Every Second Counts-Lance Armstrong(6)

The last test was a final individual time trial in Mâcon. Sun blazed over a course that undulated
through vineyards, alleys of spectators lining the way. I wanted to win it badly–to show that I
was still the strongest rider, to make up for the one I had lost early in the Tour. This time I felt
good and everything went right, and I did tear up the road.
The rest of the way toParis, we concentrated on riding safely and luxuriated in our
accomplishment. The team was infallible, every man as strong as the next. Pavel rode good
tempo in the flats. Roberto and Chechu were awesome on the climbs. Floyd suffered like a dog,
but he came through it and added depth. George and Eki were like linebackers, escorting me
around like a couple of personal bodyguards, riding in the wind and in crowds.
The race wasn't even over yet, but I said to Bill, “Your first priority is to get every guy back on
this team.” Chechu was sure to have some other offers, and I knew he was stressing because he
loved being on the team as much as we loved having him. I had a talk with him, and assured
him we'd pay what it took. He said, “I'm not going anywhere.”
Over the years we'd worked to improve the team, staff, and mechanics, and this time it was
close to perfect. They'd made life almost easy for me. The most trouble I was in during the
whole Tour de France was at La Mongie, on my own teammate's wheel.
Just before the finish inParis, a young Dutch woman with cancer came to our hotel. Again, it
gave me a sense of peace and perspective to talk to a fellow patient. I invited her to come into
the dining room with me, and we took a table next to the Postal team and talked for 45 minutes
or so. She had a tough story: she had been treated and had relapsed, and been treated again. We
talked for a while about her treatment options, and she was curious about theU.S.She asked me,
“What did you do?”
“I got treated, I fought like hell, and I got better,” I said.
We discussed the treatments in the States, and the merits of American hospitals. She asked me
what I ate, and how much I exercised. I told her the truth. “I started out eating a lot of spinach,
and then in the end all I could keep down was apple fritters,” I said. I told her I'd tried to ride my
bike as much as I could, until I fainted one day.
Finally, the conversation drew to a close, and she gave me a present. She had brought clogs, real
Dutch clogs, for my whole family. There were five pairs, including tiny ones for the children. I
now treasure them as remembrances; she's since passed away.
A few days later, Big Blue rode me intoParis, and I crossed the finish line with an official time
of 82 hours, 5 minutes, and 12 seconds and a winning margin of7:17. I was inexpressibly proud.
We hadn't made the slightest tactical error. Not one. We'd grown stronger as the race went on,
more secure in our craft, more patient. I felt a sense of achievement I hadn't felt in any of my
previous three Tour victories, because of the sheer beauty of that team performance.
Other people seemed to feel it, too. InParis, for the first time, the headlines seemed warm
toward us. TheLe Parisien headline saluted both Jalabert and me in the same sentence:MERCI
JAJA . . . BRAVO ARMSTRONG.I was grateful for the compliment. A French wine dealer was
quoted as saying, “A man's value is his spirit, not his country.” Also, suddenly the French had a
nickname for me: the Boss.
At the finish line, I spoke French to the local press. “I loveFrance,” I said. Perhaps people finally
understood what I'd been trying to express, whether in French or English, all along: the Postal
riders weren't robots, or cold corporate American merchants. Rather, we were on a search for
the perfect ride, the most excellent technique, and that was not a matter of coldness, but of love.
“This is not theater,it's sport,” I said. “I believe in performance and in the beauty of the race.”
But more than anything, I believed in my teammates–and I wanted to do something for them.
Each year we had a Postal Service victory party for 300 or so people at the Musée d'Orsay, the
grand old train station that had been converted to amuseumofFrenchpainting. It was a luxurious
party, but we would be scattered at separate tables. I wanted to do something more personal, so
we could have a celebration together, just the nine of us. For weeks they had slaved, dealing
with tendinitis and road rash, sleeping cramped and sore in small hotels. For this night I wanted
them to feel like rock stars, because to me, that's what they were. I wanted them to feel like
every inch the winners.
Kik helped me arrange for a small private-party room at the Hôtel de Crillon, where I always
stayed on the last night inParis,because they flew theTexasflag over the Champs-Elysées (the
place earned my lifelong business for that). Five S-class Mercedes picked the guys up and drove
them to the hotel. Every other team rode buses to get to their parties, but our guys got picked up
by Mercedes.
The cars brought the team and their families to a private reception room at the Crillon, where a
banquet was laid out. We all shook hands and I passed each one of them an envelope, and they
stuck them in their pockets, to open later.
We sat around with our families, nibbling from a buffet table, drinking and telling stories, and
falling out. We laughed about trying to translate ZZ Top lyrics. Kik came down and joined us,
and she strolled into the room like a fashion diva in black slacks and a white blouse with a string
of pearls. All of the guys burst out singing ZZ Top, “She wore a PEARL NECK-LACE!”
Finally, we split up and the guys left to make the rounds of someParisnightspots. As they got
back into the limousines, some of them opened their envelopes. It wastraditional, and only right,
for the Tour winner to give the $400,000 prize money to his teammates, and they assumed their
checks were in the envelopes. What they didn't know was that I had doubled the amount,as a
personal thanks from me. Guys started calling me on my cell phone from their cars, and
screaming. In the background, I could hear an envelope tearing, and someone said, “This is a
mistake, right? He put in one too many zeroes.”
We scattered acrossParisand were out till the late hours; I don't know where all of them landed
in the end. Some, like George, stayed up all night. Floyd went to bed earlier than anybody. He
hadn't seen his wife in two months, so they left atmidnight. He was so tired he didn't know how
to put it into words. Even taking a shower felt like an effort.
He fell into bed–and he didn't wake up untilfourP.M.the next day. Even then he was only awake
long enough to eat something, and then he went back to sleepagain until ten the next morning.
He wouldn't feel normal for a month afterward.
But he had helped us win, and in doing so, he had helped himself. He paid off all his debts, and
he got a new Postal contract: a generous two-year deal that would pay him more thandouble his
salary. “I've never had a two-year contract–at anything,” he marveled.
Why engage in a collective effort rather than an individual one, even when you wonder, “What's
in it forme ?”? Self-interest is isolating. When you work in collaboration, you're responsible to
each other, and therefore much less likely to shirk your responsibilities or cheat your partner.
Teamwork is not only performance-enhancing, it's comforting. You are never alone, and
whether you have a six-mile climb up an alp and a cadre of attackers behind you, or a round of
chemo in front of you, that's extremely reassuring.
Pro athletes talk all the time about “my game.” But your game doesn't belong to you when
you're on a team–there's no such thing as “my” game, there is onlythe game. Your effort belongs
to your teammates and theirs belongs to you, and they're inextricable. The same is true of any
gathering of people in one place, for any purpose.
To me, the definition of a team is a group of people who share the same aim, experience, and
values. By that definition, the alliance between people fighting cancer qualifies as my team also.
I am always aware of them, just as they are of me, and I still meet people who are frightened and
fearful, who constantly remind me that I used to be sick, that I got well, that they are following
the story. And unlike a race, the story doesn't end.
You think it's over, but it's not. It's never over.
On the morning after I crossed the finish line inParis, Bart came to see me at the Hôtel de
Crillon. I was in a suite doing interviews and struggling with the sleepiness and a mild hangover
when he appeared in the hall outside my room, pale and red-eyed. Bill met him at the door, took
one look at him, and said, “What's the matter?”
Bart struggled to speak. He'd gotten a panicked call fromAustinthat morning: his younger
brother, David, had just been diagnosed with a horribly aggressive form of cancer and was in St.
David's Hospital, receiving blood transfusions.
I came out to the hall. “What's going on?”
“He just found out his little brother has cancer,” Bill said.
I stared at Bart for a second. “Okay,” I said. “Let's go to work. Let's fix it.”
I put my arm around Bart's shoulders, and Bill put an arm around him, and together we steadied
him and got him into the suite. My room was in chaos; we were trying to pack, and the kids
were running around, and some press people were there. Bill asked the press to leave.
Slowly, Bart told us the story. His kid brother, David, had stubbed his toe in a game of pickup
basketball over the weekend. It had gotten terribly bruised and swollen, but David just thought
it was broken. The next day, he got a nosebleed that wouldn't stop. Blood gushed down his
face, and finally he had to go to the emergency room, where a staff doctor diagnosed leukemia
and admitted him to the hospital in order to start transfusions. Now, virtually overnight, he was
in a precarious state and could die.
David Knaggs was 31 years old. His wife, Rhiannon, was pregnant with their first child.
It was the middle of the night back in the States, but I didn't care. I started calling and e-mailing
all of the cancer doctors I knew. I called Dr. Jeff Murray, the child-cancer specialist fromFort
Worthwho had treated Kelly Davidson. I also called Steve Wolff, the chairman of the LAF
Scientific Advisory Committee who had consulted on my own case and steered me to the right
specialists. I woke Dr. Wolff up, and he immediately offered to consult. He promised to check
on David's status, and in the meantime recommended that we quickly get David transferred to a
cancer center.
“We've got to get your brother moved,” I told Bart.
Bart just nodded, still too devastated to talk much. “Listen, I'm here with you,” I said. “You
can't fall apart. We've got to get a move on.”
Next, we set up a human chain to help get Bart home toAustin. I reached Jim Ochowicz, who
was still inParis, asked him to meet Bart at theParisairport and take care of him. Och met him at
curbside, got his bags checked in and upgraded him, and held his hand, literally.
Just before Bart boarded the flight, Steve Wolff called back with worrisome news. David's
white blood-cell count was 177,000–and the normal white blood-cell count for a young man is
between 4,000 and 7,000. “He's got about thirty times too many white blood cells, and that
indicates a lot of disease,” Dr. Wolff said. “It's very aggressive.”
The immediate danger, he said, was leukostasis, a life-threatening thickening of the blood. “He's
at a critical juncture,” Wolff said. He recommended that David be moved, and quickly, to a
specialized facility equipped to deal with aggressive leukemias; otherwise he could deteriorate
quickly. “He needs to make some immediate progress against the disease,” he told us.
Bart got on his plane, worried sick. He and Och flew to the States with Bart sitting bolt upright.
Finally they touched down inChicago, and as he changed planes forAustin, Bart talked again to
Steve Wolff. David was going to be moved by ambulance to the M. D. Anderson cancer facility
inHouston, where a specialist was waiting to admit him.
Bart landed inAustin, got in a car, picked up his mother, and began driving toHouston. He was
so tired that his mom had to sing songs to keep him awake as he drove. They reached M. D.
Anderson at aboutfourA.M., and David's new cancer doctors, Archie Bleyer and William
Wierda, met them there. What happened next was a testament to the power of science.
BysevenA.M.they had performed a bone biopsy on David and typed the cancer. Next, they
performed a procedure to lower his dangerously high white blood-cell count. They gradually
removed the blood from his body, pulling it from his inner thigh, in order to remove some of the
white cells. They centrifuged the blood and put it back into his body. Bynoon, the procedure
was complete and his white blood-cell count had fallen below 100,000.
The last time Bart had laid eyes on David, his younger brother was a robustly healthy man with
an easy way about him, one of the many smart, athletic young Austinites who'd found a good
life in the city, who tapped at a computer by day and played pickup basketball by night, and who
was so sure and secure in his future that he was starting a family.
Now Bart stood by David'sbedside . In 24 hours, David had acquired small blue bruises all over
his body. They were the marks from the capillaries that were bursting and bleeding inside him
because he had no platelets. His breathing was labored and shallow, because there was a mass in
his chest.
Once David was stabilized, he embarked on a course of clinical-trial chemotherapy, a regimen
only available at specialized cancer centers. By August 1, he was undergoing the rigors and
toxins of chemo, and he had a fighting chance to survive.
I talked to Bart every day, and I sent David handwritten notes regularly. “I believe in you,” I
wrote. “I know that what you're doing is even harder than what I did. I see how hard it is on
your brother. But I know you're strong, and he's strong. I'm just another guy who's had cancer,
and who knows that you can do this.”
David did well until November, when his health went sideways. He lost the use of his hands
and feet, the result of nerve damage. He could move one finger. That was it. The doctors began
talking about a bone-marrow transplant and looking for a donor, testing the members of his
family for a match.
David's wife, Rhiannon, spent most of her pregnancy sleeping on a Murphy bed in his room at
M. D. Anderson. One evening, as David slept, she went into labor. Rather than wake him, she
rushed with her mother to the Texas Women's Hospital. Later, as she fought through her
contractions, she reached David by phone. She lay there in the delivery room, while David
talked to her soothingly. David listened on the other end of the receiver as his first child came
into the world. Isabella Knaggs was born onNovember 24, 2002.
At Christmas, they found a perfect sibling match for David's bone-marrow transplant: Bart.
On the day after Christmas, my 36-year-old best friend went toHoustonto begin the process for
harvesting his bone marrow, so it could be transplanted into his brother. After a series of EKGs
and MRIs, to make sure he was perfectly healthy, the doctors put Bart on Neupogen, the
blood-boosting drug that I'd been given during my own chemo. They also gave him a series of
shots in order to build up his stem cells. Twice a day for five straight days, Bart had to get shots
in his stomach from a long hypodermic needle.
The shots and the drugs gave him terrible bone aches. He complained of horrible, dull, incessant
pains. I knew exactly what he was talking about: they're called bone flares, and chemo patients
get them all the time. One minute you're lying in bed, feeling okay, and the next minute a deep
pain flares through the center of your bones, deep down below your muscles, where it seems no
painkiller could ever reach.
I teased Bart, trying to keep things light, but it hurt me to know that my best friend finally, fully
understood the cancer experience. “Oh-ho,” I said. “Now you've joined the bone-pain
fraternity.”
On New Year's Eve, they siphoned Bart's blood out of him, and centrifuged it, taking it from his
left arm and putting it back into his right arm. They separated out the plasma. It was difficult to
grasp that what was left, a small yellow drip bag with some fluid in it, contained stem cells from
Bart's bones and was his brother's best chance to live. The transplant was done: some of Bart's
life passed into David.
It took 100 days before we knew whether the transplant was successful. Each day went by, and
Bart hoped, and I watched from afar, sending messages from my various travels. “The strength
is inyou ,” I wrote to David. “You've just got to believe it.”
One day in early May, Bart called me. His voice trembled as he said, “David is well, and he's
coming home.”
OnMay 6, 2003, David came home toAustin. He was temporarily leukemia-free, and his platelet
count was normal. He was still on medications for nerve pain, and he was 50 pounds
lighter–cancer takes the mass out of you. He'd lost his job, and the body he knew, and he had a
lot of rehab ahead, with an uncertain outcome. But he was home.
I wasn't there when he came home, because I was inEurope, but I sent him a present. It was a
bike, a black Trek mountain bike, and a fine-looking thing. Bart mounted it on rollers and
plugged it into a windtrainer in David's living room. David rode it every day, as part of his
rehab. He sat and watched Cubs games and rode his bike. We hoped his strength would return,
but it didn't. A month later he relapsed and as of this writing he was back with his team of
doctors at M. D. Anderson, starting the fight all over again.
We don't do anything alone, none of us. I certainly didn't fight cancer alone, or regain my health
through some extraordinary solo effort. I survived with the help of six different doctors, four
chemo cycles, three surgeons, a devoted mother, dozens of tirelessly caring friends, and several
much-cussed-at nurses, including my oncology nurse LaTrice Haney. An important fact was that
they didn't disagree or fight amongst themselves. My friends took turns caring for me, and none
of my physicians objected to a second opinion or declined a consultation. Instead, they worked
together to heal me. We could only try to do the same for David.
When I first won the Tour in 1999, I knew my old cancer ward was following my progress.
Each day I thought about my old hallway at theIndianaUniversityMedicalCenterinIndianapolis,
where I suspected that LaTrice turned on the TV and watched, nervously, to see if my lung
capacity would hold up in the mountains. I knew that each morning, LaTrice came to work and
pointed to the TV and proudly said to whoever she was treating, “He was a patient here.” I still
know it.
Each time I cross that finish line, she jumps around the room, hugging nurses and doctors and
patients. Once she said, “You felt us. I know you felt us.” And I did.
Who would want to be a singleton, when you could have all that? Anyone who imagines they
can work alone winds up surrounded by nothing but rivals, without companions. The fact is,no
one ascends alone.
CHAPTER 7
My Park Bench
I'll be honest with you: I don't wake up every morning thinkingI want to be an inspiration to
somebody today. Some days I don't even want to put shoes on. I just want to wander around
barefoot, dragging the cuffs of my jeans in theTexasgrass, and think about nothing more
complicated than whether to drink a beer or play golf, or both. Usually, I decide to drink a beer
for every hole of golf Iwould have played.
For a while, after I won the Tour for the fourth time, I quit shaving. I'd get up in the morning
and look in the mirror, and think,Well, why should I? Who cares? The stubble on my chin grew
until it was patchy and uneven, and my friends called me “Chewbacca,” or “Grizzly Adams.”
College said, “What are you doing that for?”
I was doing it because beer and a beard were my puny versions of excess.
“It's all I have,” I said.
But eventually, I got tired of it. Hard as I try, slacking doesn't agree with me. Everybody needs
something to do with their days, to occupy their mind and energies, and in my case that's
especially so. I don't just need to take my edge off; I need to wear it off, saw it off, and sand it
off. When I've let myself go for too long, gotten way down in the slackage, I look at myself in
the mirror, unhappily, and say, “You sorry sack of slack.” And I get back on my bike.
But I can't ride in the Tour de France forever, and eventually, I'll have to find something else to
do. I guess my next career won't be in diplomacy. Here's something else to consider about
retirement too: if the Joux-Plane was my hardest day on a bike, it was still easier than giving a
speech.
One day, like it or not, I'll be faced with the inevitable cooling of my career–and then what?
What will I do when my muscles and tendons don't respond to the bidding from my brain, and
I'm vulnerable to upset, and the stage victories don't come in the thick clusters they used to? Or
when I suffer a bad-luck crash I can't recover from? These are all things that could determine
when I quit.
My plan is to keep racing through 2004 and beyond, and to try to win a record-tying fifth title.
Whether I can actually do it is another matter: people constantly ask me about the record, but
I'm superstitious, and I know too much about the race, the accidents that can happen and the
way a body can give out, to say that I'll do it.
The greats will tell you that a fifth Tour was hard, and a sixth was impossible. In 100 years, no
one has ever won six, and the very best have tried. It's as if there's an invisible barrier. Indurain
won five straight from 1991 to '95 and made a valiant attempt at a sixth in '96, but on a big
climb to Les Arcs in the seventh stage, his body failed him. Instead,Denmark's Bjarne Riis won
the tour. Jacques Anquetil won his fifth in 1964 but then vanished from the podium entirely.
The great Eddy Merckx was going for a sixth in 1975 when he was dealt a vicious blow by an
irate fanatic: a man leaped from the crowd and punched him in the stomach as hard as he could.
Two days later he was still sore and laboring, and he was finally beaten on a mountainside by
Bernard Thevenet.
Bernard Hinault had a catastrophic crash en route to his fifth title in 1985, when he was
knocked down by a teammate during a sprint stage. He crossed the finish line bleeding from his
nose, and went on to barely win over teammate Greg LeMond. The next year, it was LeMond
who prevented him from winning his sixth.
You just have to accept that some day you're going to fail or fall off your bike. The one thing
you can't prepare for in the Tour is a crash. So be it. I'll just lie there, and then get up and go to
the beach, and say, “I'm okay. Bring me some sunscreen, and some margaritas.”
There is always the possibility that my career could end as the result of a crash, or some kind of
injury, or a freak accident. I suppose there is the remote but scary chance that a hostile crazy on
the roadside could decide to attack, as Eddy Merckx learned. It's one of the charms of the Tour
that it's an open-air event with free admission. You don't need to go through a turnstile to
watch the race; you can just wait by the side of the road and it will pass by. The crowd has
always been a presence and sometimes an active part of the race; spectators push riders up the
hills, clap them on the back, applaud them, hand them food and drinks. It's part of the
atmosphere that fans leap out and scream, whether they are irate, or silly, or over-served. I
ignore them, because it happens hundreds of times each Tour. I try not to think about whether
someone could come for me with something more than an angry expression.
Once in amountain time trial in Chamrousse, all of a sudden some guy came out of nowhere and
started chasing me, holding a magazine and a pen. He said, “Can I have an autograph, can I
have an autograph?”
I looked over at him and said, sarcastically, “I'll tell you what. Just let me finish what I'm doing
here, and I'll come back and get you later.”
George heard that story that night and he fell out laughing. “I can't believe you said you'd come
back and get him later,” he said.
I prefer to believe in the basic benevolence of fans. I'm more concerned about the possibility of a
crash. All cyclists were reminded of just how dangerous the sport can be when Andreï Kivilev
was killed. Andreï died in the early spring of 2003 after suffering a fractured skull in a crash in
Stage 2 of the annual Paris-Nice race. He was a wonderful, attacking rider who always rode at
the front when a mountain loomed. I loved to race with him because when he was in the race,
and when the road went uphill, you knew he would lay it all out. Man, was he an attacker. And
the best in him seemed to come out in the toughest races, as his fourth-place finish in the 2001
Tour had shown us.
Andreï left behind a wife and a six-month-old baby. I will remember him, always, as a
gentleman, a friend, and a competitor who brought forth the best qualities in his opponents.
I hope to finish my career healthy and whole, and to be intelligent enough and self-aware
enough to walk away when it's my time to stop. I might even stop a lot sooner than people
expect–maybe one morning I'll just wake up and decide not to do anything more strenuous than
coaching my kids in T-ball.
I don't want to stretch out my career if it means going out on my face, which is not a pleasant
thought. I don't want to linger on too long, until I'm hanging on at the back of the peloton.
That's not for me; I can't ride the race in the back. When you're not at the front, but just hanging
on, that's when it hurts most of all, down deep where muscle meets bone, and it's a different,
more hopeless kind of pain. The leader of the race feels pain, but because he has a good chance
of winning, it doesn't feel so bad. When you're at the back, there's not much recompense for the
hurting. There's just the honor of finishing.
I often wonder what I would do if somebody put a big chunk of time into me, passed me on a
mountainside the way I've done to other riders. The first chance they get to stick it to me, oh,
man. I want to get out before that happens. Hopefully I'll know it, and the people around me
will know it, and I'll just go ahead and quit.
I'm not obsessed with winning a fixed number ofTours, because the only record that ever
mattered to me is this: there had never been even one Tour victory by a cancer survivor. After
the physical, mental, and emotional rigors of chemo, if I'd lost even 2 percent of my capacities,
I'd be noncompetitive. I don't think anyone, including myself, expected such a spectacular
recovery. What I didn't reckon on was that cancer would provide such a focus, a reprioritization.
Winning the Tour became my way of saying to cancer, “You haven't beaten me, and you can't
beat me.”
The determining factor in the length of my career won't be a record. My career will play out year
to year, and what will keep me in the saddle is not a number, but happiness. The way I ride has
always been based on a simple fact: I love riding my bike. It's just too hard to do it otherwise.
How long will I continue to love it at the world-class level? That needs to be checked regularly.
I can't answer that or guarantee it.
In sport you're always on record for what you've done, for what you've said, the way you've
acted. Everything is measured, either by a clock or by a camera. It's all on record, or on video;
the data is there for all to see. But there is no measurement that can tell me how happy I am, on
or off the bike. All I know is that for every minute that I improve physically, there are days when
I may become 45 seconds less motivated, as I understand more about what achievement can and
cannot do for me as a person, and what it costs.
So it's not my job to speculate on what my place in cycling history will be, and whether I'm
remembered or forgotten, because–not to be disrespectful about it–whoholds the record for
most Tour victories won't be my problem in ten years.
I just hope I'll be content when I stop. Why should what you do between the ages of 20 and 30
be the apex of an entire life? InTexasyou see it all the time: people who are still dining out on
their finest moment on a high school state championship team. But the athlete is just one
segment of a person; in my case there are also the cancer advocate and a father who takes his
children to preschool.
I think one of the real traps of being a prominent athlete is that you get used to a big spike in
adrenaline and attention, and that can cause a lot of problems later. You wake up one morning
and find you need a big jolt. But not much surprises me anymore about celebrity, and the main
thing I know about it is that it's not good for you. When I'm done cycling, I'll disappear. I've got
no contract that says I have to appear on TV screens and talk to the press. I look forward to
thinking more, and to listening more. I don't have much interest in interviews and speaking
engagements; they are, to me, complicated affairs, and life is too short to be complicated.
One reason I love Girona is that on the street where I live, I'm just another neighbor. There's a
small café that I can see from my window, with deep wicker chairs on the sidewalk, and I love
to sink into one and drink coffee and read the paper.
What I'd like to do when I'm retired is take the kids toEuropefor three months, and live in
Girona and go to all the races, as a spectator, so that I can show them how beautiful the world is
from a bike. I'd like to show them whySpainis a paradise. InSpain, you learn about design as
revelation: plazas lead to inner plazas, walls within walls open into surprising spaces, where
hidden fountains run and ferns hang from the ancient brick. Streets cascade down to broader
plazas andramblas, overlooking crescent beaches and ports choked with the masts of sailing
yachts, and you can hear the chimes from the ropes of the rigging.
On a bicycle, you never know what's around the next bend, when a view may open up, or
theAlpsmay shear off to the sea. Even when I'm 50, I'll probably still be riding in all weather. I'll
put on every piece of clothing I own and ride for the pleasure of the bike, sightseeing.
A bicycle is the long-sought means of transportation for all of us who have runaway hearts. Our
first bike is a matter of curb-jumping, puddle-splashing liberation; it's freedom from supervision,
from carpools and curfews. It's a merciful release from reliance on parents, one's own way to the
movies or a friend's house. More plainly, it's the first chance we have to choose our own
direction.
It's the first wheeled machine we ever steer solely by ourselves, and perhaps for that reason we
have intense affection, and strangely specific memories, of the bikes we've owned. I myself have
had hundreds of them by now, but they stay with me, like old friends. The physical familiarity
you gain with a bike is something you don't feel for any other vehicle, no matter how sweet the
ride. There are times when I swear a bike is merely an extension of my arms and legs. All these
years later, I still have a faint sensation of my first bike, a Schwinn, how the rubber handgrips
molded to my palms, and how the soles of my sneakers grabbed the teeth of the pedals.
Even in the midst of a hard day on a bike, beneath every pain and stress is the sense of relief and
pleasure that I'm able to ride again. I ride to prove that in a scientific and highly mechanized era,
the human body is still a marvel. In cycling there is no outer skin of metal to protect you from
the elements. You have only your flimsy clothing, and this makes it a sport that is as sensuous as
it is severe. The cyclist experiences great beauty, sublime views, and the swooping exhilaration
of a mountain descent, but there's a penalty on the body for cycling, too, a physical toll in
exchange for the beauty of the trip that reminds riders that they're human.
A bicycle, no matter how elaborate the technology or how advanced the composite that it's
made of, remains driven by the body. There is something fundamental about a bike: a frame with
a crank, a chain and two wheels, powered by nothing more than my own legs. On a bike, you
are under your own power, directed by your own hand. Your motor is yourself.
For now, I still crave the race. I understand that we're only given a couple of shots, and that this
may be my only chance to win it . . . again.
An athlete hasto somehow figure out how to enrich the people around him, and not just himself.
Otherwise he's purposeless.
I'm still sorting out what I can and can't do for other people. I can be a good-luck charm, a
hopeful example, a companion in suffering, an advisor, and a good listener. I can try to win the
Tour de France over and over again, and in doing so, pound cancer into the ground. I can tell
people the one thing I know for sure about the disease, which is that they aren't alone: the
illness is so big, so widespread, and so common, that it affects nearly everybody–friends, family,
people in the workplace or at your school. Mainly, I can just try to be helpful.
But sometimes, I'm not so helpful. There are occasions when I simply don't know what to say to
someone experiencing the ravages of the disease. In September of 2002, I went to the White
House to promote cancer research and make a plea for more resources and funding. Before the
presentation, someone in the White House press office arranged for me to meet privately with
aHodgkin's Disease patient named Paul de la Garza, a journalist from theSt. Petersburg Times
who was undergoing chemo. After he was diagnosed, a friend had given him a copy ofIt's
NotAbout the Bike , and he had followed the Tour. When he heard that I would be visiting the
White House to promote cancer research, he arranged for a meeting through a contact. He
wrote later of our meeting: “Who better, I thought, to give me a moral boost or a morale boost
than the world's most remarkable cancer survivor?”
But I'm not remarkable; I'm like anybody else, and if you catch me at the wrong time I'm not
good for much. As I was introduced to de la Garza, we were ushered into a small anteroom near
the Blue Room to talk, but the White House was on a very strict schedule and the protocol was
very clear. There wasn't a lot of time, and I was nervous over the prospect of meeting with the
president. I tried to listen as I was given some things to sign, posters and magazines.
De la Garza began to ask me some very specific questions about his cancer, what to do, what
not to do. I fumbled for replies. I didn't have the $64,000 answer for every cancer question, but I
gave him my standard one, which I believe to my core: find the best doctors you can, and trust
the hell out of them.
“How do I survive this?” he asked.
I answered, honestly, “Listen to your doctors. Get the very best treatment.”
But that advice, as he put it later in an article he wrote about the experience, was “not exactly
an epiphany.”
His left arm was hurting, his veins were burning, and other parts of his body were rebelling
against the treatment. But the main part of him that was rebelling was his mind. He had seven
chemo treatments left, and he was getting weaker with each one. I knew exactly what he was
experiencing–the nausea, and the taste of tin in the roof of his mouth. I could still smell the stuff
myself. He was demoralized, and he had come to meet me hoping for something more.
“How do I survive when I can't stand the thought of another IV in my arm?” he asked.
“The misery is part of getting better,” I said. “You have to welcome it.”
What I meant was this: misery is the cure. You must embrace it, because it's what may save you.
You can alter any experience with your mind–it's up to you to determine what the quality of
each moment is. Concentration and belief can make even chemo, no matter how sickening it is,
a positive experience. It takes practice, but it's possible. I used to tell myself, when I threw up or
when it burned so badly to urinate, that the sensations represented the cancer leaving my body. I
was pissing it out, puking it out,coughing it out. I wasn't going to dwell on whether I was going
to die. There were those in medicine and those outside it who thought Iwould die–but I chose to
be around doctors and nurses who believed I could make it.
I had help from LaTrice Haney, my oncology nurse. Once, deep in the misery of chemo, I asked
LaTrice if I would ever get out of the hospital. LaTrice said, “Lance, each time you walk in
here, you will walk out again. And there will be a time when you don't come here anymore at
all–because you'll be cured.”
I should have told all of these things to Paul de la Garza. Or maybe I'd have been better off just
sympathizing with his plight and telling him this simple, stark truth: yeah, cancer was the best
thing that ever happened to me–but I don't want to do it again.
Instead, all I said was, “When the treatment is over, you bounce backquick . At least, I did.”
Then a White House staffer interrupted us and I was ushered into the Blue Room for my brief
address with the president. De la Garza was left in the anteroom, clearly disappointed in our
meeting.
“That was it,” he wrote;
Our meeting lasted maybe five minutes. While I appreciated his time–I later learned it was his
31st birthday–and relished the trappings of the White House, he really didn't say anything that
knocked my socks off, the sort of nugget I was fishing for to get me through the tunnel. Still,
the meeting helped, because it made me realize something else. On the drive home from work
the night before, I actually had tears in my eyes in anticipation of our meeting. I was counting on
him for some revelation to make everything better. Because of his story I was treating him as if
he held the secret for my cancer cure. But what I discovered almost immediately, before I
walked out the gates of the White House even, is that I don't have to turn to the rich and
famous, to the heroes of the sports world, to get me through the anxiety, the depression, and the
fear of the what-ifs. My heroes are right in front of me, ordinary folks who every daymake my
life better. At the top of the list I include my wife, my kids . . . my family, my friends, my
co-workers, my nurses, my doctors.
He was right; heroism is impossible to fulfill–the bar is too high. If some people want a
revelatory experience, I can't answer the request. More often than not, a hero is a person who
acts without thinking, anyway. If ten people, or a million people, want to say that you're a hero,
the only thing you can do is say thank you, just keep going about your day, and understand
thattrying to be a hero is not the most useful purpose you can serve.
The most useful purpose I can serve is to tell people who are suffering that it's an absolutely
important human experience to be ill, that it can change how you live, and that it can change
other lives, too.
Sometimes I'm successful in imparting the message, and sometimes I'm not. I wasn't so
successful with de la Garza. But not long after, I met a woman who was ill and had lost her hair.
The only people who had ever seen her with her wig off were her doctors, but when I visited
her, she took it off. We had our picture taken together. I will never get tired of befriending
people with cancer, and I'll always say, “Come on over here, get right up next to me.”
It's not a burden, it's an opportunity, and I'll do it until they ask me not to. Someday there might
be a 15-year-old girl who won't know or care who I am, and someone else can step in and be her
inspiration. Until then, I'll try to meet every request, every person who can use some help.
I'd like to learn to use my influence to shape thinking about cancer on a larger level, too. Maybe
I can even help shape opinions, policy, and the flow of money on cancer. After I visited the
White House that day, I continued on to Capitol Hill, with the same mission, to promote cancer
research and ask for more funding. I met with, in order, Senator Ted Kennedy
(D-Massachusetts), Senator Sam Brownback, a conservative fromKansas, and Senator Diane
Feinstein (D-California). The meetings perfectly illustrated the commonality we all have on the
subject of cancer.
Senator Kennedy's son, Teddy Jr., lost a leg to bone cancer when he was a boy. The senator
ushered us into his office and began showing me the pictures on his wall, of brothers and sisters
gone. He talked a little about each of the people in the pictures, and then he turned to another
picture, of his son.
“When my son had cancer, I tried everything I knew to distract him,” the senator said. “But the
only thing that would keep his mind off of his cancer was the Celtics-Lakers series. So I got
tickets to every game I could, and we would go, and for a couple of hours he wouldn't think
about it.”
He showed me another picture: Ted Jr. on a ski slope wearing a prosthetic, and raising his arms,
triumphant. He had just won a gold medal at the Paralympics. As I turned to speak to the
senator, I realized that tears were streaming down his face.
The next office we went to was that of Senator Brownback. I knew of the senator because he
had survived a bout with cancer, like me. The senator was very certain that the cancer had
altered his view of both life and the afterlife: he had become a born-again Christian. We settled
onto a sofa.
“Tell me how cancer has changed your spirituality,” he said.
There it was again, that uneasy question. I wondered how to explain to the senator that my
spirituality is mine, and mine alone. But before I opened my mouth, my friend Jeff Garvey, the
chair of my cancer foundation, understood my dilemma and jumped in. “Lance's wife, Kristin, is
Catholic,” he said quickly. “And he has a chapel in his house.”
I was grateful for the out, but I decided to be straight. I gave him my honest answer, and said, “I
relied on my doctors, and the medicine and the science, they were my hope.” I added that I
believed in my personal responsibility in my cure, to educate myself, and to combat the disease.
The senator is a spirited and vigorous cancer fighter, and he said, “We need to set a date, and
say that within the next ten years we want to have a cure.” It was my kind of fighting speech,
very determined. But we both knew the reality, too, which is that cancer is not just one disease
but 250 diseases, each with separate symptoms and treatments and potential cures. So we're not
talking about one cure, but 250. We parted with a handshake and an agreement to see each
other again.
My final stop was to see Senator Feinstein, for what was the most lighthearted of our
interviews. She was a charming lady without an ounce of pretense. We gathered in her office
and sat down and talked for a while about the importance of funding for more cancer research,
and of better information, too.
Then she said, “Let me ask you something.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I ride my bike, too. Does your butt hurt?”
I threw back my head and shouted with laughter. “Yep,” I said. “That's why my shorts are
padded.”
By the time I leftWashington, I had new questions about my peculiar status as an athlete.
Athletes are public figures, yet we tend to believe we shouldn't engage in politics or the issues
of the day because our job is just to be excellent with our bodies. But to me, that's not quite
enough. It's not about the bike. It never has been. It's about causes: I think everybody should
have one.
I still struggle with whether or not it's my responsibility to make public statements. For instance,
as war withIraqbecame imminent, both the American and the foreign press wanted to know my
thoughts on the subject, since I'm friendly with President George W. Bush. My reply was that I
wasn't in favor of war–who is?–but that I support my president, and our troops. Somebody said,
“So you disagree with him?” I said, “Well, the nice thing aboutAmericais that it's the kind of
place where it's okay to disagree with a friend.”
But a far more significant answer to the question came from my friend Lee Walker. One
afternoon I was sitting around visiting with Lee at his house, and I asked him what he thought
aboutIraq.
Lee said, “I'll tell you two things. First of all, I'm not sure what I think, but I'm an American and
I follow my president, I go where he goes. But the second thing is, that's a global issue and I
can't affect it. I can't do a damn thing aboutIraq, and Saddam Hussein doesn't know me from
Adam. But here's what Ican do. I can go down to the street corner and makethat place a better
place. I can do that. I can affect the park. I can affect the bus stop. I can go affect that park
bench right over there, and maybe change somebody's day, or minute, or life. I can do that.”
Lee pointed to a bench on the sidewalk in front of his house. Lee had literally bought the bench
and placed it out front, just to contribute something to the neighborhood. His neighborhood is
full of elderly people, and they walk to various shops for what they need. It occurred to Lee that
they might need a place to sit down and rest their feet. So now that's what you see in front of
Lee's house, people sitting on the bench, with bags, resting their feet.
Lee says his philosophy is just to break problems down to their smallest parts, right down to the
person or to the child, and work backwards from there. “There's a lot we can't do anything
about,” Lee explained. “But we can affect the things right here in front of us, make them better,
as best we can.”
So that's what I'd like to do, too. I'd like to build park benches. Cancer is my park bench. And so
are the kids in my arms.
There's no difference between a man with no power and a man with power who doesn't use it at
all. That's what I've come to believe about athletes and participating in the issues of the day. If I
were religious I'd say cancer advocacy is what God would like me to do, but I'm not. So I'll
simply say that's what I have the opportunity to do, and what I'm designed to do.
When a bookisover, people always wonder what happened next. Does he live or does he die,
does he win or does he lose, is he happy or is he unhappy? Who does he turn out to be?
Here are just a few things that happened after the summer of 2002. OnSeptember 2, 2002, the
French doping investigation was finally, officially closed. Bill Stapleton was right–it went away
quietly. After 21 months of inquiry, investigators admitted they'd found not a shred of proof, and
they issued just a small discourteous announcement from the prosecutor's office. The case was
dropped for lack of evidence.
We had a party at Milagro to celebrate the six-year anniversary of my cancer diagnosis, and,
after the fact, my 31st birthday. Children ran everywhere. The girls crawled around on the lawn
while I put Luke on a four-wheeler and drove him around. We had barbecue, cases of Shiner
Bock beer, and two cakes, one that saidCARPE, and one that saidDIEM.
The girls began to walk, and Kik painted their toenails pink. That fall, Luke started preschool.
By then he was a seasoned world traveler, so his first trip to school was no problem. He bolted
into class with a wave, and he got an excellent report in his first parent-teacher conference: he
was lively and played nice with the other kids. “He participates, and he's outgoing,” the teacher
said. “He's the leader of the class, and friends with everybody. And he loves the girls.”
When I got home, we sat down to dinner and discussed the day. I said to Luke, “Do you like
your dinner?”
“Yeah, I like my dinner.”
“I also hear you like chicks.”
“Yeah.Chicks for dinner,” he said.
As he grows, Luke has more and more questions, and I just try to have good answers. But there
are things I struggle to answer for myself, let alone for him and for his sisters.
In February of 2003, Kik and I agreed to a trial separation, and we entered marriage counseling.
I moved into my one-room cabin at Milagro, the small ranch that I had cleared and planted with
a soft green lawn. I sat on a rocking chair on the porch and cast around for the specific cause of
our marital difficulties, but they were cloudy to me. All I knew was that in trying to do
everything, we'd forgotten to do the most important thing. We forgot to be married. It was like
being in a current you didn't know was there. One day we looked up and realized we'd been
swept downstream from our landmarks, all the points of reference.
People warn you that marriage is hard work, but you don't listen. You talk about the pretty
bridesmaids' dresses, but you don't talk about what happens next; about how difficult it will be
to stay, or to rebuild. What nobody tells you is that there will be more than just some hard days.
There will be some hard weeks and perhaps even some hard years.
In February I returned toEuropefor training alone, and Kik stayed behind inAustin. But we
continued to talk and to work at rebuilding our relationship with a better foundation. In April,
Kik came toEuropeand we went to Nice, where we had lived together before we were married.
It was the first time in four years that we had really been alone, without children.
As of this writing, we didn't know what the future would hold, but we did know this: we
intended to bring the same dedication and discipline to counseling that we brought to the rest of
our lives. And whatever our personal shortcomings, and no matter the outcome, the marriage is
a success: we have three great prizes.
I know this, too: the seize-the-day mentality that I carried with me from the illness doesn't
always serve me well. It's too tempting, in the throes of it, to quit on any problem that seems
hard or inconvenient, to call it a waste of precious time and move on to something more
immediate. Some things require patience.
The question of how to live through cancer, for me, has become: how do you live beyond it?
Survivorship is not unlike competition; both are emotionally complicated, and neither
necessarily delivers pat answers, no matter how nice it is to think so. In both cases, you have to
constantly ask yourself what the real lessons are, what's worth transferring to the rest of your
life?
But both cancer and competition have taught me one great, incontrovertible lesson that I think
every person can learn from, whether healthy or ill, athlete or layman. The lesson is this:
personal comfort is not the only thing worth seeking.
Whether the subject is bike racing, or cancer, or just living, comfort only takes us to a point
that's known. Since when did sheets with the right thread-count, a coffee maker, and an electric
toothbrush become the only things worth having or working toward? Too often, comfort gets in
the way of inner reckonings.
For instance, there's no math that can tell you why some people ride in the Tour de France,
some never enter the race, and some ride but don't risk. I've known guys who never quite put it
all on the line, and you know what? They lost. One minute, after nearly a month of suffering,
can decide who wins. Is it worth it? It depends on whether you want to win. I have the will to
suffer. I do have that.
There are parts unknown with regard to human performance, and those are the parts when it's
just about pain and forfeit. How do you make yourself do it? You remind yourself that you're
fulfilling your obligation to get the best from yourself, and that all achievement is born out of
sacrifice.
The experience of suffering is like the experience of exploring, of finding something unexpected
and revelatory. When you find the outermost thresholds of pain, or fear, or uncertainty, what
you experience afterward is an expansive feeling, a widening of your capabilities.
Pain is good because it teaches your body and your soul to improve. It's almost as though your
unconscious says, “I'm going to remember this, remember how it hurt, and I'll increase my
capacities so that the next time, it doesn't hurt as much.” The body literally builds on your
experiences, and a physique and temperament that have gone through a Tour de France one year
will be better the next year, because it has the memory to build upon. Maybe the same is true of
living, too.
If you lead a largely unexamined life, you will eventually hit a wall. Some barriers can be
invisible until you smack into them. The key, then, is to investigate the wall inside yourself, so
you can go beyond it. The only way to do that is to ask yourself painful questions–just as you try
to stretch yourself physically.
So the fact that there are unanswered questions in my life doesn't bother me. I don't know what
happens next, and I don't need to know, because I welcome the exploration. There's no simple
and final explanation for me. Can't be, won't be. As I watch my children grow, it occurs to me
that while the structure of your bones takes shape, other elements leave their tracings on you,
too. I can see that in my own scars–there's no way to move through this life and not be marked
by the unexpected.
As we move, we leave trails, intended or not.Trails of action, trails of sound, trails of colors,
trails of light. Who knows how long they last?
When I climb out of the water at Dead Man's Hole, I walk over the rocks, and if I turn and look
behind me, what I see are my own damp footprints disappearing. They disappear before my eyes.
When I look in front of me, what do I see? I see the turning of more of these pages, and in the
pages there will be near things, small things, fuck-ups, celebrations, tragedies, broodings,
weddings, graduations, accidents, and close calls.
I want to feel this life as it occurs. Not as itmight have occurred.Or as itcould have been, if only.
I want to feel it,as it is : naked or clothed; barefoot or wearing shoes; cold, hot, complicated,
simple, fearful, happy, discontented, exhilarated, fruitful, selfish, giving, and feeling.
All I know is that I shouldn't be alive, and yet I feel more alive than just about anyone. Each
time I go back to Dead Man's Hole, I do the jump again. I still believe a little fear is good for
you. I believe it so much that after a while, when the jump became routine, I began to study a
higher point on the rocks.
This is an outcropping that offers a truly terrifying 50-foot drop to the water. For days I regarded
it with my friends, and we made laughing bets about whether any of us would ever have the
nerve to do it. Finally, one afternoon, my friend Morris Denton did it. He threw himself off that
shelf of rock and arrowed down into the cold green water, and as he came up we all shrieked
and applauded. Next,Ryan Streetjumped off, and plummeted into the water.
I crept to the edge, and peered over. As I stood there, I felt the blood rush from my head into my
feet, and I got weak. “No way,” I called down, my voice echoing. “I can't do it.” I stepped
carefully back, retreating from the cliff.
Down below, Morris treaded water. “What's the matter?” he called.
“I can't do it,” I yelled down.
“You scared, MellowJaney ?”
I stopped short. Ryan and Morris's high-pitched howls of laughter caromed off the stone canyon
walls.“Mellow Janey!Mellow Janey!”
“That's funny,” I yelled.
I stood there for a moment, laughing with them. And then I turned around . . . and ran straight
off the edge of the cliff.
I threw myself into the air. The rock ledge dropped out from under me, and for a fraction of a
second I hung in the breeze, my arms pinwheeling and my legs kicking involuntarily, with
nothing below but green water. The breath died in my throat. My friends stared upward,
open-mouthed and laughing, at a man thrilled to be in midair . . .
. . . Another Ending . . .
You think it's over, and then it's not. I thought I was done with this book, which was supposed
to be about overcoming odds, not just in one period of your life, but the whole of it. What
happened next was, I set out to win a fifth Tour de France, and got knocked on my ass, and was
reminded of just how hard it can be to get back up. Which is exactly the point: you don't just
overcome odds once and that's it. Things keep, you know, happening.
In the 2003 Tour, things kept happening.Too many things. There were crashes, heat waves,
viruses, broken bikes, such a succession of miseries that the event began to seem jinxed. At one
point, I stood on a mountainside in thePyrenees, cut, bruised, and screaming, because I was
certain the race was lost. At times the only thing that kept me riding was, as race announcer Phil
Liggett described it, “the magnetism of a finish line.”
Is history an actual force? It felt like it. In the 100th anniversary edition of the Tour, it seemed I
was riding against some eerie invisible opponent. It was as if the collective spirit and judgment
of the past greats got together and decided that this year's winner had to prove not just his
worthiness, but his ability to deal with the absurd and near-unendurable.
I should have known it would be a hard race when, a couple of days before it began, a bird
soiled Johan's shoulder. We were sitting outside the team bus having a meeting when it
splattered on his shirt. Was it a bad omen? In some countries it's considered a good one. Later,
there would be a lot of discussion about good luck, and bad. But to me, that's excuse-making.
The fact is, in the previous four years I'd won the race without having to overcome any real
misfortunes: no crashes, no flats, no problems. Now things went wrong all at once–or maybe
they just evened out.
It started in the winter, when Kik and I separated. Anyone who has been through something
similar understands how catastrophic it is emotionally, and how it overwhelms any other
concern. I tried to tell myself that I was managing the situation and that my personal trials had
nothing to do with the bike, but it worked on me. I never cracked physically, had a day where I
couldn't get out of bed or get on the bike. But it was a disruption, and I don't mean a disruption
in training. It was a disruption in my head and my heart.
As the Tour approached, there were other, smaller problems. I crashed in an important tune-up
race for the Tour, called the Dauphiné Libéré, on Friday the 13th ironically, and was slow to
recover. I came down with tendinitis in my hip. I caught a stomach bug from my kids the week I
was supposed to leave forParisand barely made the trip. I was still doubled over the day before
the race began.
As I prepared for the Prologue, I told myself maybe I could still find my form on the road once
the race began. But everyone expected another big, dominating victory from me, more than they
had in any other year. When you hear that all the time, it gets to you, and you begin to feel that
there isn't much to race for. You can only lose.
I promptly lost. I finished seventh in the Prologue, and started the Tour in a full-blown crisis.
Now everybody knew what I'd hoped to hide: word immediately swept through the peloton that
I wasn't the rider I'd been in the past. My performance bolstered the hopes of every rider that
night, including those of Jan Ullrich, who showed up inParislooking as lean and fit as he ever
had, and riding for a new team, Bianchi.
From there, things just got worse. The very first stage, to Meaux, was marked by an epic crash.
The peloton was jumpy and tightly packed as we raced for the finish, and one small event
caused a huge chain reaction. A guy came out of his pedal. That's all. Within seconds, 176 riders
piled into each other, total carnage. The worst casualty of the day was my friend and neighbor
Tyler Hamilton, who broke his right collarbone but somehow got up and kept riding. I was
luckier; I had some bruises and road rash. But the crash signaled what kind of race it would be.
So did the heat. It was hot all acrossFrance, very hot, and it made the race hard for everybody.
In the early sprinting stages, the heat rose to 100 degrees and beat down on our heads and
shoulders. It was like being leaned on by something heavy and it steadily sapped me. Instead of
feeling better as the days went on, if anything, I felt weaker.
But my teammates carried me through the first week. Postal won a wonderful collective stage
victory, a team time trial from Joinville to St. Dizier of 42.9 miles. It was a highly technical
stage that required all nine riders to go flat-out, together, against the clock. We yearned to show
that Postal had become the best team in a European-dominated sport, and we rode perfectly, a
flying blue wedge of speed.
We won the stage in 1 hour, 18 minutes, and 27 seconds, half a minute faster than our closest
competitors, and that vaulted me from 12th place into second. Just as satisfying was the fact
that Postal riders occupied the top eight places in the overall standings, and I actually trailed my
own teammate, Victor Hugo Peña, who claimed the yellow jersey. As we'd neared the finish
line, we were all tired, but I urged Victor on, saying, “What color do you want to wear tonight?
What color?”
After a week of riding, we were heading into theAlpsand I still didn't feel great. I kept telling
myself that it was a long race, and I waited to feel strong again, but anyone who knew me could
see that I was struggling–especially when we arrived at Alpe d'Huez for the eighth stage. In the
past I'd taken control of the Tour in theAlps, and the presumption was that I'd mount another
huge attack. But Alpe d'Huez was the site of yet another mishap, and a reckoning.
The stage included a monstrous climb up the Galibier, a 30-kilometer ascent that was among the
highest in theAlps. I felt uncharacteristically leg-weary as we climbed, and I couldn't understand
it. Finally, on the descent, I looked down and realized that my back brake was rubbing against
my wheel.
On the radio, I called Johan. “Johan, I have good news and bad news,” I said.
His voice crackled. “Okay, tell me the good news first.”
“No, I'm going to tell you the bad news first. The bad news is,I feel like shit. The good news is,I
think I know why. I just looked back and my brake has been rubbing the whole time.”
I'd ridden the first 120 kilometers or so of the stage with the brake on. It was like trying to swim
in a pair of boots. It was almost embarrassing; I should've noticed sooner.
I fixed the bike problem, but I couldn't fix the body problem. I was tired. It was 100 degrees
again, and now we were heading into the final climb up Alpe d'Huez, and other riders started
attacking. There went Joseba Beloki. There went a talented young Spaniard named Iban Mayo.
There went the rising Russian star Alexandre Vinokourov. There went my friend Tyler
Hamilton, riding with his broken collarbone.
I couldn't chase them. I struggled up the mountain and finished fourth. It put me in the overall
lead, but it was hardly the dominant performance that people had expected. The numbers didn't
lie: my personal time up Alpe d'Huez was four minutes slower than it had been in 2001. I had
the yellow jersey, but it was bittersweet; I knew I wasn't the strongest rider that day, and I had
to face the fact that I wasn't riding well and could lose the race.
The next day we journeyed from Bourg d'Oisans to Gap, and again the attacks kept coming.
Vinokourov, Mayo, and Beloki pounded at me. The heat was so intense by now that the tar
roads were melting, which made the dueling that much more intense–and dangerous, too.
What happened next was one of those instances when good luck and bad collided in the same
moment. Finally, we reached the last big descent of the stage. We whirled into a corner that was
sticky and slick with tar. Beloki was intent on chasing down a break by Vinokourov, and I hung
back, 15 yards behind him. We came into the turn at about 50 miles an hour.
Beloki's wheel started to slide.
He tried to brake–and his wheel locked. Then it caught hard, and the bike jerked, and went over
to the side.
Beloki was whipsawed off the bike. He slammed onto the pavement right in front of me. Man
and machine skidded across the road, tangled up together.
I tried to brake–and now my rear wheel started to lock up, too. I was losing it. I had two
choices: I could either pile into Beloki, orswerve off the road. I swerved.
I hurtled into a field. I had no idea what had happened to Beloki behind me. All I knew was that
I was lucky to still be upright. There could have been a cliff at the side of that road, or a wall.
Instead, there was an open field. I was lucky, too, that the field had been harvested and wasn't
full of crops.
The bike jounced over tractor furrows and broken stalks. I thought about trying to turn around,
but that would cost me precious time. I glanced up and saw that the road hairpinned back
toward me. I thought,Maybe I can off-road through the field and pick up the race route again.
On instinct, I veered sharply and kept going, wheeling over crunchy stalks, certain that at any
moment I would go over the handlebars, or get a flat tire. Finally, I got across the field. There
was the road.
Suddenly, there was a ditch, a rain gutter. I braked hard, almost plunging into it headfirst. There
was no way around it, so I jumped off the bike and hoisted it over my shoulder, potato-sack
style. I leaped across the rain gutter. My back foot slid about two feet, and kicked up a cloud of
dust as I jumped.
I landed on the other side, ran to the road, and vaulted back on my bike. Just then,Tylersped by
me andwaved, a kind of salute. I pedaled to catch up with the lead group. I rode on, relieved to
still be in the race.
I finished the stage in decent shape, still in the yellow jersey. But I felt lousy for Beloki. That
evening, I called his team doctor, a gentleman named Pedro Celaya, to see how he was doing,
and found out he'd broken his thigh, wrist, and elbow.Celayawas in the hospital visiting with
Beloki when I called, and I passed along my sincere regrets. “I'm really sorry this happened,” I
said. “Tell him I thought he looked great.” I meant it. You never want to see a great competitor
put out of the race by a crash. Accidents like that don't help the contest.
Afterward, Beloki and I became comrades of sorts. For the rest of the Tour, he would call Johan
every now and again to say good luck and pass on his best wishes.
I hoped the trip into the field was my last mishap–surely nothing more could go wrong. But it
was just the opposite. A couple of days later, I took the start line in a critical stage, an individual
time trial of 47 kilometers from Gaillac to Cap'Découverte. Again, the sun was intense, and as I
warmed up, I sweated through my clothes. I already felt sapped and thirsty as I waited in the
starting gate. Ahead, I knew Jan Ullrich was riding a fast time.
I shot out of the gate and hunched down over my racing bars. At first, everything went okay,
but it was so hot that I kept pulling at my water bottle. A third of the way around the course,
Ullrich and I were dead even.
But now the heat was inside my helmet, and inside my racing skins, and I couldn't seem to cool
off. I drank and drank. Dehydration starts days before it really hits you. Now it hit me: suddenly
I was parched, and powerless.
Then I ran out of water.
At the second time check, I'd lost 39 seconds to Ullrich, and I was slowing. There was no way
to get more water; time-trial rules forbid a rider to get help on the course. I didn't care what my
split times were anymore. I just wanted to drink.
By the time I hit the finish line, I'd lost a minute and 36 seconds to Ullrich, and there was a huge
ring of white salt around my mouth. I slumped off the bike. I'd lost nearly 15 pounds in fluids in
a single ride. Somehow I'd hung on for second place, and I still wore yellow, but I was a very
shaky, ill leader.
I didn't know how to face my teammates. Johan just patted me and said, “Look, we'll get it back
tomorrow.” But dinner that night was quiet. I could almost hear the guys wondering what was
going to happen, whether I still had it in me to win the race. I felt miserable, and guilty. The
boys in blue were working tirelessly on my behalf, and I wasn't able to make their hard work pay
off. Instead, every day seemed to bring some new mishap, and now I'd failed physically on a
crucial stage. I could barely look at them. But no one whispered or complained, or questioned
aloud. They just ate their meals and kept their jaws tightly shut and went about their work.
The next morning, as we rode into thePyrenees, George rolled up next to me. I was still at rock
bottom, and George could see it. “I just want you to know something,” he said.
“What? I suck?”
“No. What you did yesterday may be the most impressive thing I've seen you do.”
“Why?”
“Because I could see that you were suffering, and you hung in there.”
George's words helped me through the wretched day ahead. We were now entering the most
difficult mountain stages of the entire Tour, and I was in no shape to defend a lead. When you
have severe dehydration, you can't recover from it in a day, or even two. That day we had a hard
climb to a village called Bonascre, and I was going to suffer badly. I knew it–and so did
everyone else.
By the end of that day I'd lost more time to Ullrich. Now he was just 15 seconds behind me.
At the finish, I looked terrible again. I had sunken eyes, and I looked old. Word around the
peloton was that I couldn't hang on much longer; that I was going to lose the Tour any day now
to Ullrich.
Through it all, my teammates kept me going, with the help of Johan. None of them panicked.
Instead, Johan insisted that I would eventually feel stronger, and that Ullrich was bound to
weaken at some point. He also looked for some practical ways to protect our lead. He came up
with an inspired tactic to help defend me from constant attacks other riders were launching: he
decided to turn the tables. He sent our climbers, Chechu and Manuel Beltrán (whom we called
“Tricki,” which is Spanish for Cookie Monster), on the attack. They shot up the road, forcing
other riders to chase them. It worked: the other riders were so busy chasing Tricki and Chechu,
they couldn't attack me. I was able to ride at a more comfortable pace.
Then one day, as Johan had promised, I did begin to feel a little better. Johan swore he could see
my pedaling getting stronger. “You've worked hard and you're prepared,” he said. “Things have
gone wrong, but in the last week of the Tour it's the experience, the mentality, and the
determination that make a difference, and I don't think anybody is stronger in those three things
than you.” He still believed in me–and that helped me believe.
Breakfasts and dinners continued to be quiet, grim affairs, with everyone determined to preserve
our slim lead. I just needed one big day, I told myself.
But I needed it soon–practically overnight, in fact. We now had just one final climbing stage, to
a summit called Luz Ardiden. If I was going to win the Tour, I'd have to do it there.
Fear gnawed at me: what if I lost, after all we'd been through in the race? When you carry the
hopes and expectations of a team, you feel a lot of responsibility. I was carrying other things,
too. In the middle of the Pyrenean stages, shortly before Luz Ardiden, Kik sent me a text
message. She'd had a dream that I was riding up a mountain. But hitched to the back of my bike
was a cart, and in the cart were people–cancer survivors, sponsors, well-wishers–and I was
trying to pull all of them up the hill. In her dream, she wrote, I unhooked the harness and rode
away. “Throw off the weights that are holding you back,” she urged.
Kik was right. I was trying to pull this thing along, and feeling too much weight. It was a
message that meant a lot, and I saved it.
On the evening before Luz Ardiden, Bill Stapleton came to visit me, and he told me something
else that encouraged me. We talked about how close the race was, and how much pressure I
was feeling. Bill just stared at me calmly, and said, “Dude, you're the guy who makes the eight
ball.”
I didn't know what he meant. “The eight ball,” I repeated.
“Clear the table,” he said.“Eight ball, corner pocket. You call it, you make it.”
That night, I slept soundly, and the next morning, I woke up feeling well, better than I had since
the Tour began. I went down to the team bus for a cup of coffee. “I think I'm back,” I told
Johan.
I sipped my coffee and thought about Luz Ardiden. Ullrich and his Bianchi team director, Rudy
Pevenage, were telling everyone that he would lead the race by the time we reached the summit.
I was going to lose the Tour that day, thanks to them, they said.
As I sat on the bus still sipping coffee and thinking, one of our operations managers, Geert
Duffy, came over and told me a story. The year before, Pevenage had asked him for a souvenir
yellow jersey. Duffy had promised to get one for him, but then forgot. Now that Ullrich was
within 15 seconds of me, Pevenage had gone looking for Duffy.
“Hey, Duffy–don'tworry about that jersey,” he said, “because we're going to get our own.”
I listened as Duffy told me the story. I put my cup down.
“The Tour is over,” I said. And I walked out of the bus.
It helped to know their plans. Now I had plans of my own. At the start line, I saw Tyler
Hamilton. “Be ready,” I said.“'Cause I'm going.”
It was my last chance. After Luz Ardiden, there would be just one more critical stage, a time
trial toNantes, and Ullrich had already beaten me once in a time trial. I didn't want to go
toNanteswith only a 15-second lead. I needed to gain some time in this final mountaintop stage.
It was perhaps the longest, hardest climbing day of the Tour. When we passed over the massive
Tourmalet, Ullrich briefly got away, with a shock attack. I decided not to waste energy going
after him, but preferred to let him work. Gradually, I reeled him in again as his tempo slowed.
We fell back into a group with Mayo and Vinokourov and swung down into another descent.
Finally, after five hours on the bikes, we reached the foot of Luz Ardiden–and the pace
quickened, and a kind of sparring match on bikes began.
Iban Mayo attacked. I leaped up and countered the attack, and passed him.
Now I was in front. I darted up the road. Where was Ullrich? I wondered. I hoped he was
paying for the Tourmalet.
In my ear Johan said calmly, “Ullrich is dropped.”
Behind me, Ullrichlagged, pain on his face. He churned upward, but he couldn't match the
acceleration. “Ten seconds,” Johan said. I felt a small bloom of excitement.
I lunged at the pedals, scaling the mountain, thinking about putting empty road between myself
and Ullrich. I hugged the side of the route, cutting every corner. I skimmed past spectators,
barely noticing them . . .
A flash of yellow caught my eye. A small kid was holding a yellow Tour souvenir bag, whipping
it back and forth.
Uh-oh, I'm going to catch that thing,I thought.
Suddenly, the bag was tangled on the handle of my brake. I felt the bike jerk violently beneath
me–
It flipped over sideways.
It was as though I had been garroted. I went straight down, and landed on my right hip,
hard.I've crashed?Now? I thought, incredulously.How could I have crashed?
My next thought was,Well, the Tour's over. It's too much, too many things gone wrong.
But another thought intruded.
Get up.
It was the same thought that had prodded me during all those long months I'd spent in a hospital
bed.After surgery.Get up.After chemo.Get up. It had whispered to me, and nudged me, and
poked me, and now here it was again.Get . . . up.
I got up. Johan said later it looked as though I'd bounced back to my feet almost
instantaneously, like a pop-up toy. I hauled my bike upright and worked furiously at the chain,
which had come off–shaking it, threading it back onto the ring. As I did so, I began to scream, a
guttural, primal roar. I screamed in fury, and in devastation. I screamed every cuss word I knew.
I screamed because I thought I had lost the race.
I got the chain on, and I hopped on the bike and started to push off, and now there was a Postal
mechanic behind me, shoving me up the road, and I could hear him screaming, too, with effort,
and with anger.
Chechu had waited for me. Now he sped up and motioned frantically for me to follow him. I
leaped up and hammered at the pedals. But the gear slipped, and my foot popped out of the
pedal. The bike swung crazily, and I landed, chest first, on the top-tube of the bike. Later, I
would discover that the rear chainstay was broken. Somehow I stayed upright and clipped my
foot back in.
Ahead, Tyler Hamilton was angry, too. Tour etiquette dictated that the leaders wait for me to
catch up, just as I had waited for Ullrich when he went off the road in that frightening crash two
years previous. The Tour was supposed to be won by the strongest rider, not the luckiest, and
the consensus in the peloton was that no one should profit from a freak accident.
Afterward, Ullrich would be credited with sportsmanship for waiting. But in retrospect I'm not
so sure he did wait. In replays, he seems to me to be riding race tempo. He didn't attack, but he
didn't wait, either–not untilTyleraccelerated in front and waved at them to slow down, and
yelled, “Hold up!”
The lead group slowed. Meanwhile, Johan pulled up alongside me, to see if I was all right. I had
a gash on my elbow. Johan rolled down his window and started to say something. I swung my
head toward him and threw him a look of pure fire. Johan closed his mouth, and closed the
window without saying a word. He had seen all he needed to. “I knew then it was over,” he said
later.
The bike ran up the road beneath me. After just a few minutes of furious effort, I rejoined the
lead group.
No sooner had I gotten there than Mayo glanced back at me–and attacked again. I immediately
jumped out of the saddle, charged up to his wheel, and slingshotted past him.
I was livid. I drove my legs into the pedals, adrenaline and fear and frustration in every stroke.
In a matter of moments, I was alone. I had bolted away from the group so suddenly that nobody
could follow. Once again, Ullrich receded behind me.
“He's dropped,” Johan reported. “You have ten seconds.”
I accelerated, almost snarling. I rode fueled by residual fright and rage from the crash.And by
pent-up resentment from weeks of crashes and ordeals, and doubts.
“Twenty seconds,” Johan said, more excitedly.
I found a rhythm and began to dance on the pedals, as if I were running up a staircase. “Thirty
seconds . . .”
I was thirsty again. I had dropped my bottle in the crash, and now I was beginning to tire. But
Johan pulled up behind me and started yelling, so excited that I could barely understand him.
“Come on, come on! This is it! You're winning the Tour! Here's your chance!”
I had given everything, and now I was wasted. The last few kilometers were one long grimace
of pain. But finally the finish line was approaching, and adrenaline and anger carried me. I
thought about the doubts in the peloton, all the whispers that I was too old, or too rich, or too
distracted, or too American to win the Tour de France a fifth time. I thought,Thisis my
neighborhood, and nobody else is winning this race.
As I crossed the line, I just slumped over my bike, my shoulders sagging, too exhausted and
relieved even to lift my arms. I was bleeding and limping and drained, but I had won the stage
by 40 seconds over Ullrich.
I now led the Tour by1:07. A one-minute lead, after two weeks of suffering and self-doubt, felt
like an hour. It was more than we could have expected under the circumstances. I took the
podium and slipped on the yellow jersey, and as I stood there, arms upraised, I could see George
crossing the finish line. My fatigue lifted, and I lit up and pointed straight at him, jabbing at the
air in triumph.
Finally, I left the podium. I went to drug testing, and then the press conference, so it was some
time before I finally saw Johan. I threw myself at him, and he grabbed me in a huge bear hug
and shook me up and down, babbling, “Yes, yes, yes, yes!”
“This is my neighborhood,” I said.
We climbed into a car together and started the drive down the mountain to our hotel. The rest
of the Postals had gone ahead of us on the team bus. Suddenly I wanted to see my teammates,
urgently. The only reason I had stood on the podium in the yellow jersey was because they had
surrounded and protected me, and now I didn't want to ride solo, I wanted to ride with them.
“Let's catch them,” I said to Johan.
He sped down the road until we could see the bus ahead. We radioed the driver, and he pulled
over to wait. When we reached the side of the road, I leaped out of Johan's car, ran to the bus,
and clambered up the stairs. I jumped aboard and stood in the aisle, screaming in exultation.
“How do you like me now?!How do you fucking like me now??!!”
The guys erupted. They charged out of their seats, whooping, and for the next ten minutes it
was pandemonium in the aisle, all of us hugging, crying, and pounding one another on the back.
The Tour wasn't over, but now I believed absolutely that I would win it. For the first time, I
didn't feel weak or hunted. I felt like the real leader of the Tour de France. Most important, I felt
I could look my teammates in the eye.
For the next three days, Ullrich and I rode in a sort of limbo, eyeing each other. There was no
ground in those stages over which to make up any significant time, so we simply maintained a
steady tempo and rode towardNantes, and what we both knew would be the deciding stage, the
time trial. We had nothing to do but pedal and think, and the tension grew. Every second would
literally count.
We awoke inNantesto a driving rainstorm. Nevertheless, Johan and I got up at6:30A.M.and
drove out to examine the course. I slowly cruised up and down the road on my bike in the rain,
studying the corners, train tracks, even the manholes. Just a paint mark could be dangerously
slick on a wet road. The last ten kilometers were especially treacherous, I noticed–a series of
roundabouts and corners that offered potential disaster. When we got back to the hotel, we
heard that Ullrich had slept in, and had looked at a video of the course rather than get wet.
The team bus was quiet that morning, as the rain pelted the windows. My friend Robin Williams
broke the quiet here and there with his usual hilarity, and I tried to laugh through my clenched
jaw.
Eventually, all the other riders were out on the course. Reports from my teammates came back:
riders were crashing every few minutes. Three of Ullrich's teammates had already gone down. I
should take no chances.
Johan gave me some last tactical instructions, which amounted to a caution: I wasn't the one
who needed to take risks. Ullrich was chasing me, not the other way around.
With that thought, I headed out onto the course–and started slowly. I lost six seconds to Ullrich
in the first kilometer and a half.
I could feel my wheels slipping in the rain.
I stayed calm. I suspected that Ullrich had started fast to try to press me early, and maybe even
demoralize me. I concentrated on my own tempo, and found a rhythm.
By the next time check, I was only two seconds back.
Ullrich kept pushing despite the fact that there was standing water all over the course. Water
sprayed from our wheels on every corner.
Most of my teammates had ridden safely in, and now they were back on the bus, nervously
watching the race on TV. They covered their faces with their hands as I sped over the slippery
pavement. They peeked through their fingers.
I went up by ten seconds.
Ahead, Ullrich jackhammered at the pedals. He entered the most treacherous part of the course,
the last ten kilometers. He swept into a roundabout.
A moment later, Johan's deadpan voice came into my ear. “Lance, Ullrich has crashed.”
Ullrich had hurtled into the roundabout, and as he leaned into the curve, his bike skidded out
from under him. It was as though the road had simply disappeared beneath him. He slid for a
few long, terrible moments across the water-soaked asphalt, then slammed into some hay bales.
Ullrich struggled to his feet and got back on his bike, but the race was over. I was the winner of
the Tour, if I could stay upright. “Lance, take it easy. Please, no risks,” Johan said. “You can
practically walk to the finish now and you'll still win the Tour.”
From then on, my ride was a beautiful tour ofNantes. I practically sat up and enjoyed the view.
But I still took care around those corners.
With three kilometers to go, Johan pulled the car up next to me and flashed a thumbs-up sign. I
lifted a hand back in salute–the “hook 'em, 'horns” sign forTexas.
As I neared the finish line, all of the strain of the past three weeks fell away. I felt something
almost sunny on my face and realized it was my own smile. I streaked across the line, and beat a
fist in the air, and tried to absorb the moment: I was about to become a five-time winner of the
Tour de France.
But records are hard to feel. They're measures, or markers, that we use to set limits. To say that
someone has won fiveToursis a cool abstraction, because the number doesn't begin to suggest
all of the events and emotions that those races reallyentailed, the setbacks and the stages
victories, or the anguish and the elation. Perhaps the only people who could fully understand
what the phrase “five Tour de France victories” meant were my teammates, and the other four
men who had done it, and they all had their own personal associations with the number five. I
only knew what it meant to me: it represented the number of times I had gotten back up.
As I came down from the podium, I met Bernard Hinault. He just gripped my hand and said
simply, “Welcome to the club.”
The next day, the ride toPariswas a traveling ceremony. I glided along, sipped champagne, and
thought about the meaning of the race: about getting up again, finding another way out of your
problems, with your head or with your will. I felt a swell in my chest as we enteredParis. As we
passed the Hôtel de Crillon, I saw that it was flying theTexasflag for me, as it had done for the
past five years.
But the real moment of victory came that night in a private banquet room with just the team. I
rose and toasted them. “This year was so hard for me, personally and professionally,” I said. “I
wasn't the best at times, and I know it. I scared all of us, and I promise never to let it happen
again. But you guys carried me. It killed me to come down to the dinner table and look you guys
in the face, after letting you down like that. After Luz Ardiden, I could finally look in your eyes
with pride. I really needed you, and you were there, and now I'm here because of you. Thank
you for sticking by me. I owe this jersey to you. This celebration, this night is in your honor.
Thank you.”
That marked the end of the 100th Tour de France for me. But like I say, things keep happening.
Kik and the kids and I returned to Girona together. We put the kids in bed, plugged in the baby
monitor, and went to the café downstairs, just under our window. We ordered cold beers,
Spanish ham, and bread, and we sat there in silence. We would continue to put effort, care, and
deep thought into our relationship.
Over the next few days, I skipped every invitation, every interview, and every adventure. This
time, unlike any other Tour victory, I just stayed home. I played with my children, and took
them to the beach. We bought a new barbecue grill, and cooked outside in the garden and
listened to Bob Marley. I perfected my frozen-margarita-making skills. I thought about seeing
the Amalfi coast inItaly, for pleasure. For once, I didn't think about racing.
Another finish line is out there, somewhere. But I don't really want to find it–yet.
Afterword
I've said it many times before–if I had to choose between winning the Tour de Franceor having
cancer, I'd choose cancer. I consider myself lucky for the experience, and because of that I feel a
strong commitment to fulfill the “obligation of the cured.” That's why I created the Lance
Armstrong Foundation (LAF). The LAF is dedicated to helping thenine million cancer survivors
who are dealing with all the same issues I am.
Today, seven years after my cancer diagnosis, the LAF is just as important to me as the day I
signed it into existence. Cancer changed my life. From the moment I was diagnosed, priorities
changed and focus shifted. I had lots of new challenges to meet–physically, psychologically, and
socially. That is why the LAF is dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for those living with,
through, and beyond cancer. Life after cancer is all about living, and the LAF wants to help
make sure cancer survivors and their loved ones experience the highest quality of life possible.
Thanks to advances in medicine and science, we've come to a time where the odds in favor of
living long past a cancer diagnosis are increasingly brighter. Unfortunately, most programs fail
to recognize the particular needs of cancer survivors beyond diagnosis and treatment. I know
firsthand how relevant and important these issues are, and I consider myself very fortunate to
have had access to so many experts and resources to help me make informed decisions about my
life after my diagnosis. The LAF works hard to create this same level of access for all cancer
survivors and help fill that void in survivorship services and information.
For me, there were four things that really helped me face the ongoing challenges of cancer:
knowledge, support, motivation, and hope. I want to extend these four gifts to all cancer
survivors, so they too can face head-on the life changes that cancer brings. The LAF works to
achieve this by providing education about the immediate and long-term challenges of managing
cancer.
The LAF promotes the optimal physical, psychological, and social recovery and care of cancer
survivors. We do the same for their loved ones. We focus our efforts in four areas: survivorship
education and resources, community programs, national advocacy initiatives, and scientific and
clinical research grants. We educate cancer survivors, healthcare professionals, and the general
public about cancer survivorship issues; aid in the development of services and support for
survivors; address health-policy issues to increase services for cancer survivors; and support
research for a better understanding of cancer and cancer survivorship.
I'm thrilled by the success that the LAF continues to exhibit. Since I created the Foundation in
1997, it has raised more than $23 million in funding for cancer survivorship programs and
grants. Our revenues have grown from less than $250,000 in 1997 to more than $7 million in
2002. In that time, we have invested our resources in many innovative cancer survivorship
programs, grants, and mission-related activities and helped countless cancer survivors and their
loved ones.
I invite you to join us in our important mission–enhancing the quality of life for those living
with, through, and beyond cancer. With your help, we'll continue to make a difference for
cancer survivors and to awaken the spirit of hope in all of us. There are a lot of ways that you
can help: volunteering, joining our Peloton Project, donating, or raising awareness. For more
information, please call the Lance Armstrong Foundation at (512) 236–8820, or
visitwww.laf.org. Thanks for your support.
Also by Lance Armstrong
with Sally Jenkins
It's NotAbout the Bike:
My Journey Back to Life