Every Second Counts-Lance Armstrong(5)

“Random drug control,” the woman said.
Kik couldn't believe it. “It's seven in the morning,” she snapped.
The woman just stuck out the paperwork.
I came to the door.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
“Random drug control,” she repeated.
“Random? What's random about this? Are you kidding?”
Kik was so angry she was trembling. She'd always faintly resented the drug testers because of
their lack of cordiality, the way they barged into the house and gave orders. “If only they'd say,
'Howare you?' ” she'd say. But this felt like an outright violation, for them to show up on the
doorstep while we were in our bathrobes, with newborns in the house. They had seen Kik in
labor, only a week earlier, and it had been all over theAustinpaper when we brought the children
home from the hospital, and they knew exactly how invasive a test must have been at this time
in our lives. I was all for random testing, but this went too far. It felt like needless harassment in
the game of “Gotcha.”

For Kik, it was the worst possible time to see a stranger at the door. She was full of protective
feelings for the babies and it was the last straw. There was just something about having them in
our living room that felt wrong that day.
After I did the usual drug-test routine and paperwork, Kik walked them to the front door. As
they reached the threshold, Kik threw her arm out and blocked the way, so they couldn't leave.
Kik leaned into the woman's face and said, through clenched teeth, “I don't want you coming
over here early in the morning like this and disrupting this familyever again.” But we both knew
they'd be back.
We closed the door and went back inside and tried to resume our peaceful morning. But the
moment was gone, and what no one could know was just how few of those moments there
were. We didn't get very many of them.
Looking back onit now, the episode was telling. Life was a constant series of large and small
disturbances, interruptions, breaks in the connection.
I was trying to oversee the renovating of our new apartment in Girona and the move
fromFrancetoSpain, run a cancer foundation, and maintain a world-class cycling career all at the
same time. But most important, we were parents to newborn twins, and to a two-year-old boy.
We lived in a rush–a focused rush, but a rush nonetheless–and sometimes we forgot the most
basic things, with hilarious consequences. For instance, once I got Kik some real cycling gear,
including a pair of high-performance shoes that clipped into the pedals. She trooped off to the
gym and signed up for a spin class. She clipped herself into the bike, and worked out. When she
got done, she popped off the bike–and couldn't figure out how to get the shoes off. She stared
at the straps and buckles, baffled. I'd forgotten to show her how
In front of the entire gym, Kik had to clod-hop out the front door, down the stairs, and into the
parking lot. She got into her car and drove home in the cycling shoes. I was sitting in the
kitchen eating cereal when I heard, “clunk-clunk-clunk,” coming down the hall.
“Why do you have your cycling shoes on?” I said.
“You have to help me take them off.”
I burst out laughing.
The next day, Kik went back to the gym, and there was College, working out. Kik put on her
cycling gear and got on a spin bike. College finished his own workout, and then wandered over
to Kik.
“I just need to know if I have to hang around for another thirty minutes to help you out of those
shoes,” he said.
But we forgot some important things, too. For instance, we forgot to go to a quiet dinner, just
the two of us. We breezed through the house, gave each other a kiss, a quick tackle, and then
there was always something else to do, a baby that needed something or an important call.
Even in the off-season, I had to travel more than I liked, usually for the cancer foundation or to
honor my endorsement contracts. I always tried to make it back home for dinner, but there were
times when it was impossible. A typical week: I went toEuropefor 48 hours for an appearance,
and took the Concorde fromParisback toNew York, changed planes, landed inAustin, and drove
straight to a photo shoot. From there I went to sign books, jerseys, and posters for cancer
survivors. Then I drove home, changed, and took a 35-minute bike ride. I showered, changed
again, and spent some time with Kik and the kids. Then I changed yet again, and we went to a
gala-fundraiser for the cancer foundation.
Meanwhile, Kik was bringing a similar energy to motherhood–anda perfectionism , too. She
didn't take the easy road. For instance, she didn't buy baby food; she wanted to give the kids real
vegetables instead of processed stuff, so she cooked fresh ones and mashed them up.
We had help, in the form of a nine-to-five nanny and a housekeeper, but we still struggled to
stay ahead of the game. I bought hours on a private plane, in order to get home at night and not
miss too many of the struggles or highlights.
I'd walk in the door after being away, and Luke would launch himself at my stomach, and I'd
feel a renewed surge of energy. I'd peer at Grace and Isabelle with a deep curiosity: each of them
was changing daily. Soon Grace had outgrown Isabelle, and I wondered with a pang what else
had happened without me.
Luke got a new two-wheeler from Trek, and he was so excited when he first saw it, he
screamed “NEW BIKE, NEW BIKE!” He leaped on it and took off, ripping around the house
and skillfully angling around furniture. I looked at Kik and said, “This is scary.”
When he rode it outside for the first time, he crashed just like his father. Kik took him to a
neighborhood with no traffic and smoothly paved streets. Luke was so excited that he wore his
helmet the whole way over in the car. He jumped right on the bike and took off at top
speed–with Kik chasing him. He took a sharp left and headed downhill, and onto a
cobblestoned driveway. He hit the bumps, and went flying headfirst from the bike and landed on
his face. He got up bruised, scratched, and crying . . . but he just wiped his nose on Kik's
shoulder and got right back on his bike. Just like his father.
I was deeply curious about parenting, and wanted to be a hands-on father. I didn't shy away
from the responsibility. I respected and admired good fathers, most especially my father-in-law,
Dave. I expected myself to be good at it, and felt devoted to the job–even when I wasn't sure
how to go about it. I loved doing the small fatherly things–doting on the girls, taking Luke to
school, talking to his teachers. The smallest act of fatherhood was very symbolic to me, and
vital.
But I was discovering what a hard job it could be. Juggling three children all at once, plus
meeting other responsibilities, was alternately joyful, chaotic, and overwhelming. There were so
many small bodies and needs to attend to that I couldn't even find time to go to the bathroom.
One morning when the girls were still brand new, Kik was exhausted from handling three
children with just two hands. I was out riding, and she was by herself. The twins went on
dueling crying jags, and Luke was racing around being rambunctious.
Kik couldn't put a baby down long enough to answer the phone, or to get out of her pajamas.
All of a sudden there was a knock on the door. Kik opened it, still in her pajamas and with an
infant in each arm. It was her dad, Dave. “Hi, honey,” he said. “I called and then I tried your cell
phone, and you didn't answer either one, so I thought I would just stop in. I thought maybe you
could use a hand.”
“Bless you,” Kik said. “Here, take a baby.”
One afternoon Iwas out on my bike when my cell phone rang. It was David Millar, the great
young British cyclist and my friend, calling fromParis. He was out on the town and had had a
few drinks and decided to give me a ring.
“Please tell me you're not on your bike,” he said.
“I'm on my bike.”
“No! You bastard! It's December bloody first! How long have you been on it?”
“Three and a half hours.”
“You bastard!”
If you asked me when I started preparing for the next Tour, my answer was, “The morning
after.” To my way of thinking, the Tour wasn't won inJuly, it was won by riding when other
people weren't willing to.
That meant there was no such thing as an off-season. I rode year-round. In a way, I preferred
training to my other responsibilities. Since I wasn't in the States very much, there was always
too much to do, people to see, requests to fulfill. It was actually a relief when the cycling season
resumed each February and we returned toEurope.
From then on I trained with a meditative concentration on my job. It was isolating, but it was
also an escape, with no distractions and fewer potential problems. It simplified everything.
This year, I looked forward to going back toEuropeand having some peaceful time with my
family, because our new home in Girona was finally ready.
The result was breathtaking. What had been a dank, crumbling old set of rooms was now a
large, gracious apartment. The floor-to-ceiling terraced windows were hung with rich magenta
drapes, and the ancient columns had been repainted with gilt. In a small cloistered garden, a
fountain burbled beneath 12th-century stonework arches and cornices. My friend and
architectRyan Streethad turned it into a four-bedroom family home with every modern comfort
and fixture, while preserving the atmosphere and detail of the old rooms. The chapel was
splendid, and even a set of broken-paned stained-glass doors under gothic arches had been
restored. Hanging over the altar was the beautiful piece of religious art I'd found for Kik, a
15th-century crucifixion scene painted on wood.
Back home, the girls needed passports. Luke already had one, with his tiny baby photo on it. He
was screaming at the time it was taken, so his face in the photo was a red “O,” and even the
frowning Frenchmen in customs smiled when they saw it.
I wanted to make it as easy as possible for Kik to travel with the children and the cat-and-dog
menagerie, so I booked a private charter flight for them. Rather than hassle with changing
planes and trying to get through customs with a double stroller, as she usually did, Kik and the
kids went to a private terminal and flew direct fromAustinto Girona in a little over eight hours.
It was the best I could do under the circumstances. Still, we'd have both preferred it if I had
been there to help.
I was already in love with Girona, a city that was once conquered by Charlemagne and then
later reclaimed by the Moors. I never tired of strolling down the elegant arcades, or stopping at
the gothic cathedral, behind which were ruins and improbable gardens planted through the
different ages.
Kik walked into the apartment to find that all of our things had arrived fromFranceand every
piece of furniture and dish was in place. Her reaction was what I'd hoped: she looked around the
huge, high-ceilinged rooms and pronounced them “palatial.” It was a far cry from her move
several years earlier, with a mattress tied to the top of a Renault.
Kik loved the history and elegance of the old town center of Girona, with its arched stone
doorways and cobbled streets. She had never lived in an urban setting before, so it was a new
experience for her to ride a private elevator one flight down to the ground floor, and to walk a
couple of blocks to do her shopping. She wandered through the Ramblas, the main pedestrian
square, ducking into the various specialty shops for bread, or tea, or seafood. Or, she could just
order groceries over the Internet and have them delivered to the door.
That spring we had a baptism for Grace and Isabelle, now almost six months old, in the Girona
cathedral. We stood in the ancient baptismal nave, in the evening, surrounded by Kik's family
and some friends. The priest conducted the ceremony in Spanish, and at one point as he
gestured with his hand, Luke thought he wanted to shake. Luke walked right up and took his
hand in the middle of the ceremony. We all laughed, the priest included.
The apartment was near the Ramblas, which made it easy for Kik to load up the double stroller
and wheel it through the center of town. We bought Luke a little skateboard that attached to
the back of a stroller, so he could ride along behind the girls. Luke made himself at home
inSpain, which was no surprise. He said “hola,” and “gracias,” and “hasta luego” to everyone,
charming his way to free cookies and other items. But he was unmistakably American in his
Nike duds and a backwards cap that saidUNIVERSITYOFTEXAS.
A typical day: I rose at aboutsevenA.M.for coffee, and read the paper, and if something
interrupted the ritual, I was grumpy. Next, I dealt with the overnight e-mails and fired off
business correspondence. Sometimes, Bill Stapleton arrived at the office to find as many as 20
messages from me by nineA.M. Breakfast depended on my training and how many calories I
would burn that day: sometimes fruit, sometimes muesli, sometimes egg whites and fresh bread.
Then I left home on my bike to train for anywhere from three to seven hours.
After I got home, I showered, ate some pasta, and returned more phone calls and e-mails, and
then lay down for a nap. While I slept, Kik made dinner, usually fish or chicken and steamed
vegetables. When I woke up, I played with the kids and had dinner. In the evening, we read or
watched television, and we were all in bed by tenP.M. That was it. And we did it every day, for
months on end.
Outwardly, Kik seemed content with our lives. When I came home from riding, there was pasta
or soup boiling on the stove, the kids would be adorable and happy, and she always said she'd
had a good day. She rarely complained or balked at the intensity of my training or the solitude of
her own life inEurope, away from her parents and friends. I could have said, “I need to eat grass
for dinner and go to bed at six,” and she'd have said fine, and help me do it. She was
sunny-natured and she kept negative air out of the house. We almost never fought.
But in retrospect, perhaps we should have. For the first few years together, it was an adventure
for both of us to live the life of a European cyclist. But over time, it became less of an
adventure, and now with three children it began to mean spending stretches of time apart. It
was just too hard to move three children around, and we weren't willing to leave them with a
nanny.
We no longer went places together the way we once had. In March, I left for a one-day race,
Milan–San Remo, an event she'd always come to in the past. But this time she stayed home in
Girona. I flew toMilanalone, and raced 300 kilometers, and afterward I threw on dry clothes,
sped to the airport and flew home. I made it back in time for dinner. I was aching with fatigue,
but I was home.
It was therain that made Floyd Landis drink 13 cappuccinos.
It wasn't because he thought it was a good idea.
Floyd and another young member of the U.S. Postal team, Dave Zabriskie, were sharing an
apartment in Girona in the spring of 2002, and it had rained for weeks on end. There wasn't a
lot to do except ride their bikes, and it had strained their abilities to entertain themselves. When
they woke up to gray skies and wet streets for yet another day, Floyd said to Dave, “Screw it,
let's not ride today. Let's hang out at the café.”
They wandered down to the town square and took a table in a sidewalk café. They watched
people go by, and Floyd ordered a cappuccino. It arrived, frothing and aromatic. After a while,
he ordered another, and then another. “How many of those are you going to drink?” Zabriskie
said. Floyd shrugged. So Zabriskie joined him, and ordered another. And it went on like that for
three hours, Floyd and Dave lounging and drinking coffee, after coffee, after coffee, with
mounting hilarity. When the check came, Floyd found he'd had 13 cappuccinos.
The next day the story got back to me. I'd been watching Floyd carefully. He was an interesting
new kid on the team, made up of equal parts mischief and talent. He was a 26-year-old from a
Mennonite family inLancaster,Pennsylvania, who'd run off to become a mountain biker and had
then switched over to road racing. He showed promise, but he'd had some hard luck, and he
obviously hadn't yet learned how to be a professional, either. He was loud and smart-alecky and
he liked to blast ZZ Top, which in combination with his iffy training habits made him seem like
a slacker to the veteran cyclists on our team, who were all serious in their work habits. If he
didn't know better than to blow off training and try to give himself caffeine poisoning, he
needed to learn. Mainly he was young.
I called him up. “Floyd, what are you doing tomorrow?”
He said, “Oh, I'm going to do a two-hour ride with the guys.”
I said, “No, you're not. You're going to do five hours with me and we're going to have a little
talk.”
He met me the next morning, and we rode into the hills above Girona, and I told him I'd heard
what he had done.
“Man, youcannot act that way,” I said. “You can't treat your body that way, you can't train that
way, and you can't treat your teammates that way.”
Floyd was very open, and apologetic. He said, “I know, I know.”
“Look man, you gotta get it together,” I said. “You've got to have a little balance. You aren't
born a professional. You have to turn yourself into one. You have to do the right things. You
have to eat right. You have to sleep right.”
I knew that Floyd was in the midst of a hard year. His previous cycling team, Mercury, had gone
bankrupt when a sponsor pulled out, and Floyd only got paid half of what he was owed, and he
was out of racing for eight months. Eventually, he got up the nerve to contact Postal and ask if
he was wanted, and we said sure. Now he was one of 20 riders on the Postal roster, and he had
a chance to be one of the nine riders selected by Johan to ride in the Tour–if he worked hard.
But Floyd was distracted. He was loaded down with debt, because he'd maxed out his credit
cards when his team folded. He had medical and dental bills, and was struggling to support his
family, his wife, Amber, and his six-year-old daughter, Ryan. He didn't know what to expect
from his new team, or what was expected from him in return, or even whether he had a future as
a rider.
“Look, pal,” I said, “you've got to get this right. Listen to me, and do what I tell you.”
I explained the math: Floyd was making a salary of $60,000, but if he bore down and made the
nine-man squad that raced in the Tour, and we won, he would get about $50,000 more in prize
money. “And then I'm going to throw a Lance-bonus on top of it,” I said. “But to do it, you've
got to focus, and quit worrying about anything else. Your family, debt, money, stress, you have
to forget all of it. You've got to focus on this one thing.”
Floyd said that was easier said than done.
“Forget it,” I repeated. “You just fucking ride your bike.”
But the very advice I was giving Floyd–to focus on cycling to the exclusion of all else–was the
subject about which I struggled most. I constantly considered the cost of a career as demanding
as cycling, versus the demands of a young family. How to balance the two? One of the ways in
which I was determined to be a good father was to make the best living I could for them, make
the most out of this brief opportunity I had as a world-champion athlete. But professional
success could become a personal failure, if cycling came at the expense of our family.
In Floyd's case at the time, it was the right choice, and the only one. There aren't many clearly
marked, signpost moments in your life, but occasionally they come along, and you have a choice.
You can either do something the same old way, or you can make a better decision. You have to
be able to recognize the moment, and to act on it, at risk of saying later, “That's when it all
could have been different.” If you're willing to make a harder choice, you can redesign your life.
This was Floyd's moment, when he could change everything for himself, and I wanted him to
know it.
Floyd agreed, and for the next several weeks, we trained together. He went with me toSt.
Moritzfor altitude training. We went on reconnaissance rides for the Tour stages. We rode
together for hours on end, and he learned, on a day-to-day basis, what I meant by
professionalism. He learned focus, the ability to ignore large distractions, and to concentrate on
the process. He learned resolve.
Sometimes others see more ability in you than you see in yourself. As a young rider, I'd been
something like Floyd, a talented thrasher who didn't know how good he could be. What was
true in his case had once been true in mine: I'd been ambitious but directionless, and a little bit
of a loudmouth American, until older riders taught me better.
I'd never conceived of the Tour de France as a race I was capable of winning before Johan
Bruyneel told me I could. I remember the moment when he said it to me, back in 1998. Johan
was the newly named director of the Postal team, and I was the newly named team leader, and
while I'd begun to work my way back from illness, I was still a tentative rider. I'd recently placed
fourth in the Tour of Spain, a three-week road race, and Johan had watched me closely.
I was about to ride in the World Championships inHollandwhen Johan came to see me in my
hotel room. He immediately started to talk about his ambitions for me and the Postal team.
“Okay,” he said, “you just took fourth inSpain, without any special preparation, without having
trained for it. You just showed up, you didn't even have the ambition to be in the top five, and
you ended up fourth. So I think next year we have to work toward the Tour de France.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I can win some stages.”
“No, no, to win the whole thing,” he said.
I stared at him, doubtfully. I was just glad to be there, to have a bike and a job again. I said,
“Well, yeah, right. Look, I'm thinking about the World Championships now. We'll talk about
this later.”
Johan let the topic go for the moment, but he came back to it a couple of days later.
Traditionally, the winner of the World Championships wears a rainbow-colored jersey for the
entire year, signifying that he is the title-holder. Just before I raced, Johan wrote me an e-mail.
“Good luck,” he said. “I think you will look great on the podium of the Tour de France in the
rainbow jersey.”
I didn't win the Worlds–I was fifth. But the idea of winning the Tour began to grow in me.
Johan knew me more by reputation than anything else: a huge talent who didn't get everything
out of himself. Every once in a while, I'd deliver a big ride: when I was 21, I had come out of
nowhere to win the Worlds, and then a stage of the Tour de France. But mostly I cruised for
months at a time, performing decently but not exceptionally, just barely meeting the definition
of “professional.”
Back then, I thought I was doing all that I could do. After the cancer, I realized I'd been
operating at about half of my abilities. The truth was that I'd never trained as hard as I could,
never focused as much as I could.
For one thing, I carried around 15 to 20 pounds more weight than I should have, some of it in
puppy fat and some of it in margaritas and tortilla chips. After cancer, I was 20 pounds lighter.
Under Jonah, I began training seriously, and kept the weight off, and discovered what a huge
difference it made in the mountains, where your own body was your biggest adversary. The lost
weight, I discovered, made me 10 to 12 minutes faster over a mountain stage; I figured it saved
me about three minutes on every mountain pass I rode.
Also, I began to work on becoming an efficient rider. As a young rider, I would start off at the
gun, and just go. I didn't really know how to race–I mashed big gears and thrashed around on
the bike, my position all wrong. Now, with Johan and Chris Carmichael, I studied proper
aerodynamic positioning and effective cadence. Instead of cranking a big gear without much
technique, I used a smaller gear and quicker pedal strokes as I moved uphill. I became an
extremely good technical rider–the athlete turned into a trained and practiced cyclist.
There was no mystery and no miracle drug that helped me win that Tour de France in 1999, I
explained to Floyd. It was a matter of recognizing the moment. It was a matter of better training
and technique, and my experience with cancer and subsequent willingness to make the
sacrifices. These were the explanations. If you want to do something great, you need a strong
will and attention to detail. If you surveyed all the greatly successful people in this world, some
would be charismatic, some would be not so; some would be tall, some would be short; some
would be fat, some would be thin. But the common denominator is that they're all capable of
sustained, focused attention.
Since then, I'd become ever more fixated on the Tour de France, both as a personal challenge
and an objective one. The race became not so much about beating others, but about turning the
competition againstmyself . I was obsessed with doing it a little better than I had before, a little
bit better than last year, or last month, or even yesterday.
The Tour is essentially a math problem, a 2,000-mile race over three weeks that's sometimes
won by a margin of a minute or less. How do you propel yourself through space on a bicycle,
sometimes steeply uphill, at a speed sustainable for three weeks? Every second counts.
You had to be willing to examine any small part of your body or the bike to find extra time, I
told Floyd; to look for fractions of seconds in something as small as the sleeves of your jersey.
“Once you reach a certain level, everyone is good, and everyone trains hard,” I said. The
difference is who is more meticulous, willing to find the smallest increments of time, and as you
get older and more experienced, the percentage gains grow smaller and smaller.
You had to become a slave to data, to performance indicators like pedal cadence, and power
output measured in watts. You had to measure literally every heartbeat, and every morsel you
ate, down to each spoonful of cereal. You had to be willing to look like a vampire, your body-fat
hovering around three or four percent, if it made you faster. If you weighed too little, you
wouldn't have the physical resources to generate enough speed. If you weighed too much, your
body was a burden. It was a matter of power to weight.
Who knew when you might find a winning margin in a wind tunnel in December, during
equipment testing? You might find another fraction of time in your position on the bike, or in a
helmet, or in the composition of a wheel. Aerodynamics are different for every type of road, and
for mild pitches, steep climbs, and long grades, so I worked on strengthening my hip flexors and
my lower back, until I could hold certain positions–because the smallest thing, like moving your
hands on the handlebars, could make you three seconds slower over 25 miles. I practiced
changes in rhythm, accelerations.
I drove Trek's advanced-concept group crazy with testing new equipment, always looking for
fractions of seconds. I wanted the bike lighter, I wanted it more aerodynamic,I wanted better
wheels. I could lift a carbon-fiber frame with one finger, but I asked, “Can't you make it even
lighter?” A tiny change in the weight or construction of the bike could save 10 to 15 seconds
over the course of a 24-mile time trial. We played with computer-assisted design, aerospace
materials. A hydration system was installed, so I could sip fluids without having to shift on the
bike from the ideal aerodynamic position–it might save me another 10 seconds.
I tinkered with the bike incessantly. I was always changing the seat height, or the bars, a little
down, or up. I talked to engineers, became personally acquainted with every pipe and tube. I'd
become so attuned to the bike that I could sense the slightest alteration, like the princess and the
pea. A mechanic might change my seat by a micrometer.
“Who messed with my bike?” I'd say.
When I was in remission, College and I took a driving tour ofEurope. We rented a Renault, and I
drove it so fast and so hard, I did something to the engine. When I floored it, it developed a faint
high-pitched whining sound,Wheeeeeeeeeeee.
Finally, on our way fromItalytoSwitzerland, I got tired. I let College take the wheel, but only if he
promised to keep his foot down on the accelerator.
“Put it to the floor,” I instructed him.
I dozed off in the passenger seat. When he was sure I was fully asleep, College eased off the gas.
TheWheeeeeeeeeeslowed to aWaaaaaaaaaaah.
My eyes snapped open. “Put it to the floor,” I said.
The winning is really in the details, I told Floyd. It's in the details that you get ahead. And in
racing, “If you aren't getting ahead, you might as well be going backwards,” I said.
The data and the numbers and the details gave you a psychological edge, not just physical. Each
time I rode a hard climb twice, I told myself I was doing something no one else had done; that
nobody in the Tour had suffered and worked as hard as I had. It gave me a deeper overall
strength.
The reason we trained in bad weather, I told Floyd, was because a race wouldn't be cancelled
just because it was 40 degrees and sleeting. Unless you ride in the cold you can't know how it
feels, can't understand the sensation of cold seeping into your legs and stiffening them. That was
a kind of strength you could only acquire by riding in it.
We spent most of May off in the mountains, training, and we rode at such high elevations that
we got snowed out.
One day as I was riding, Johan pulled up next to me and said, “There's snow six kilometers from
the top, you can't get through the pass.”
“How much snow?”I asked.
“From an avalanche,” he said.
“What if I keep going?”
“You can't.”
“Who says?”
That's what it took to win the Tour.
One day I rode to a huge mountain called La Plagne. I reached the top after six and a half
hours,then descended. At the bottom I just turned the bike around and went up again. I finished
with more than eight hours of riding that day. It was dark when I got off the bike.
Nobody could give that kind of confidence to an athlete, except himself. It couldn't be faked, or
called up at the last minute. You got it from everything you did leading up to the competition,
so that on the day of the race itself, you looked around at all the other strong riders beside you,
and said, “I'm ready. I've done more than they have. Bring it on.”
But these things didn't always make me easy to work with. Johan Bruyneel and Chris
Carmichael got 100 percent from me, and I wanted 100 percent from them. I called Johan four
and five times a day.
I've been known to callCarmichaelatoneA.M.and say, “What are you doing?” If he hadn't posted
my latest training program to me via e-mail, I wanted to know why not.
“Why isn't it up? You said you'd get it done.”
“I forgot.”
“You forgot? What do you mean you forgot? What if I forgot to show up at the Tour?”
“I'll get it done,” Chris said. And he'd get up, while I was on the phone, and go to his computer.
“Listen,” I'd say, “at this time last year my cadence was 93, and now it's 90, but I'm at the same
wattage. How come? We need to look at that, and the spreadsheets of my last twelve tests, and
measure them against where I was two years ago . . .”
Abike racewas a comparatively easy and compelling form of success. There was a surety to the
math: I knew within a fractional certainty how I would perform in a race because it had all been
measured. It was ultimate, total confidence in the data.
But matters like marriage, or moving, or parenting, were more complicated and ambiguous
compared to winning a race. In May, Kik and I celebrated our four-year wedding anniversary.
We had a rare dinner out in Girona, just the two of us. Date night for us was becoming a
once-a-year deal, on a birthday or our anniversary.
It was an occasion for reminiscing. Kik and I had first met when I was recovering from cancer
and didn't yet know what I would do with the rest of my life, or how much of a life I would
have. She was working for a marketing agency that promoted the cancer foundation, and
shehassled me about not doing more for a corporate sponsor. We ended up having a drink to
make peace–and from then on, we spent all of our time together. I'd known women who were
smart, or pretty, or funny, but until Kik I hadn't met one who was so many things all at once.
Dave Richard hadn't liked any of Kik's boyfriends. He shot every one of them down. Finally, she
said, “Dad, am I ever going to find anybody to satisfy you?” Dave knew then that he had better
try to like the next one. “I'm out of ammo,” he said to his wife. The next guy she brought home
was me. She invited me to her parents' inRye,New Yorkfor Christmas, and by then I was
already thinking of proposing, and hoping she would accept. After the holiday, I sent Kik's
mother, Ethel, an e-mail thanking her. I added, “You've raised a wonderful daughter.” Ethel
wrote me back and said, “Thanks for the nice compliment, but are you sucking up?” I wrote
back, “If it's working, I'm sucking.” I proposed to Kik after just four months.
At our anniversary dinner, we realized all that we'd done since that time: we'd had four
residences and three children, a bunch of bike-wrecks and various medical checkups, and we'd
been through threeTours. We'd done it all fast. We fell in love fast, got married fast, had
children fast, had success fast, and had more children fast. But we were about to have problems
fast.
From the outside it looked graceful and easy, a golden, storybook life, and often it was. But
there was a growing tension between appearances, what the rest of the world expected us to
feel, and what we were actually feeling. The reality was that at the end of the day, we were like
everybody else. The kids were tired and hungry, and the adults were, too. I'd walk through the
door, physically spent. Kik would be worn out from a day with three small children under the
age of three. It didn't help that neither of us wanted to admit to problems or fatigue or the threat
of slippage–we weren't supposed to experience everyday unhappiness, because we'd been given
so much. Neither one of us was able to say to the other, “This doesn't feel quite right.” So we
simply drifted on, doing our best.
A far more difficult test of endurance than a bike race is how you handle the smaller, common
circumstances of your days, the more mundane difficulty of trying to make your life work. It's a
typical assumption that the lessons of athletic competition are transferable. But the truth is that
sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren't.
How do you measure whether you're being a good mate and a consistent parent? If other
versions of success aren't as clear-cut as a bike race, frankly, they're also harder to come by.
They can't be measured with data. They also provide an immeasurable satisfaction.
I was a beacon of survivorship–but I wasn't immune to its effects, and one of the emotional
traps of survivorship is arush to happiness. You race toward joy, exhilarated, and tell yourself
that you don't have a moment to waste on anything that feels wrong or unpleasant. “Why am I
doing this?” I'd say. But a rush to happiness is impossible to achieve. Pure happiness is a rope
slipping through your fingers, a silky sense of something passing from your grip. It's replaced by
exigencies, hard work, renewals, chores, obligations, and another day.
CHAPTER 6
Blue Train (Le Train Bleu)
Picture it: two hundred riders flying down a narrow road at 45 miles an hour, all of them trying
to ride in front, bumping, jostling, punching, cutting each other off, and even jumping curbs in
an effort to get ahead. Some of them will leave tire tracks on your back, if you let them. It's just
one of the ways in which the Tour de France accurately imitates real life.
It takes eight fellow U.S. Postal Service riders to get me to the finish line in one piece, let alone
in first place. Cycling is far more of a team sport than spectators realize, and it's an
embarrassment worth cringing over that I've stood on the podium of the Tour de France alone,
as if I got there by myself. I don't just show up there after almost three thousand miles, and say,
“Look what I did.” When I wear the yellow jersey, I figure I only deserve the zipper. The rest of
it, each sleeve, the front, the back, belongs to the guys.
The Tour de France poses an interesting question about the nature of teamwork: why should
eight riders sweat and suffer for three weeks when only one man, me, will get the trophy? This
is asking for an extreme degree of self-sacrifice, perhaps even an unnatural amount. But the
smart athlete, and person, knows that if self-sacrifice is hard, self-interest is worse. It dooms a
team; you wind up a bunch of singletons that just happen to wear the same shirts.
A great team is a mysterious thing, hard to create, much less duplicate, and there are a lot more
bad teams in the world than good ones. Just look around. Many groups who go through
hardships togetherdon't bond–all you have to do is survey the NFL, the NBA, and
corporateAmericato see that. People talk about teamwork all the time: it's a shopworn and
overused term, experts try to explain and define it, charlatans write books on the subject, but
few really understand it.
And no wonder: teammates have an odd relationship; they float somewhere between
acquaintances and relatives. But I contend that people are meant to work together in groups,
not alone, and that a certain amount of self-sacrifice is not unnatural, but natural. Think about it:
people have been gathering together in group efforts throughout time.
If you truly invest yourself in a team, you guarantee yourself a return on your investment, and
that's a big competitive advantage over other less-committed teams. On the Postal Service team,
we invest in each other's efforts–and the result is that we often have the sensation that we're
racing against teams that merely spendthemselves . What's smarter, to invest or spend?
Investment implies a longer-term commitment; it's not shallow or ephemeral; it's enduring, and
it suggests a long-term return.
There have been times when I've practically lived out of the same suitcase with George
Hincapie. In cycling we're on the side of a mountain for weeks, in small hotel rooms, sharing
every ache, and pain, and meal. You get to know everything about each other, including things
you'd rather not.
For instance, I know that George has such heavy stubble on his chin that he has to shave about
every hour. I learned that one August when we roomed together on the road. One morning,
George was in the bathroom shaving, when I heard him yell.
“Goddammit.It happened again!”
I went running toward the bathroom. “What happened?”
He stepped around the corner, beaming and clean-shaven.
“I just got better-looking,” he said.
You can't always tell what makes a good team–but you know one when you see it, because the
team members like each other. Sometimes we'll stay at a hotel where two or three other teams
are lodged, and we all end up in the dining room together. Our Postal team sits around the table
laughing, and chucking dinner rolls, and even after we're done we linger over our plates,
enjoying each other's company. But across the aisle is a team that's full of free agents, with no
one working very hard in anyone else's behalf. They eat with their heads hanging down over
their plates, not making conversation, and as soon as they finish their meals, they go to their
rooms. And in a pack sprint to the finish line, a solo rider without allies or associates is a tired
and losing one.
The 2002 U.S. Postal Service team was one of the best cycling teams that ever rode a road.
What made the personalities of nine different men on bikes meld into a single agreeable entity?
Reciprocity is the answer. Too many people (especially bosses) demand or try to foster
teamwork without grasping its most crucial aspect: a team is just another version of a
community. The same principles apply to any communal undertaking, whether you're talking
about a community garden, a neighborhood watch, or racing aroundFrance: if you want
something, first you have to give it. You have to invest in it.
If I don't want to get sideways with the guys on my team, it's important to make them feel that
when I'm winning, they are, too. One way to do so is to ride on their behalf in several races a
year. I spend a portion of each spring working as a support rider and trying to help my
teammates win races. I act as a domestique, shield them from the wind, protect them in the
pack, and carry their water bottles–and it's one of my favorite parts of the season. And you
know what? Itfeels good. I don't just do it so that they'll do the same for me in the Tour de
France. I also do it because it feels better thansolitude, it's more gratifying than riding purely
alone.
The 2002 USPS team was made up of like-minded riders. By that I don't mean that we agreed
on politics, or music. We simply shared an ethic. The reason we did so was that Johan and I had
spent the previous five years carefully identifying, recruiting, and signing the kind of people we
wanted to work with. Cycling is a free-agent world: it's a sport full of riders who will subtly
hold back, and ride for themselves rather than the team, with only their own contracts in mind.
We didn't have room for that. We'd had riders on the team we suspected of feeling that
way–and they weren't on the team anymore.
Over the years, other riders had come and gone simply because they were so good that they
were lured away to lead their own teams.Free agency makes it doubly difficult to form a
cohesive team, because the personnel changes regularly from year to year, and 2002 was no
exception: Tyler Hamilton, who'd helped me to three Tour victories, was stolen away from us to
lead a Danish squad. (He remained a good friend and close neighbor.) But hopefully all of our
riders, present and future, are of a type, committed to the team strategy and to doing the small
things right.
At the start of each season we started training with 20 USPS riders from all over the world.
Various factors went into selecting the nine team members who would take the start line in the
Tour de France, including who was riding well at that time of year, and what roles they could
fill–we needed some climbers, we needed some guys for the flats, and we needed
domestiques–but what mattered most was how much they were willing to sacrifice. If you
weren't thinking “team,” you got left home. It was that plain.
We called it Dead Man's Rules. If you violated the ethic, broke the rules, crossed the line, you
were off the team. Everybody went into the Tour knowing there was no self-interest. It was
all-team, or all-nothing. If a guy wasn't thinking this way, then we didn't want him, not even if
he was one of the best riders in the world, because it wasn't a good fit for us. That didn't always
make us the best of friends with people outside the organization–I was viewed by some as a
cold-blooded tyrant. I didn't talk much to other riders. If you weren't on the Postal team, I
wasn't a social butterfly.
We wanted riders who rode with 100 percent aggression. The Postal formula to prepare for the
Tour was simple: measure the weight of the body, the weight of the bike, and the power of the
legs. Make the weight go down, and the power go up. We watched our diet, were consistent in
training habits, and went over every inch of the course. (You'd think every team would do it,
but they don't.) We didn't accept slacking–you have to know that everybody is working as hard
as you are–but we encouraged good humor, because we believed it was excellent painkiller.
You had to mix laughs with the hard work, and be able to tease each other without getting
offended.
A couple of weeks before the 2002 Tour, Johan named the nine who would be on the start line.
Each rider would have to play a different role and serve a different need over the various stages
of the race. But their main job was to keep everybody out of the winner's circle but me.
The team:
George Hincapie was a dryly funny man and one of the most accomplished men in American
cycling. He was true-blue, like a brother to me, solid and serious about his professional
responsibilities every day. Nothing ever seemed to fazeGeorge, or his chronic wit–not even the
hardest stage of the Tour.
I described George's style as “fingers in the nose.” You could see other people breathing hard,
with their mouths hanging open, gasping for air through their ears, through their eyes, through
their pores. But even when George was in a full sprint, you never saw his nostrils flare. It was as
though he didn't need to breathe, didn't even have to use his nose. That was George, fingers in
the nose.
Victor Peña (Colombia), Pavel Padrnos (CzechRepublic), and Benoît Joachim (Belgium) were
consummate Tour domestiques, professional cyclists who could and did win different types of
races around the world, but who for three weeks were willing to subjugate their efforts to the
peculiar job of the world's longest stage race, for the sheer honor of the thing. They were
formidable, stone-faced, and hard-bodied, and some people were afraid to talk to them because
of how they looked, but the truth is, they were big teddy bears who gave of themselves every
day and always looked for a way to help. They protected me from 200 other riders who wanted
to beat up on me, guarded me against crashes and sideswipes, chased down breakaways, ferried
food and water,sheltered me from the wind. The longer they could stay in front of me, the
fresher my legs would be at the end.
I liked to say of my old friend Viacheslav Ekimov, the Olympic champion, that he was
nails.Meaning, “hard as.” He never complained, never whined, always delivered. We'd rather
have his ethic on the team than some million-dollar talent who only rode hard when he felt like
it.
Ekimov had retired at the end of the 2001 season, but he already missed cycling. He called
Johan in February, when we were in a training camp inEurope, and said he wanted to race
again, and he asked if there was still a place for him. “For you there's always a place on the
team,” Johan said. Eki started training, but we figured he wouldn't be race-ready until after the
Tour. Typically, he showed up in early May at training camp, race-fit, the most in-shape of any
of us.
Johan watched him for a few days, and said, “Eki, what do you think of the Tour de France this
year?”
“What about it?” Eki said.
“Would you like to do it?”
“Yeah, I would love to do it.”
“Well, you have no choice. You have to do it. We need you.”
From then on, Ekimov was one of our freshest riders. He had the mentality of a junior, excited
to be there again, and happy every day that he was on the bike.
Roberto Heras and José Luis “Chechu” Rubiera were young Spaniards with beautifully civilized
manners, but on bicycles they climbed mountains with leg-breaking intensity. Heras was
slightly-built and reserved, but when he was on the bike scaling an alp he seemed to flutter with
a hyperkinetic, hummingbird quality. He was so good that there were times when I had trouble
keeping the pace he set.
Chechu was an easy laugher, one of the more gregarious and well-loved men on the team, but
he had his serious side, too. He was an engineering student who brought his textbooks on the
team bus. Both of these guys gave of themselves on every ride, no matter how sore or banged
up they were. They never held back, or seemed to have an off day. Or a bad mood, either.
Then there was Floyd Landis. One afternoon we were out riding together, and I said, “Who do
you think we should pick for the Tour?”
“Well, obviously, I'm going to say me,” he said.
I laughed. Then I named our seven top riders. I finished up by saying, “And, obviously, you.”
Floyd almost jumped off his bike with excitement.“Really?Really?”
“If things keep going the way they are,” I said.
The last big tune-up race before the Tour was called the Dauphiné Libéré. I won it–and Floyd
got second. It was the first time Floyd had done anything in a European race, a huge result for a
novice, and it was obvious he was the right choice for a teammate. I patted myself on the back
for being smart enough to recognize how good he was before he saw it for himself. He was
well-rounded, he could climb, he could time-trial, and he could handle himself in the peloton,
didn't get scared with the high-speed pushing and shoving. Mainly, he wouldn't quit; he was a
stubborn bastard.
With so many different languages on the team, we ended up speaking a kind of pidgin or
shorthand with each other. We swapped phrases and colloquialisms, and developed our own
jokes. I taught Chechu to “raise the roof.” He was so studious that it was doubly funny when he
would act silly, and it sent us all into fits when he raised the roof.
“Chechu, where is the roof?” we'd ask.
The surest way to crack up the boys at dinner or on the team bus was to teach some
Americanism to a civilized man like Eki or Pavel. They spoke excellent English, but they
puzzled over our more casual terms.
Eki would say to Hincapie, “George, what is that thing you always say, 'How you doing?' ”
Pavel was one of the quieter riders, who just did his job and rarely spoke up. We almost never
heard from him on the team radios, until finally one day as we were riding, he asked for a
mechanic because something was wrong with his bike. Johan dispatched a staffer to fix the
problem, and then we heard Johan say, “Okay, Pavel, is it better now?”
“Less or more,” Pavel said.
We all cracked up. I tried to explain it to him. “It's 'moreorless ,' ” I said. “The term is 'more or
less.' ”
“Well, it's the same thing.”
“No. No it's not.”
“How can it be different?” he said.“Less or more, more or less? What is that?”
He argued with me for the longest time.
We traded harmless insults, based on each other's nationalities, limitations, personalities, and
habits. Mostly we shared jokes that nobody else would think were funny.
Every day, I'd go to the gym to work out with George, and we'd sit side by side on the
stationary bikes.
One afternoon, George said, “Got any tape?”
“Why?”
“'Cause I'm ripped,” he said, and made a muscle.
Laughter took away the suffering of training. Our jokes were profane and boyish and silly, but
within the team, among nine people who knew and loved and trusted each other, mouthing off
was an important part of every day, our ritual morale-builder.
“Give me a frickin'tricycle, and I'll kick some ass,” I'd say.
We would make up jingles on the bike. Floyd would ride along beside me, and he would start to
sing, “Somebody's going to be my bitch today, bitch today,bitch today.” All the guys would start
screaming, “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!” and get excited.
George had a saying, when he was feeling really good: “No chain.” The chain on the bike
cranked the wheels and created the tension in your legs that drove the bike forward. But
imagine if you didn't have a chain. You'd spin nothing, air, which would feel real easy. So
George and I had this thing.
“Man, can you check something for me?” he'd say.
“What?”
“I don't feel a chain,” he'd say. “Is there a chain on my bike?”
It became shorthand, “No chain.”
I'd say, “Hey, how good do you feel today, George?”
“No chain, no chain.”
At the startline of the 2002 Tour de France, I decided to wear a plain, regular workaday blue
jersey, indistinguishable from those of my teammates. I wanted to set the tone for the entire
race: it was traditional for the defending champion to begin the race in the yellow jersey, but I
didn't want to single myself out, and we hadn't done anything to deserve the jersey yet in this
year's race. I said to Johan, “Let's earn it.”
The prologue would be a seven-kilometer sprint through the majestic streets ofLuxembourg,
with spires looming as a backdrop, and it was important to me to earn the yellow jersey on that
very first day. I'd lost a couple of time trials in tune-up races, and there were the inevitable
murmurs in the peloton that maybe I was slipping; every rider would be watching for signs that I
was beatable. I wanted to promptly disabuse them of the notion. A win in the prologue would
send a message that said, “Hey guys, I'm here, this is the Tour, not some tune-up, and things are
different.”
There was history at stake, too: I was trying to become only the fourth rider ever to win four
straightTours. The list of others who had done so was short and illustrious: Jacques Anquetil,
Eddy Merckx,Miguel Indurain.
But it would be difficult: 189 other riders would try to beat me to the finish, and then there was
that timeless opponent, the course itself. It would cover 2,034 miles, and three days before the
finish intoParis, we'd still be in the mountains. What that meant was that if you had a bad day,
you could run out of road before you could make up the time.
The Tour organizers had made a significant alteration to the route: it would be shorter, but more
severe. It was clear that they wanted to design a race that would be more difficult for me,
specifically. I'd ridden so strongly and taken such big leaps in the mountains during the previous
Tour victories that there was a feeling the race had been boring in the later stages. This time, the
course was set up to keep the outcome in doubt until the end, with four key mountain stages in
the final eight. Three days before we rode intoParis, we'd still be in the mountains.
In the end, the winner would be the one with the best team, who had managed to stay fresh. I
was convinced that Postal was the strongest and best team, especially when we surveyed a field
of riders that didn't include Jan Ullrich. He'd had a tough year, injuring his knee, and then
wrecking a car after a night out, and he was absent.
On the day of the prologue, Kik went to the cathedral to light the usual candles for good luck,
and then she brought the children to the course to see me before the race began. As she moved
through the crowds, she wound up on the wrong side of the course, with bikes and follow-cars
whizzing by. She had to ask some police officers to help her over the barricade and across the
avenue. She carried Luke, while some helpful onlookers in the crowd hoisted the stroller with
the girls in it in the air, as if they were crowd-surfing at a concert. When they finally made it
across, the crowd cheered.
I sat on a stationary bike, warming up my legs, while Luke drank my Gatorade and examined all
the wheels and bike parts with the team mechanics. The twins sat in the stroller facing me,
staring up at me, while Kik shoveled baby food into their mouths.
It was time to go. I kissed everybody, and I mounted my bike and headed to the start ramp.
Then, after all the other riders had started at one-minute intervals, I flew down the ramp and
onto the course. It was a tight, technical course that required a precise ride, and Johan kept up a
stream of instructions and chatter in my ear. I kept my eyes on the road in front and ignored the
alleys of spectators beating on the barricades.“Very good, Lance, very good, very good,” Johan
said, and read off my split times.
Johan informed me that the leader was Laurent Jalabert ofFrance, a huge crowd favorite who
had announced he would retire after the Tour. I barreled down the last straightaway, chasing the
time that “Jaja” had just ridden. I got it–and the stage win–by two seconds. As I crossed the
finish line, Kik and Luke shrieked, “Go, yo-yo Daddy!”
The yellow jersey was ours. I knew we would give it right back–it's impossible to defend the
jersey from start to finish. It would be smarter to yield it for a few days and conserve energy, and
then reclaim it on the way toParis. Still, it was reassuring to hold it for a day. “It's just good to
know I've got it back,” I told Bill Stapleton.
After the prologue, I returned to the team hotel and visited with my family. It would be the last
relaxed time we'd have together for three weeks. I held the girls, one in each arm, and kissed
them, and once again, I schooled my son in who would win the Tour de France.
“What does Daddy do?” I asked.
“Daddy makes 'em suffer in the mountains,” he said.
But first we had to get there.
The days wereas long as the blacktop in front of you. We rode through the flat champagne
country ofReims, andEpernay, a high-speed chase through northernFrance. We kept ourselves
alert and entertained by cranking ZZ Top on the team bus every morning.
ZZ Top was one of Floyd Landis's contributions to the team, and it was an indelible one. Floyd
was a loud, rampantly funny presence on the bus, and it was a source of daily entertainment to
watch him try to explain ZZ Top to Heras or Rubiera or Eki, jumping around to the lacerating
guitar-rock of songs like “She Wore a Pearl Necklace.” Finally, Heras–quiet, gentlemanly
Roberto–tried to put his foot down. “No more ZZ Top,” he pleaded. “No more.”
But like it or not, ZZ Top had become our ritual, and so had our morning gathering on the bus.
First we'd discuss the strategy and receive our riding orders from Johan, and then the meeting
would degenerate and we'd start fooling around. We realized that the bus windows were tinted
so darkly that no one could see in, and we'd point out and roar with laughter at autograph
peddlers, ticket scalpers, and the loonies in costumes.
Sometimes my friend Robin Williams would climb on the bus and do comedy routines for us. He
would imitate a pissed-off Frenchman, smoking Gitanes and drinking Pernod, or he would turn
on me and make the guys howl by calling me “The Uniballer,” or “The Big Zipper.”
One morning when the material had gotten particularly raucous, we decided we should test the
privacy of the windows, just in case. We made Johan go outside and look through the
windows–and we all mooned him. He never knew it.
It was immature, but it was our way of breaking the tension and the boredom of the flat stages.
We wanted to avoid mishaps until we reached the mountains, but these were dangerous sprint
stages, windy, with a lot of attacks from out of the pack and always the threat of crashes. The
team was riding strongly, but it was wearing on us, especially on Floyd, who we used hard.
Floyd had gained such a hotshot reputation from his finish in the Dauphiné that the field was
aware of him. We'd make Floyd sprint out hard, and the peloton would go after him, chasing
him down and wearing itself out.
Floyd didn't complain. He listened, and he rode hard, and he soaked up knowledge from the
veteran riders, and he wouldn't quit. But he had one weakness–his youth. The Tour isn't a
young man's event, and in fact it's most punishing on rookies who aren't yet fully hardened and
conditioned for a three-week race.
Floyd was nervous. He wasn't sleeping well, and his heart was racing at night. He was worried
that he wasn't ready, that he was a liability. One morning we were on the bus together, just the
two of us, and we talked. He stared at me, wide-eyed and goateed. “Look,” I said, “I need you.”
“I know, I know, I know,” he chattered.
“Quit it,” I said. “Quit fucking freaking out. You're fine. Quit worrying about the team. We're
fine.”
“But Lance, man, my heart is racing . . .”
“Don't give me any of that,” I said. “You're afraid. What are you worried about?Your contract
with the team?”
“No.”
“I think you are. You need to quit thinking about that. Here's what you need to think about:
remember why you're here.”
“Okay. Okay.”
“No bullshit,” I said. “I don't want any excuses. Now you deliver, okay?”
But Floyd wasn't the only tense or tired rider. We all were. We lost track of what day it was, we
didn't even know which stage we were riding. Some mornings you woke up feeling like you'd
been run over by a truck. But you got back on the bike, and after an hour you felt better. If you
were race-hardened, eventually you got in a zone. You reached a point where you had no other
concern in life, it consumed everything. You didn't even have the spare energy for a phone call.
It was a netherworld state in which we just cycled, and then we'd go lie down until it was time
to get up and deal with it again.
In addition to the wind, and the pushing and shoving in the crowded peloton, we were nagged
by small mechanical problems. A couple of our guys had to go back to the car for repairs, and it
made us jumpy.
One morning I decided to try to ease the strain for all of us. I got on the radio and said, “Johan, I
need to come back to the car.”
Johan said, “What do you need?”
“I got a problem. I need you to look at my bike.”
There was a pause, and I could feel Johan worrying on the other end of the radio. It would take
some reorganizing of the team to get me back to the car.
“Johan, you hear me?”
Johan started snapping out instructions. He said, “Okay. Floyd, Chechu, Eki, and Pavel, you go
with Lance. He's coming back to the car. We've got to bring him back.”
I said, “No, no, I don't need all that. I just need confirmation of something.”
“What?”
“I need to know if there's a chain on this bike.Because I can't feel it.”
There was another pause, and then Johan's voice crackled on the radio.
“You motherfucker.”
Around me, my teammates broke up in laughter.
“I'm serious. Is there a chain back there?”
Stage Four was a team time trial throughEpernay. It was a test of our ability to ride together as a
group, and also a kind of loyalty test, because you had to get at least six riders across the finish
line together or take a time penalty. That was easier said than done, given what could happen at
high speeds: flat tires, crashes, or riders falling off the pace. We would be timed collectively, and
our time as a team would also be each rider's individual time. In other words, if enough Postal
riders rode slowly, it could potentially cost me the overall Tour title.
The ONCE team, led by some superb individual time-trial specialists, was the traditional
favorite; no American squad had ever shown much aptitude for team time trials, and in fact it
was said to be a Postal weakness. But this time we felt we could challenge the European
powers. We went off decked out in our Postal blue skin suits, atop mean-looking black carbon
Trek Time Trial bikes. We whirled down the road, averaging around 30 miles per hour, and in
some places on the course our speeds rose to around 45. Each guy took a rotation at the front,
pulling the others, and when the guy got tired, he faded to the back. There were no mistakes or
disasters. Everyone kept up.
We rolled through the finish line together, all nine of us, with a time of1:20:05–just 16 seconds
slower than ONCE, and in second place for the day.
We got through the first week with just one real mishap: about a mile from the end of the
seventh stage, Roberto and I got tangled up. We were riding in the middle of the tightly packed
peloton, trying to avoid the wild rush to the finish line. Roberto, whose daily assignment was to
protect my back, was right behind me. Somebody clipped his wheel, and he fell, and as he went
over, his handlebars caught in my rear wheel. My bike locked up–and just stopped.
I hopped off the bike, and yanked on Roberto's handlebars, trying to get them out of my spokes.
It took about a minute to get them disentangled, and then I kicked my wheel back into place.
Eki pushed me from behind to help me accelerate to the finish. The crash was enough to drop
me from third place to eighth. It could have been worse.
But then something worse did happen. Stage Nine was an individual time trial aroundLorient, a
coastal city with a beautiful boat-studded harbor that had been painted by Impressionists. The
time trial was a Tour ritual called “the race of truth,” because it was just you against the road
and the clock, going flat-out. It was a discipline that rewarded a good technical rider who could
make a big solo ride, take a calculated risk without crashing, and I was considered one of the
best in the world at it. Since the start of the 1999 Tour, I'd won seven out of nine time trials.
As I warmed up for the stage, I teased one of our mechanics, Jean-Marc Vandenberghe. His
father was a road builder, and we had a running joke about it. If I was feeling good, I'd say,
“You better call your dad, because I'm going to tear this road up.”
The joke was such an old gag between us that by now he didn't even have to ask me how I was
feeling. All he had to say was, “Do I need to call my dad?”
That morning I didn't wait for him to ask. I said, “Look, you better call your dad 'cause this
road's going to be fucked up when I get done.”
But I didn't tear up the road that day. Sometimes you do everything right, and then there are the
days when you can't doanything right, and this was one. The course didn't especially suit me,
and my technique wasn't good. I got off to the wrong cadence, too high, but I couldn't correct
it. I knew something was going wrong, but I couldn't quite figure out what.
I lost to Santiago Botero, another great time-trialer who was having a strong season, by 11
seconds. Second place was still a good performance, but because I'd been a heavy favorite, it
was treated as a shocking loss and set off a buzz among the peloton: I wasn't quite the
Armstrong of the past. Igor González de Galdeano ofSpain, who had worn the yellow jersey
through the flats, suggested that perhaps my dominance of the race had ended. “The Tour has
changed,” he announced to the press.
I went back to the hotel in low spirits, and quietly alarmed. If others questioned me, I
questioned myself, too. I was also angry at myself for bragging to Jean-Marc that I'd tear up the
road.
Standing outside the hotel waiting to see me was a family with a small son who had cancer. The
boy's father was a chef fromLyons, the cuisine capital of the world, and they had driven all the
way fromLyonstoLorientjust to talk to me. They had even brought a French edition ofIt's
NotAbout the Bike . I paused to chat with them on a grassy hillside, and as we spoke, as the sun
was setting, the events of the day receded. What they couldn't know was that talking about
cancer was like medicine for me.
My encounters with other cancer fighters are often misconstrued: I don't stay involved with
cancer just to help others. I do it to help myself. That night, talking with that little boy and his
family put me back on my feet. While the rest of the team went to dinner, I stood on the lawn in
front of that hotel and kept talking with them, or rather, trying to, as I stammered in my Texas
French, and I learned about what the boy had been through. He had spent two five-week
stretches in a sterile bubble environment because his immune system had shut down
completely–but now he had been cancer-free for a year. It was unimaginable to me what they
had been through.Give me cancer 50 million times more, but don't give it to my kids , I thought.
I felt peaceful now, just glad to know the boy was well, and that I was, too. I put my arm
around him, and left it there. I messed with him, patted his back, and pulled his ears, so I could
feel a connection. Finally, I thanked them for coming and went inside to join the team for
dinner. But I did so with a surer grasp of what's right and real in the world, and with a sense
that there was always a larger community that I belonged to, from which I would always get
help in a tough time.
The next day, I kept my mouth firmly shut. I was self-conscious about my bragging before the
time trial and determined not to say another word unless I could live up to it. “I'm not going to
say anything anymore,” I told George. But George said, “Why not? We like to hear that kind of
talk.”
George made me realize something: the last thing a team needs is self-doubt. Nobody wants to
work alongside someone who is unsure of himself, because it's a waste of everyone's efforts. My
teammates had put in all those thankless hours on the bike because they believed it was for a
winning cause, they had trained with me in theAlpsand given up their personal lives because it
was a bargain we'd all struck together. That mutual belief gave usmomentum, it propelled us
down the road and up the mountainsides.
They didn't want to hear, in the middle of the race, that I was suddenly iffy about the job.
By the time we reached the foot of the jagged, rockyPyrenees, I felt surer of myself again.
“We're going to attack, and get the time back,” I said.
Stage 11 would take us to a village called La Mongie, halfway up the famed Tourmalet, and I
knew what was ahead and exactly how difficult it was. I knew something else, too, which was
reassuring: I wouldn't have to do it alone. We were going to come charging up that mountain
together, all of us, and when we did, the other riders would drop away. “They'll crack,” I
promised the team.
The day took us over three monstrous climbs. The first was theCold'Aubisque, a steep and
treacherous 11 miles to over 3,900 feet of altitude. As we approached theCold'Aubisque, I got
on the radio. “Time to ride,” I said.
Teamwork on a climb is especially vital: drafting behind a teammate could save me as much as
40 percent of my effort, so that I would be fresh for the final sprint to the finish line. The idea
was to use teammates one by one, until they tired. Each served as a kind of booster rocket to get
me to the finish line.
Laurent Jalabert sped up the Aubisque in a breakaway that made the roadside fans delirious–but
then Postal came down the road chasing him, not far behind. We looked like a huge flying blue
wedge, with Ekimov and Hincapie out front.
But as we hit the foot of the climb, Floyd Landis gained a full understanding of why the Tour is
the hardest event in the world. His front wheel started the climb–and he just parked. It was like
his bike just stopped and decided to go in reverse. He was stunned by the severity of the climb;
he simply couldn't keep up with the rest of us. He dropped away. The rider who had
swashbuckled through crowds of riders now wove unsteadily up the mountainside by himself,
with a stricken look on his face.
We rode on without him. We reached the bottom of the Tourmalet, with George still riding in
front. Normally, George wasn't a climber, but we needed him to do some work today, especially
with Floyd struggling. The problem was, Tourmalet was one of his most feared climbs, and I
knew it.
I said, “George, just pull for the first four or five K, just whatever you can do.” George looked at
me skeptically. He wasn't sure he could survive it, much less help anybody else. “You can do it,
man,” I said.
I hung on to his wheel and he pulled until he thought his heart was going to explode. He pulled,
and pulled, and began to really suffer. It was an hour-long climb. About 20 minutes into it
George was still working at the front, and you could practically see his heart pounding through
his open jersey. For once, his mouth hung open and he struggled to breathe. He was just trying
to concentrate.
I decided to take his mind off his pain by teasing him a little. I got on the radio, and I said, “Hey,
Johan, George just asked me if you could check on when the climb starts.”
“This is not the time,” George said.
Finally, George dropped away. I started to say something, but I took one look at him, and closed
my mouth. He was done–but he'd made an unforgettable effort.
Next, Chechu and Roberto took over–and over the next few minutes they blew the Tour apart.
They set such a fast pace that within minutes it crippled most of the field.
We went higher and higher, over roads with no guardrails, and the sun scorched us. There were
no more than ten riders who could stay with our pace. The rest had fallen back. We passed
Jalabert.
Chechu wore his hat turned backwards to soak up the sweat. I was so hot that I pulled mine off
and tossed it into the crowd.
Now Chechu faded, finally spent. Roberto took over. He hammered at the road so hard that he
reduced the group to three: himself, me, and the only rider who would be my competition in the
coming week, Joseba Beloki ofSpain.
I rode just behind Roberto, staring at the back of his curly-haired head as he swayed on his bike.
I glanced over my shoulder. The rest of the peloton was strung down the mountain in a scene of
pure colorful destruction.
But Roberto's pace was so strong that it even hurt me. Outwardly, I looked fine. I didn't want
anyone to see I was in pain, not the directors who might be watching television in their cars, and
especially not Beloki, so I tried to stay smooth and settled and straight-faced.
Meanwhile, I said to Roberto just ahead of me, “Tranquilo,tranquilo ,” meaning, “take it easy,
take it easy.”
Roberto slowed down a little, to my relief. But I did such a good job of hiding my distress that
Johan, watching me on a screen from inside the team car, thought I was fine. He saw a chance
to open some real time on the field and didn't understand why we had slowed down, so he got
on the radio and said, “Roberto,venga ,venga .”“Faster, faster.”
So Roberto started to go faster. I said again, “Roberto,tranquilo .” He slowed down again.
Johan came on the radio again, saying, “Venga,venga ,venga ,venga !”
Finally I got on the radio, and I said, “Goddammit, Johan, tell him to slow down!” Johan relayed
the message, and Roberto settled into a pace I could keep more comfortably.
Beloki still doggedly rode on my wheel. I knew he was thinking he could steal the stage win
from us. I let him slide between me and Roberto, and for a few minutes we pinned him there.
I could tell from Beloki's face that he was hurting worse than I was. His mouth hung open and
his eyes were half-closed.
Suddenly, with about 200 meters to go, I slingshotted past Beloki.I leaped out of my seat and
charged hard for the finish line. He couldn't respond.
I took seven seconds from Beloki in the space of less than 50 yards to the finish, and became the
leader of the Tour. We had regained the yellow jersey. Everyone else had broken but me, thanks
to the team. It was as if they had opened the door, and then stood aside for me, and let me walk
through it.
At the finish line I found Johan. “What were you doing?” I said. “I was telling Roberto to slow
down and you were telling him to speed up.”
He said, “You were hurting?”
“I was fuckingdying .”
“Man, on TV you looked like you weren't even trying.”
“No shit?”
At the end of the day, Floyd climbed onto the team bus. He was physically shattered by the
severity of the stage. He dropped onto a couch.
“You know, I'm really sorry,” he said.
“You had the reverse lights on,” I told him.
Someone made a high-pitched sound like a tractor backing up.“Beep, beep, beep, beep!”
The bus erupted into raucous laughter.
We weren't disappointed in Floyd. We'd all been in his shoes before–and while welaughed, we
winced for him too, because the first mountain stage in the Tour was a rite of passage for every
rider. Floyd had to learn that it was okay to be in pain, to suffer, and to be defeated by a climb.
He was also learning that the Tour would use up every last bit of him; there could be no other
concern in his life, except getting back on the bike. It consumed everything. There was no extra
energy for any kind of stress. All you hoped to do was fight each specific pain or challenge as it
arose, and to hold off the daily exhaustion that made even sitting down an effort.
It was no easy thing to be a rookie in the Tour, but it was particularly grueling to be riding on a
team in first place, because it meant riding at the front every day. If Floyd was flattered and
surprised to be on our Tour squad in his first year with us, he was scared and self-conscious, too,
because he knew we had to choose carefully and take guys who could do the job. He didn't
want to hold us back.
I reassured Floyd that he was doing a fine job. His role was to sacrifice himself for the rest of us,
and he had done that. Only older, more experienced men could expect to ride strongly in every
single stage.
Floyd was amazed. He couldn't believe nine guys, all of us so stressed and tired, could be so
forgiving of one another's performances. But that was exactly what made us a strong team. We
urged one another on, and teased one another. Sometimes we exceeded expectations, sometimes
we fell short, but we always tried to find out if we had more to give. For a rider to discover new
capacities he didn't know he had–that was the whole point of the Tour.
Later that night, highlights of the stage came on TV. I ran to George's room and we watched it
together. Here came The Blue Train, as the commentators called us, whirling up the road, with
George in front. We both watched in awe how strong our team was. It was a spectacle.
“Man, look at that,” I said. “I love the way that looks.”
The team wasn'tjust the riders. It was the mechanics, masseurs, chefs,soigneurs, and doctors.
But the most important man on the team may have been our chiropractor.
The Tour hurt in a dozen different ways. We were all sore.Sore necks, sore knees, sore
hamstrings. Guys got tendinitis all the time. They crashed, or they rode in a fixed position for
hours on end, and they got it. They woke up one morning and it was in an elbow or a knee.
They got road rash. Let me explain road rash. It's what happens when you fall off a bike and you
skid on asphalt at 40 miles per hour. We're not talking a scraped knee here. We're talking about
rolling down the crude rocky asphalt of northernFrance, and skinning both sides of your entire
body, and the front and back, too. It leaves you with scabby, nasty patches where the skin's been
scraped off–sometimes to the bone. (A), it hurts; (B), it hurts for days or weeks; (C), you can't
sleep. Just rolling over in bed, the mere touch of a sheet could make you wake up and groan in
the middle of the night, “Aaaahh.” If you crashed and got a bad case of road rash, it could mess
you up for the rest of the Tour.
The guy who put us all back together was our chiropractor, Jeff Spencer. Jeff had been with us
since my first Tour victory in '99. His contract was just for ten days, but three days into the race,
I called a Postal executive over and said, “Let me tell you something. See that guy over there?
That guy's not going anywhere. We need him.”
Jeff is part doctor, part guru, part medicine man. He had all kinds of strange gizmos and rituals
and cures, a remedy for every condition. He did things we had no explanation for–but they
seemed to work. His methods ranged from basic stretching and massage to high-tech lasers,
strange wraps, tinctures, and bandages. If you got road rash, he put a silvery wrap on the injury,
and shot you with a laser. George swore Jeff's lasers made road rash heal twice as fast.
Sometimes he did things to parts of your body that didn't hurt. Let's say your foot hurt. He'd
shoot the laser at your neck, and talk to you about “nerve connections,” while you half-listened.
But the next day, your foot would be better.
But Jeff had something that was better than any laser, wrap, or electric massager. He had The
Tape. It was a special hot-pink athletic tape that came fromJapanand seemed to have special
powers.
George got a problem with his lower back. Jeff turned him around and started putting hot-pink
tape on it. George thought, “How can that help?” But the next day the pain had disappeared–it
wasgone .
We swore by Jeff's pink tape. He would tape the hell out of anything. You had a tweaky knee?
He taped it. A guy would start to get tendinitis and he'd say, “Don't worry. No problem. We'll
tape it.” We all had pink tape on our legs.
Every morning before the stage, he'd tape us all up, different parts of our bodies. He'd do
George's back, Chechu's knees. Sometimes we'd be so wrapped up in hot-pink tape that we'd
look like dolls, a bunch of broken dolls.
One day, Johan went to him and said, “The tape is too flashy. People see the tape, and they
think we're all screwed up.”
Jeff said, “What do you want me to do?”
“Tone down the tape,” he said. “Can't you get the gray color?”
But the pink tape worked, so we kept it, because it could fix things. It could seriously fix things.
At the end of the day there was a line of riders waiting to see Jeff, because we believed Jeff
could fix any and all of our problems. Sometimes guys weren't really hurt, they were just tired,
or screwed up mentally, or emotionally. Pena got tired, Pavel got tired,even Roberto got tired.
Jeff could fix that, too. While he fixed us physically, he also fixed us mentally. He'd say, “You
know, you look a lot better today.”
I'd say, “Really?”
“Yeah, I can see it in your face.”
If you judged the most important man on the Postal team by the foot traffic in and out of his
door, then it was Jeff. Without him, we knew we'd never make it toParis.
Big Blue keptcoming. By now other riders feared us, they dreaded our accelerations, and when
they saw us coming, they parted. We'd surge to the front, and they'd say, “Can you please just
slow down a little bit?” We'd hear riders from the back of the peloton, yelling, “Please just take
it easy,take it easy!” We rode until they slumped over their handlebars, their heads hanging low
from their necks like dying tulips.
The idea was not to torture people, but to make them uncomfortable enough that they would
have trouble keeping up, much less attacking. We rode as a single entity, the same set to our
shoulders and hips, no wasted motion swaying on the bikes, as if we all breathed at the same
pace and pedaled at the same cadence.
We won a second mountain stage victory the day after La Mongie, this one to the Plateau de
Beille. It was a stage with five vicious ascents, the last to a ski station at the top of a climb that
washors de catégorie –“beyond category,” meaning, you don't want to know. The day was so
hard that six riders abandoned the Tour. But I felt great. While other riders felt miserable, I rode
behind Big Blue.
We climbed 4,000 feet in ten miles. Again, Chechu and Roberto put everybody out of the race
except for me and Beloki–and we still weren't going full-bore. Now we had a chance to stamp
our authority all over the race. Roberto sat on Beloki's wheel while I blew by him. I lengthened
the lead comfortably and then checked over my shoulder. At the finish I threw up a big
two-armed salute, because I knew we had laid the foundation of the overall victory.
For the rest of the race, we just ground our opponents down, putting a little more time on them
each day. Stage 14 took us to my old friend Mont Ventoux, which could be seen looming over
all ofProvence. By the end of the day we'd all but won the overall title, racing up the stony
wasteland almost two minutes ahead of Beloki to increase the overall lead to4:21.
You're supposed to hit the brakes when you're going downhill, but you don't hit the brakes
when you're going uphill. That day, we rode so strongly that we were hitting the brakes–uphill.
We went so fast into some of the turns that we actually had to slow down.
Afterward, Beloki conceded the race. “I'm going for second,” he said. “Today we went to the
moon and saw the astronaut.”

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