: five senses, an appetite,
an admittedly selective intellect, an animal soul with a nervous system, four limbs and a
backbone with vertebrae in various states of disrepair but not too bad, a pierce-mark on the
chest, a horseshoe surgical dent in the scalp, a slash at the groin. A little scarred-up in places and
missing a thing or two, perhaps.But not much.
The investigative dossierthe French accumulated on me got thicker. On the front cover of the
folder was a picture of me, a Tour de France victory photo, as I rode down the Champs-Elysées
with a flag.
On top of this, someone had superimposed a picture of a syringe.So much for the presumption
of innocence, and the impartiality of the investigators.
The months passed, and still no test results came back. I was certain the samples were crystal
clear–and surely they knew it too after all this time. It was hard to believe any amount of testing
could take longer. But the prosecutors refused to confirm or to announce anything; instead they
claimed they needed more tests and kept the case open.
Meanwhile, everyone who worked with me was guilty by association. My coach, Chris
Carmichael, was raked by the press. Some journalists wrote that if I was on drugs he must have
given them to me.
“Can you imagine?” Chris said. “You work your ass off, and then people say you didn't really do
it.”
I said, “Let it go. You're falling into their trap.”
Chris was working with a hockey player named Saku Koivu, the captain of the Montréal
Canadiens, who had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma and was attempting a
remarkable comeback. Koivu was declared cancer-free just as the Canadiens were fighting for a
playoff spot, and Chris was hired by George Gillett, the Canadiens' owner, to help Koivu in his
recovery. A month after Koivu finished chemo, Chris started him on a gradual daily regimen,
with 30 minutes on a stationary bike and light weight-lifting. Soon Koivu was working out five
hours a day, six days a week.
He came back before the end of the regular season, accounted for ten points in 12 games, and
led the Canadiens to a victory in the playoffs as well. It was an unbelievable story.
“Was I doping him, too?” Chris asked, bitterly.
The investigation that should have concluded in January was still ongoing as spring approached.
It was as though they had decided, “We'll keep testing until we find something.” There was
nothing I could do. I was used to controlling my own fate, whether on a bike or in business, or
even in a sickbed, but now I was helpless.
Everything seemed to take forever, every minor legal point. The investigation would go quiet
for long periods, and I wouldn't have any idea of what was going on, and it drove me crazy. I
couldn't defend myself, couldn't talk to the judge or prosecutors, couldn't control the science,
couldn't scream at anybody (except Bill), and I couldn't make it go faster. I hated all of these
things, and in turn, I drove Bill crazy.
“What are we doing about it today?”
“Why is the judge always on vacation?”
“We're not doing enough. Why aren't we doing something?”
My lawyer inFrancewrote letters imploring the French authorities to speed up the investigation.
I wrote the judge personally, offering my full cooperation. When the ICU balked at turning over
my blood and urine to prosecutors in a jurisdictional quarrel, I asked the cycling authorities to
please cooperate.
None of it made a difference. We had absolutely no influence over the speed at which the
process moved, and that was hard for me. In fact, Bill came to believe that the more we tried to
hurry them, the more likely they were to drag their feet. Sophie-Hélène Chateau had all the
power and she could make it last as long as she wanted to.
At night I stared at the ceiling and thought about a worst-case scenario: what if the test results
came back screwy because of bad science, or what if someone was so determined to find drugs
that they rigged the results? If a false positive came back, all the world would ever remember
about me was that I was a doper. The one verdict no one seemed willing to arrive at was that
their case was baseless.
Bill tried to reassure me. “It'll be like this,” he said. “All of a sudden we'll wake up one day, and
it will be over, with just a little announcement that the investigation has come to a close.”
“I don't know.”
“You wait,” he said. “This thing will go away in the dark of the night.”
Finally, April came, and with it, what seemed to be good news. We heard via a reporter from
Reuters that all of our tests were clean–exactly as we had insisted all along. My lawyer
inPariscalled the judge, Chateau. She confirmed it.
I was already inFrancefor a bike race, and I went toParisand called a press conference at the
Hôtel George V to announce the results: all of the Postal team samples, not just mine, were
negative. Nor had they found anything in our trash. Boxes and wrappers, that's all.
I couldn't help taking a few digs at the pace of the investigation, pointing out that while the
press conference was going on, the judge was on vacation somewhere. “I'm losing sleep over
this, I want my name exonerated, and she's on the beach for three weeks,” I said. I added that I
hoped the investigation would conclude swiftly now that there was positive proof that I was
clean and so was our team.
But no sooner had I finished than Chateau began hedging. When reporters called her for
confirmation, she admitted that our tests were negative–but she called my press conference
“premature,” and suggested that all of the evidence wasn't in.
A reporter mentioned that I hoped the investigation was drawing to a close.
She replied, curtly, “Il rêve.”
Translation: “He's dreaming.”
Someone asked me what it would take to convince skeptics of my innocence. I answered, “I
don't know.” I was beginning to think I would be presumed guilty for the rest of my life.
Everything I had worked so hard for, my career, my reputation, what I'd done as an athlete,
everything I had could go away, all the things you lose when people don't think you're a good
guy.
What if I lost them? I had lost other things, and survived it. I thought about the things I could
lose as a result of the doping charge, and wondered if I could do without them. My name was
being attacked, and I felt that would be hard to replace. It was my own and no one else's, and it
represented my values, my livelihood, and my family. I could do without money, or a Coca-Cola
deal, but what if I lost my good name and my reputation? I might never be able to earn that
back.
“It's so important to me,” I told Kik. “Luke's name is Armstrong and people know that name,
and when he goes to school I don't want them to say, 'Oh yeah, your dad's the big fake, the
doper.' That would just kill me.”
But there's one thing you can't lose, and that's yourself. I had my own innocence; that was
something no one could mess with.
I'd lost races, health, and an old sense of self, and each loss had its own place in the scheme of a
life. Other losses, if they came, would have their places, too. There are certain inevitabilities.
You will grow older. You will be forced to compromise in ways you never imagined and
confront problems you thought you were immune to. You will find a job, and perhaps lose it.
You will fight with your mate, shoulder unwanted responsibilities, and cope with rank
unfairness. You can allow all that to demoralize you. Or you can let it shape you, and trust that
the shape will be more interesting because of it.
“Get altitude,” Kik said.
That's what we tried to do. And then something happened that made it easier. In April, we
found out that Kik was pregnant. In fact she was more than pregnant, she wasextremely
pregnant. She kept saying, “I feel so weird,” and with good reason, as we were about to find
out.
I was inSpainwhen she went to the obstetrician for an exam. She said to her doctor, Marco
Uribe, “I'm scared that I'm having triplets.”
He said, “Well, don't you want to know?”
She wasn't supposed to have a sonogram for another week and a half. But the doctor explained
that if it was a multiple pregnancy perhaps he could see telltale signs.
“Do you want to see now?”
Kik was alone. It was aboutsix o'clockatnight, and half a world away, it was the middle of the
night and I was sleeping. She hesitated, and then she said, “Yeah, I want to know. Of course I
want to know.”
He performed the sonogram, and there on the screen she saw it, a vibrant dual blip. Kik was
going to wait until morning to call me, but she was so beside herself that she picked up her cell
phone and dialed my number in Europe and left a message, her voice caught somewhere
between profundity and weeping and hilarity, while I slept.
“It'stwins,” she said.
CHAPTER 4
Faith and Doubt
People give me things, things they want me to have, and things they suppose I need: bibles with
my name inscribed, and prayer books, with passages marked. The main thing they seem to think
I need is belief. I do believe, just not necessarily the same way they do. I'm a spiritual person
who lacks a vocabulary for it. But that's asking for trouble.
A guy came up to me in an airport. “Lance, I want to talk to you about your relationship with
God,” he said.
“It's not going to be a long talk,” I said.
Any account of my life begs for larger explanation: why did I live? I refuse the pat answer. God
didn't do it. I don't mean to offend anyone, and I realize it upends the traditional expectation for
me to say this, but I don't believe in a neat religious reckoning. I'm not much for prayer, don't
belong to any religion that involves buildings, and I'm leery of proselytizing. Yet I wear a
crucifix. How do I explain that to a stranger in an airport between flights?
What do I believe? I believe in mystery. I believe faith keeps a lot of the world straight. I believe
if you squint hard and try to see the pattern of things, you can put them in their proper place:
taxes, scandal, gossip, headache, traffic jams. I believe in restraint on the subject of religion, and
I believe that the responsible person seriously questions it, because it's only right to question the
administration of a church that shields child molesters, or the legitimacy of a faith that
encourages repression and terror. Anything else is deficient use of your mind and morals.
I think too many people look to religion as an excuse, or a crutch, or a bailout. I think that what
you've got is what you've got, here and now. Even when I was looking straight at death, I never
thought there was something on the other end. J. Craig Ventner, in discussing the genome, said
something that I'd never been able to articulate for myself, but which summed up everything I
felt about cancer, and religion, and things in general.
“It's unequivocally clear that life begins at birth and ends at death,” he said, “and if most people
on this planet understood that, they would lead their lives very differently. We find religious or
mysterious forces to fill in for our inadequacies, but heaven and hell are both here on earth every
day, and we make our lives around them.”
I viewed my cancer from a scientific standpoint. I was fighting a malignant cell that had invaded
my body, and I wantedscientific tools with which to fight it, things I could measure: data,
medicine, and information. I wanted to be as educated as possible about the illness, because
statistics showed incontrovertibly that the more knowledgeable the cancer patient, the better his
or her chances of survival. Studies also show that a person who has faith has a higher-quality
experience. I don't deny that. All I mean to say is that when I was sick I saw too many people
who evaded personal responsibility, wouldn't take a role in the cure. I flinched each time I heard
someone say, “It's in God's hands,” or, “God will provide.”
I was sleeping so much that I wondered if sleeping was almost like dying. Maybe I was dying.
“Am I?”I wondered. You believe you'll live, but you don't know.
My friend Scott MacEachern from Nike came to visit me. He knocked on the front door and I
answered, standing in the foyer of my big house, all by myself, with no hair, no eyebrows, and
my face drawn. It was the first time Scott had seen me since I'd gotten sick. While we were still
standing there, I dipped my head and showed Scott the big horseshoe scars from my brain
surgery, and then I lifted up my shirt and showed him the other places where they had cut me.
That evening Scott and I sat around and talked about theillness, and about life after death. I
remember the flow of our conversation, and being scared but trying to be courageous, and
telling him that I was trying to stay in front of it and to educate myself, and that I was so tired,
but that I was determined, too.
The next morning Scott got up and went for a run, and when he came back, he heard music
blasting from the garage. Scott walked around the house and peered into the garage. I was
inside, astride a stationary bike. I was clipped into the trainer, in my cycling shoes and shorts,
bald as a cue ball and cut up.
I was out of the saddle. I was attacking, on the trainer. Scott told me later, “I knew at that point
that whether you lived or died, either way, there was a fight going on.”
None of these tendencies of mine meets with the usual definition of spirituality. Some people
even see me as a cause, “There's a guy that needs help.”
But I can live with the conflict, if you want to call it “conflict.” I'm conflicted for a good reason:
when I was a boy I got a poor impression of organized religion. My stepfather, Terry Armstrong,
was a church deacon–but that didn't prevent him from mistreating my mother or beating me
with a paddle. So I saw religion as something to distrust, that could be used as an instrument of
fear as well as good, and just because people went to church every Sunday didn't mean they
weren't corrupt.
My children are being reared as Catholics, and their mother is a practicing Catholic. My own
house is open on the subject. I never argued with Kik about what the kids should be taught, or
how they should be raised; as far as I was concerned they should go to church with their mother.
I think that by and by, the kids will be smart enough, and, I hope, independent enough, to make
their own decisions, and if they are believers, all the better.
Kik is increasingly passionate about her faith, while I've remained a skeptic. We were married in
a Catholic church, but over the years it became an issue of divergence. My doubt could
occasionally upset her. Sometimes a stranger would stop us, and say to me, “Why don't you
pray?” Kik would say, “If it makes you feel any better, I pray for him.”
Also, I had a tendency to be a smart-aleck that didn't sit well with her.
When she'd go to mass, I'd make a comment.
“What are you doing that for?”
“I like going to mass.”
“But it's Saturday. Let's go to dinner instead.”
“I like Saturday mass.”
I'd think about that for a second.
“Can't you change it?” I'd crack.
But one day she cured me, convinced me it wasn't worth making any more cracks. “Wherever
my strength comes from, you should be happy for it,” she said. “Because you rely on me a lot, so
you rely on that strength.” She had a point; if faith affected her life, then by extension if affected
mine. When I raced, Kik would find a church and light candles for me, and I appreciated it.
During the Tour I'd ask her, “Did you light a candle for me today?” But nobody in the family
ever said, “You want to go to church with us?” They knew better.
Kik started talking to Luke early on about Jesus Christ, but Christmas wasn't especially
meaningful to me, except as it related to my children. On the morning of Luke's second
Christmas, I was beside myself with excitement, and I was the first to wake up. We'd gotten
him a little battery-operated jeep, and I couldn't wait to see his face when he opened the box.
But on that morning, of all mornings, he decided to sleep in. I paced the kitchen impatiently.
Kik and her parents, Dave and Ethel Richard, got up, and we all sat in the kitchen drinking
coffee and reading the paper. Finally I couldn't stand it anymore.
“Let's just go get him up,” I said.
I got out of my chair and grabbed a Christmas stocking with bells on it, and I went upstairs, and
I stood outside Luke's room and I shook it, hard.Nothing. So I shook it again, and again,
impatiently. Downstairs Kik collapsed in giggles because she could hear the Christmas bells, and
me shouting, “Ho! Ho! Ho!” Finally, my son poked his head out of bed.
Kik thought my skepticism was based on childhood resentment and that eventually I might be
persuadable on the subject, might some day “credit the source” of my survival. I disagreed, and
still do. But it doesn't prevent me from being respectful of and even intrigued by some aspects
of faith, particularly by the ceremony and imagery of it.
It's why I wear the cross on my chest–it's an expression of kinship with those who've suffered.
While I was still in remission, my friend Stacy Pounds, who worked for Bill Stapleton as an
assistant for many years, was diagnosed with lung cancer. My mother bought a pair of silver
crucifixes, and Stacy wore one, and I wore the other. I still wear it.
In the winter and spring of 2001, in the midst of preparing for another Tour de France, I became
absorbed in restoring the old family chapel in our new home in Girona. I'd bought the first floor
of what had once been a small palace on one of the most historic streets in the old city, in part
because I was stunned by the wrecked beauty of it, and also because I knew how it would
please Kik. The apartment was dank and crumbling, would have to be completely redesigned
and restored, but you couldn't help but feel remnants in the air of all that had happened there,
the fervency in the flaked and fading walls, the aged dank gray stone, the arched gothic ceilings,
and the colored glass.
Girona is a living archaeological dig, with the ruins from different ages, elements of Roman,
Moorish, Jewish, Muslim, and medieval history, still visible. The gothic cathedral is one of the
largest inEurope, and it's just up a winding, narrow cobbled street, lined with small bookshops,
cafés, and other businesses. According to the history books, during some of the bloodier periods
in the city's intensely religious history, rivulets of blood literally ran down the street to the
bottom of the hill.
The apartment has tall windows with a wrought-iron terrace, and I can step outside and look
down on my favorite sidewalk café directly across the street, where there are deep wicker chairs
in which you can settle and drink coffee. The apartment itself has the old gothic arches and
cornices, and two small gardens, with stone fountains gurgling. But the centerpiece is the small
family chapel, with deep blue walls and gilt stars and a small wooden altar.
I hired craftswomen fromBarcelonato repair the frescoed walls, matching the midnight-blue and
magenta walls with textured gilt details, and when it was done, I bought a painting for it, an
exquisite piece of 15th-century religious art, to be the centerpiece over the altar.
To me, that chapel isn't just about worship, but about history, about age, about the hundreds of
years that have seeped into the arched ceilings, the gold paint, and the original stained glass. It's
stunning. I appreciate that chapel as a balance to logic; some things can be measured, and other
things can't.
My survival is an immeasurable thing, too. How much of it was due to science, how much to
belief, how much to self-will? I don't know the answer, and I resist the simple, comfortable
explanations, because frankly, pure luck had a good deal to do with it, too. SometimesI don't
know is the best and most honest answer you can give.
In 2001, as I approached the five-year cancer anniversary and the prospect that I'd be declared
officially cured, I had reason to consider all of these issues again. I also had yet another reason to
try to win the Tour again. The race was always a reconfirmation, another act of continued
existence. It seemed only right to exhaust the possibility in the body I'd been given back.
Regardless of what you attributed my ongoing presence to, it seemed to me that I was obliged
todo something with it.
And racing is what I do. But it was beginning to occur to me that it's also theeasiest thing I do.
It was a lot easier than, say, defendingmyself from a drug investigation, holding together a
marriage, or trying to reconcile the conflict between faith and science.
Early that springI visitedLourdes, not to light candles or bathe in the waters, but to ride my bike
in the mountains above the city.
One day, I ascended seven mountain passes over a distance of 130 miles. Some of the peaks
were snowed in and I couldn't get to them. I'd go as far as I could, turn my bike around and
coast to the bottom, and then ride up again, just to get another big climb in.
Obsessive training was one way to escape the frustrations of the drug inquiry, which still
dragged on. First the French authorities said it would conclude before the Tour, but it remained
open. The assistant prosecutor, François Franchi, had asked for a new round of tests–for what,
he couldn't say. “For now we haven't found any EPO,” he said. “We don't have anything
concrete or positive.” They continued to try in vain to find something in my urine.
My friend Robin Williams joked, “What is it, a chardonnay? It gets better with age?”
The best revenge, I decided, was to win the Tour again. Another victory might not satisfy the
skeptics, but at least it would satisfy me.
This time, my son would be old enough to understand a little bit of what I did for a living. I
schooled him well.
“Who's going to win?” I'd ask him.
“DADDY!” he'd yell.
The Tour began on the coast of northernFrance, atDunkirk, with a short prologue in the rain to
a seafront finish. Luke loved being at the race. He hung out with me at the team bus and
showed off all the words he knew, by pointing to a bike, wheel, truck, and so on. He kept
offering me bites of his sandwich as I warmed up for the prologue. I politely declined–it wasn't
the ideal pre-race snack.
“What is Daddy's color?” I asked.
“Yo-yo,” he answered.
He couldn't really say yellow, so everything was yo-yo, all day long. Yo-yo bus, yo-yo bike,
yo-yo truck . . . you get the idea. It was a constant yo-yo commentary.
I grinned at the start–I'd been waiting for this moment. I beat the pedals down the straightaway,
and across the rain-slick streets ofDunkirk. But I finished a faintly disappointing third. Daddy
wasn't wearing yo-yo. Luke would have to wait–for longer than anyone expected.

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