Lance Armstrong-IT'S NOT ABOUT THE BIKE(4)

I confided that I was worried about my sponsor, Cofidis, and explained the difficulty I was
having with them. I told her I felt pressured. "I need to stay in shape, I need to stay in shape," I
said over and over again.
"Lance, listen to your body," she said gently. "I know your mind wants to run away. I know it's
saying to you, 'Hey, let's go ride.' But listen to your body. Let it rest."
I described my bike, the elegant high performance of the ultralight tubing and aerodynamic
wheels. I told her how much each piece cost, and weighed, and what its purpose was. I
explained how a bike could be broken down so I could practically carry it in my pocket, and that
I knew every part and bit of it so intimately that I could adjust it in a matter of moments.
I explained that a bike has to fit your body, and that at times I felt melded to it. The lighter the
frame, the more responsive it is, and my racing bike weighed just 18 pounds. Wheels exert
centrifugal force on the bike itself, I told her. The more centrifugal force, the more momentum.
It was the essential building block of speed. "There are 32 spokes in a wheel," I said.
Quick-release levers allow you to pop the wheel out and change it quickly, and my crew could
fix a flat tire in less than 10 seconds.

"Don't you get tired of leaning over like that?" she asked. Yes, I said, until my back ached like it
was broken, but that was the price of speed. The handlebars are only as wide as the rider's
shoulders, I explained, and they curve downward in half-moons so you can assume an
aerodynamic stance on the bike.
"Why do you ride on those little seats?" she asked. The seat is narrow, contoured to the
anatomy, and the reason is that when you are on it for six hours at a time, you don't want
anything to chafe your legs. Better a hard seat than the torture of saddle sores. Even the clothes
have a purpose. They are flimsy for a reason: to mold to the body because you have to wear
them in weather that ranges from hot to hail. Basically, they're a second skin. The shorts have a
chamois padded seat, and the stitches are recessed to avoid rash.
When I had nothing left to tell LaTrice about the bike, I told her about the wind. I described
how it felt in my face and in my hair. I told her about being in the open air, with the views of
soaring Alps, and the glimmer of valley lakes in the distance. Sometimes the wind blew as if it
were my personal friend, sometimes as if it were my bitter enemy, sometimes as if it were the
hand of God pushing me along. I described the full sail of a mountain descent, gliding on two
wheels only an inch wide.
"You're just out there, free," I said.
"You love it," she said.
"Yeah?" I said.
"Oh, I see it in your eyes," she said.
I understood that LaTrice was an angel one evening late in my last cycle of chemo. I lay on my
side, dozing on and off, watching the steady, clear drip-drip of the chemo as it slid into my
veins. LaTrice sat with me, keeping me company, even though I was barely able to talk.
"What do you think, LaTrice?" I asked, whispering. "Am I going to pull through this?"
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, you are."
"I hope you're right," I said, and closed my eyes again.
LaTrice leaned over to me.
"Lance," she said, softly, "I hope someday to be just a figment of your imagination. I'm not here
to be in your life for the rest of your life. After you leave here, I hope I never see you ever again.
When you're cured, hey, let me see you in the papers, on TV, but not back here. I hope to help
you at the time you need me, and then I hope I'll be gone. You'll say, 'Who was that nurse back
in Indiana? Did I dream her?' "
It is one of the single loveliest things anyone has ever said to me. And I will always remember
every blessed word.
ON DECEMBER 13, 1996, I TOOK MY LAST CHEMO treatment. It was almost time to go
home.
Shortly before I received the final dose of VIP, Craig Nichols came by to see me. He wanted to
talk with me about the larger implications of cancer. He wanted to talk about "the obligation of
the cured."
It was a subject I had become deeply immersed in. I had said to Nichols and to LaTrice many
times over the last three months, "People need to know about this." As I went through therapy, I
felt increasing companionship with my fellow patients. Often I was too sick for much
socializing, but one afternoon LaTrice asked me to go to the children's ward to talk to a young
boy who was about to start his first cycle. He was scared and self-conscious, just like me. I
visited with him for a while, and I told him, "I've been so sick. But I'm getting better." Then I
showed him my driver's license.
In the midst of chemo, my license had expired. I could have put off renewing it until I felt better
and had grown some hair back, but I decided not to. I pulled on some sweatclothes and hauled
myself down to the Department of Motor Vehicles, and stood in front of the camera. I was
completely bald, with no eyelashes or eyebrows, and my skin was the color of a pigeon's
underbelly. But I looked into the lens, and I smiled.
"I wanted this picture so that when I got better, I would never forget how sick I've been," I said.
"You have to fight."
After that, LaTrice asked me to speak with other patients more and more often. It seemed to
help them to know that an athlete was fighting the fight alongside them. One afternoon LaTrice
pointed out that I was still asking her questions, but the nature of them had changed. At first,
the questions I had asked were strictly about myself, my own treatments, my doses, my
particular problems. Now I asked about other people. I was startled to read that eight million
Americans were living with some form of cancer; how could I possibly feel like mine was an
isolated problem? "Can you believe how many people have this?" I asked LaTrice.
"You've changed," she said, approvingly. "You're going global."
Dr. Nichols told me that there was every sign now that I was going to be among the lucky ones
who cheated the disease. He said that as my health improved, I might feel that I had a larger
purpose than just myself. Cancer could be an opportunity as well as a responsibility. Dr. Nichols
had seen all kinds of cancer patients become dedicated activists against the disease, and he
hoped I would be one of them.
I hoped so, too. I was beginning to see cancer as something that I was given for the good of
others. I wanted to launch a foundation, and
I asked Dr. Nichols for some suggestions about what it might accomplish. I wasn't yet clear on
what the exact purpose of the organization would be; all I knew was that I felt I had a mission
to serve others that I'd never had before, and I took it more seriously than anything in the
world.
I had a new sense of purpose, and it had nothing to do with my recognition and exploits on a
bike. Some people won't understand this, but I no longer felt that it was my role in life to be a
cyclist. Maybe my role was to be a cancer survivor. My strongest connections and feelings were
with people who were fighting cancer and asking the same question I was: "Am I going to
die?"
I had talked to Steve Wolff about what I was feeling, and he said, "I think you were fated to get
this type of illness. One, because maybe you could overcome it, and two, because your potential
as a human was so much greater than just being a cyclist."
At the end of my third cycle of chemo, I had called Bill Stapleton and said, "Can you research
what it takes to start a charitable foundation?" Bill and Bart and another close friend and
amateur cyclist, John Korioth, met with me one afternoon at an Austin restaurant to kick around
some ideas. We had no idea how to go about launching a foundation, or how to raise money,
but by the end of the lunch we came up with the idea of staging a charity bicycle race around
Austin. We would call it the Ride for the Roses. I asked if anyone would have time to oversee
the project, and Korioth raised his hand. Korioth was a bartender at a nightspot where I had
hung out some in my former life, and I would even take a turn as a guest bartender occasionally.
He said his schedule would allow him to put some real time into it. It was the perfect solution:
we didn't want a lot of overhead, and whatever we raised, we wanted to give straight back to
the cause.
But I still wasn't clear on the basic purpose of the foundation. I knew that because my case was
such a cause celebre people would listen, but I didn't want the foundation as a pulpit for me
personally. I didn't think I was special–and I would never know how much a part of my own
cure I was. On the meaning of it, I wasn't really clear. All I wanted to do was tell people, "Fight
like hell, just like I did."
As I talked to Dr. Nichols about how I could help, I decided that I wanted the foundation to
involve research. I was so indebted to Dr. Einhorn and Dr. Nichols for their erudition, I wanted
to try to pay them back in some small way for all of the energy and caring that they and their
staff had put into my well-being. I envisioned a scientific advisory board that would review
requests for funding and decide which ones were the best and most worthy, and dole the money
out accordingly.
But there were so many fronts to the cancer fight that I couldn't focus solely on one. I had a host
of new friends who were involved in the fight, directly and indirectly, patients, doctors, nurses,
families, and scientists, and I was beginning to feel closer to them than to some cyclists I knew.
The foundation could keep me tied very closely to all of them.
I wanted the foundation to manifest all of the issues I had dealt with in the past few months:
coping with fear, the importance of alternate opinions, thorough knowledge of the disease, the
patient's role in cure, and above all, the idea that cancer did not have to be a death sentence. It
could be a route to a second life, an inner life, a better life.
AFTER THE FINAL CHEMO TREATMENT, I STAYED IN THE hospital for a couple more
days, recovering my strength and tying up loose ends. One of the loose ends was my catheter.
The day that it was removed was a momentous occasion for me, because I had been living with
it for nearly four months. I said to Nichols, "Hey, can we take this thing out?"
He said, "Sure."
I felt a surge of relief–if he agreed to take it out, he must have been confident I wouldn't need it
again. No more chemo, hopefully.
The next day an intern came to my room and removed that ugly, torturous device from my chest.
But there were complications; the thing had been buried in me for so long that it had grown into
my skin. The intern dug around, and couldn't get it out. He had to call in a more experienced
doctor, who practically ripped it out of my chest. It was agony. I even imagined I heard a tearing
noise as it came out. Next, the gash it left became infected and they had to go back in and
perform a day surgery to clean out the wound and sew me up again. It was awful, maybe the
worst experience of the whole four months, and I was so mad when it was finally over that I
demanded the catheter. I wanted to keep it, and I still have it, in a little Ziploc bag, a
memento.
There was one more detail to discuss: Nichols gave me a final analysis of my health. I would
have to go through a period of uncertainty. Quite often the final chemo treatment did not erase
every trace of cancer, and I would need monthly blood tests and checkups to ensure that the
disease was in full retreat. He warned me that my blood markers were not quite normal and my
chest X ray still showed signs of scar tissue from the tumors.
I was concerned. Nichols said, reassuringly, "We see it a lot. These are minor abnormalities, and
we're highly confident they will go away." If I was cured, the scar tissue and markers should
resolve themselves in time. But there was no guarantee; the first year was key. If the disease was
going to come back, that's when we would see i t .
I wanted to be cured, and cured now. I didn't want to wait a year to find out.
I went back home, and tried to piece my life back together. I took it easy at first, just played a
little golf and worked on plans for the foundation.
As my system cleaned out, my body didn't seem broken by the chemo, I realized with
relief. But I still felt like a cancer patient, and the feelings I'd held at bay for the last three
months began to surface.
One afternoon I agreed to play a little golf with Bill Stapleton and another friend of ours named
Dru Dunworth, who was a lymphoma survivor, at a club called Onion Creek. My hair hadn't
grown back yet, and I wasn't supposed to get a lot of sun, so I put on one of those goofy caps
that you pull down over your ears. I went into the pro shop to buy some balls. There was a
young guy working behind the counter. He looked at me, smirking, and said, "Are you going to
wear that hat?"
"Yeah," I said shortly.
"Don't you think it's warm out there?" he said.
I ripped the hat off so he could see that I was bald and scarred, and leaped across the counter.
"You see these fucking scars?" I snarled.
The guy backed away.
"That's why I'm going to wear that hat," I said. "Because I have cancer."
I pulled the cap on and I stalked out of the shop, so angry I was trembling.
I was tense, admittedly. I still spent a lot of time at the doctor's offices. I had blood drawn each
week by Dr. Youman so the doctors in Indianapolis could keep track of me. I was constantly
monitored. With an illness like cancer, monitoring is critical, and you live by the results, the
blood work, CT scans, MRIs. You live by knowing your progress. In my case, I'd had a
fast-growing cancer that had gone away quickly– but it could come back just as quickly.
One day after I had been back in Austin for a few weeks, LaTrice called Dr. Youman for the
numbers. After she wrote them down, she took them to Dr. Nichols. He looked at the sheet of
paper she had handed him, and he smiled and gave it back to her. "Why don't you call him this
time," he said.
LaTrice dialed my home phone. Like I say, the numbers were all-important for me, and I would
wait nervously by the phone for every result. I picked up right away.
"We got the blood counts back," LaTrice said. "Yeah?" I said, nervously. "Lance, they're
normal," she said.
I held the thought up in my mind and looked at it: I was no longer sick. I might not stay that
way; I still had a long year ahead of me, and if the illness returned it would probably happen in
the next 12 months. But for this moment, at least for this brief and priceless moment, there
wasn't a physical trace of cancer left in my body.
I didn't know what to say. I was afraid if I opened my mouth, nothing would come out but one
long, inarticulate shout of relief. "I'm so glad I can bring you good news," LaTrice said. I
sighed.
seven
KIK
LOVE AND CANCER WERE STRANGE COMPANions,
but in my case they came along at the same time. It was hardly the ideal situation in which
to meet my future wife–but that's exactly what happened. Why do two people get married? For
a future together, naturally. The question was whether or not I had one.
I didn't have cancer anymore, but I didn't not have it, either. I was in a state of anxiety called
remission, and I was obsessed with the idea of a relapse. I would wake up in the night with
phantom pains in my chest, and I'd lie in bed in the darkness, covered in sweat and listening to
the sound of my own breathing, convinced the tumors had come back. The next morning I'd go
directly to the doctor and ask for a chest X ray to calm myself down.
"The chemo works or it doesn't," Dr. Einhorn once said. "If it works, the patient lives a normal,
cancer-free life. If it doesn't and the cancer comes back, he will usually be dead in three or four
months." It was that simple.
Getting on with my life, on the other hand, was much more complicated. I finished
chemotherapy on December 13, 1996, and I met Kristin Richard a month later, at a press
conference to announce the launching of my cancer foundation and the Ride for the Roses. We
spoke just briefly. She was a slim blond woman who everyone called Kik (pronounced Keek), an
account executive for an advertising and public-relations firm in town, assigned to help promote
the event. I know I'm supposed to say the light changed when I saw her, but actually, it didn't. I
just thought she was smart and pretty. She told me later her first impression of me was equally
inconsequential. I was "a cute bald guy with a great smile." It would be spring before we had
deeper feelings, and summer before we acted on them. For one thing, we were seeing other
people, and for another, the first time we ever talked at length we had a fight.
It started on the phone. She represented a corporate client, a major title sponsor of the Ride for
the Roses, and she felt I wasn't doing enough to please them. One afternoon she got testy with a
foundation staffer. Who is this chick? I thought, and dialed her number, and as soon as she
answered I said, "This is Lance Armstrong, and what do you mean by talking to my staff that
way?" I went off, barking at her. On the other end of the receiver, Kik rolled her eyes, thinking,
Tliis guy acts like he is so big-time.
For the next ten minutes we argued back and forth. "Obviously, this conversation is going
nowhere," she snapped. "Damn right it's going nowhere!" I snapped back. "You know what?"
she said. "We need to talk about this over a beer. That's all I have to say to you."
I was nonplussed. "Oh, uh, okay. We'll go have a beer."
I invited her to meet up with me and a couple of friends at a local bar. I don't think either of us
expected to be as drawn to the other as we were. I was still pale and washed out and fatigued
from the illness, but she didn't seem to care. She was funnier and more easygoing than I had
anticipated, and very bright. I asked her to join the weekly foundation meetings at my house,
and she agreed.
The foundation seemed like the perfect answer to the limbo I was in: I had completed chemo,
and beaten back the cancer for the time being, but I had to figure out what to do next. To work
on something outside myself was the best antidote. I was a cancer survivor first and an athlete
second, I decided. Too many athletes live as though the problems of the world don't concern
them. We are isolated by our wealth and our narrow focus, and our elitism. But one of the
redeeming things about being an athlete–one of the real services we can perform–is to redefine
what's humanly possible. We cause people to reconsider their limits, to see that what looks like
a wall may really just be an obstacle in the mind. Illness was not unlike athletic performance in
that respect: there is so much we don't know about our human capacity, and I felt it was
important to spread the message.
One of the more important events of that winter-spring was that I met a man named Jeff
Garvey, a prominent Austin venture capitalist who would become a close friend in time, but
who at first I simply hoped would help guide the foundation. A mutual acquaintance introduced
us, and Jeff invited me to lunch. I drove up to his place in my Explorer in shorts and a T-shirt.
We had a long rambling lunch, and talked about cycling–Jeff was an avid amateur rider and each
year he made a trip through Spain, following the famous Camino de Santiago. Jeff had lost both
of his parents to cancer, and he was looking for some charitable work to do in fighting the
disease. A few weeks later, I asked Jeff to have lunch with me again, and over the meal I asked
him if he would take over the running of the foundation. He agreed, and became our CEO.
For the next two months Kik and I worked together on the foundation. At first, she just seemed
like a stylish girl who always had a quick comeback. Gradually though, I found myself noticing
her long fine blond hair, and the way she would make the most casual clothes look classy
somehow. And then there was her Colgate commercial of a smile. It was hard not to get lost in
the view. Also, I liked her sass. Meanwhile, Kik had started reading up on me in her spare time,
under the pretext of doing research for business purposes. But neither of us was willing to admit
how we felt yet.
We held the inaugural Ride for the Roses in March, and it was a big success. We raised over
$200,000, and the Wallflowers played a concert, and friends and colleagues came from all over
the world to ride, including Miguel Indurain, Eddy Merckx, and Eric Heiden.
There was one donation I'll never forget. I was sitting at a table doing an autograph signing,
with a huge line stretching down the block, scribbling my name as fast as possible. I signed over
and over, barely glancing upward as each person stepped in front of me. A checkbook flew in
my face and flopped open on the table. "How much do you want?" a voice said. Without
looking up, I said, "Goddamn."
I started to laugh and shake my head. I knew that voice. It was the long-lost Jim Hoyt, my
homeboy from Piano, the man who put me on my first bike and then took my beloved Camaro
away. He was standing right in front of me, and so was his wife, Rhonda. I hadn't laid eyes on
them since our bitter disagreement a decade earlier. I looked Jim in the eye.
"I'm sorry," I said. I figured I owed him that.
"Accepted," he said. "Now, how much do I make it out for?"
"Jim, you don't have to do that."
"No," he said. "I want to help."
"Aw, come on, don't do this," I said.
"How about five grand? Does that sound good?"
I burst out laughing. Five grand was what I had put into that Camaro.
"That'd be fine," I said.
He wrote out the check, and we shook hands.
Every year, Jim always comes back for the Ride. And I mean to tell you, homeboy goes crazy
with his checkbook, and he never asks me for a thing in return.
A little while later, another memorable person stepped in front of me: a little girl whose head
was semi-bald like mine. Our eyes met, and we connected instantly. As I signed an autograph
for her, she recited all of my stats: she knew everything about my career. Her name was Kelly
Davidson and she was a cancer patient, and for days afterward I couldn't get her out of my
mind. I tracked her down and called her, and we became good friends.
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN I WAS IN TROUBLE WITH KlK
when we kept thinking up reasons to see each other after the Ride was over. We would
exchange e-mails a lot, and talk on the phone, and find excuses to meet now and then beyond
foundation meetings. She continued to come to the weekly gatherings at my house, and one
night she stayed after everybody else left. It was just the two of us, sitting in my living room
sipping beers and talking. I remember thinking, What am I doing? Why am I here alone with
her? She was thinking the exact same thing. Finally, she stood up to call a cab, and I offered to
give her a ride home.
We drove through the empty dark streets, not saying much of anything, but feeling a lot. There
was something there, but neither of us was ready to touch it yet. So we just drove.
BY SPRING OF '97, I WASN'T EXACTLY READY TO GO out for margaritas. The medical
uncertainties were still a constant, nagging worry. "What's it going to be?" I'd ask Dr. Nichols.
"Am I going to live or die? What?"
I felt pressure to get back on my bike, and yet I was unsure of my body. I counted and recounted
my financial assets and sweated every mortgage payment, wondering if I would ever make
another dime from cycling. Finally, I decided to at least try to race; I could still lock Cofidis into
the second year of the contract and relieve myself of financial worries if I appeared in four
events. I told Bill, "Let's find some races."
A month after leaving the hospital, I'd flown to France to appear at a Cofidis press conference.
The team officials were shocked that I showed up, but I wanted them to see that I was not the
pale, bedridden victim they had left in Indianapolis. I told the Cofidis people that I wanted to try
to come back in the spring, and I even spent a couple of days riding and working out with the
team. They seemed pleased. I began to train seriously, riding four hours a day, as much as 100
miles over some of the old routes I used to love, ranging from Austin to Wimberly, to Dripping
Springs, to New Sweden, towns with nothing but cotton fields and tractors and solitary church
steeples in the distance. But I didn't like how I was feeling. Sometimes I would ride for an hour
or so, just a little cruise, and it wore me out and I'd have to take a long nap afterward. I rode at a
moderate pace, only about 130 heartbeats per minute, but I would feel strong one day and weak
the next.
I had a vague, run-down sensation that was all too familiar: it was the way I had felt before the
diagnosis, I realized, with a knot in my stomach. Then I got a cold. I was sleepless and paralyzed
with fear for an entire night, certain the cancer had come back. Before the illness I had never
been susceptible to colds; if I was coming down with something, it had to be cancer.
The next morning I raced to see Dr. Youman for a checkup, certain he would tell me I was ill
again. But it was just a common infection that my body wasn't strong enough to fight off. My
immune system was shot, and I was what the doctors called "neutrophilic": my white blood cell
count was still down, which meant I was susceptible to every little germ that came along.
My X rays had not entirely cleared up, either. There was a spot of some kind in my abdomen.
The doctors didn't know quite what it was, and decided just to keep an eye on it. I was a
nervous wreck.
That was it. Dr. Nichols recommended that I take the rest of the year off, and I agreed; there
would be no serious cycling for me in '97. I was still convalescing, Nichols explained, and my
immune system hadn't fully rebounded from a chemo regimen that had been far more strenuous
than I realized. My lack of fitness was in no way related to lack of will, Nichols said, it was a
simple matter of how much the illness had taken out of me.
My friends and colleagues felt like I did, nervous. "Look," Och said. "Whatever you decide,
make sure the doctors know exactly what you're doing, training-wise, how much you're
working. Give them the details so they can make the determination as to how hard you should
go."
I had to admit it: I might never legitimately race again at the top level. Maybe my body just
couldn't deal with the rigors of a full-time training regimen.
Chris Carmichael called me and wanted to know what was going on.
"Chris, I'm scared," I said. "I'm scared to train. I'm scared if I push myself too hard, it will come
back."
IN AN ODD WAY, HAVING CANCER WAS EASIER THAN REcovery–
at least in chemo I was doing something, instead of just waiting for it to come back.
Some days I still called myself a bike racer, and some days I didn't. One afternoon I went to play
golf with Bill at a local country club. We were on the fifth hole, a par-5, and Bill hit a beautiful
six-iron for a chance at eagle. "I'll be able to do that some day," I said, admiringly.
Bill said, "It's going to be a while before you play enough golf to hit a shot like that."
"Bill, you don't get it," I said. "I'm retired."
Bill and I had this argument all the time. I vacillated–one day I would plan my big comeback,
and the next day I would tell him my career was over.
On the first tee, I'd say, "Well, now we're just friends because I don't need an agent anymore.
I'm never riding again." A few minutes later I'd be standing on the next tee, waggling a club,
and I'd say, "When I start riding again, what are we going to do, what's the plan?" By the next
hole, I would have reversed myself again.
"I hope you're not hanging out with me because you think I'm going to make any more money,"
I'd say. "Because I'm not riding."
Bill knew I was prone to making sweeping statements, and he had learned to make a joke, or to
put me off. He'd say to me, "Okay, fine, we'll talk about this tomorrow."
Then something happened that deepened my ambivalence: Bill's assistant, our good friend Stacy
Pounds, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Stacy had been a tremendous help to me during my
own illness and an integral partner in launching the foundation. She was a 55-year-old Texas
belle and chain-smoker, -with a gritty voice and exquisite manners. Stacy could basically tell you
that you were the biggest jerk in the world, and to never call again, and that you smelled, too,
but you would hang up thinking, "That was the nicest lady."
Stacy was not as fortunate as I was; her cancer was incurable. We were devastated, and all we
could do was try to support her and make her more comfortable. My mother came across two
pretty silver crucifixes on chains, and bought them for me. I wore one, and I gave the other to
Stacy. She was completely agnostic, just like me, but I said, "Stacy, I want to give you this
cross, and I'm going to wear one, too. This is going to be our bond. You wear it when you're
being treated, or wear it whenever you want. And I'll wear mine forever." We wore them not as
religious symbols but universal ones, symbols of our cancer kinship.
Stacy deteriorated quickly. One day she announced, "I'm not doing chemotherapy if I can't get
better." Dr. Youman tried to treat her, but the chemo wasn't working. It made her miserably
sick, and it wasn't going to save her life, either. Ultimately, she stopped, and the doctor told us
she had only a matter of weeks left.
Stacy had a son, Paul, who was a sailor serving with the Navy at sea, and we wanted to bring
him home to see his mother, but nobody seemed able to get him off his ship. We called
congressmen and senators, everybody, but nothing happened. Finally I decided to pull a string; I
knew a four-star general, Charles Boyd, who'd been based in Germany, and who had recently
retired and was living in Washington. I dialed his number, and I said, "General Boyd, I need a
favor."
I explained about Stacy, and I said, "This lady's dying, and her son's on board a ship." General
Boyd stopped me. "Lance," he said, "you don't need to say any more. I lost my wife two years
ago to cancer. I'll see what I can do." The next day, the kid was on his way home. That's what
the term "cancer community" means.
But before Paul got home, Stacy went into a nursing home for a few days. A group of us went
to visit her there, Bill, me, and my mom, and we found her in an awful, crowded facility with
barely enough nurses to go around. Stacy said, "I'm in pain. I ring the bell in the night and they
don't bring me my pain medicine." I was horrified.
I said, "Stacy, this is the deal. We're going to pack up your shit, and we're going to check you
out of here. You're going to go home, and I'm going to hire you a full-time nurse."
A nursing-home official said, "You can't check her out." "She's fucking leaving," I said.
"Now."
I told Bill, "Back the car up. Open the door." And we were gone. Stacy spent her last few weeks
at home. Her son arrived, and we found a hospice nurse to help him care for her. She fought as
hard as she could, and held out for three weeks more than the doctors predicted. She was
diagnosed in January, right after I finished my own chemo. She quit working in February, and by
March she was gravely ill. Then she slipped away, and broke all our hearts.
I was despondent, and still nervous about my own health, and half guilty over my good fortune
in being alive. Cycling didn't seem like a very important pursuit after losing Stacy, and I didn't
think it was a realistic one, either. Steve Lewis came from Piano for a visit, and could see an
obvious change in me. I don't think he understood what the illness had done to me until he laid
eyes on me, so skinny and white, cheekbones sticking out, and defeated-seeming. I showed
Steve the pictures of my lungs, and I told him, "I really thought I was going to die."
I was still struggling to get past the idea that I could have lost my life, and it was difficult to
know where to begin again. Decisions like whether to try to race, and how to deal with Cofidis,
were beyond me. I didn't know what I wanted, or even what was possible, and I couldn't help
feeling that cycling was trivial.
Steve looked at a picture of me winning a stage of the Tour de France, and he said, "When are
you going to do this again?"
"I'm pretty sure I'm done with that," I said. "It's too hard on your body."
"You're kidding," Steve said, shocked. "I'll never be able to ride in that race again," I said. Steve
was taken aback. He had never known me to give up at anything. "I think I've lost it," I said. "I
just don't feel good on the bike." I told him I was afraid of losing my house, and that I had tried
to adjust to certain spending restrictions. I had scaled things back proportionately, and tried to
come up with an alternate plan for the future, with no bikes in it. Steve knew me as a
braggadocious kid, but now I was talking like a victim. I didn't have the edge that he
remembered. As for my personal life, I was equally tentative. Lisa and I needed to make some
decisions about our future together, and I had seriously considered marriage. She had stayed
with me throughout the cancer battle, every miserable step of the way, and that meant
something. She gave me a kitten, and we named it Chemo.
"I think she's the one," I'd told Steve. "She stuck with me through this, and she'll stick with me
through anything."
But when Steve came back to see me again two months later, Lisa and I had broken up. That
tells you how chaotic my feelings were. Cancer does one of two things to a relationship: it either
brings you closer together, or it tears you apart. In our case, it tore us apart. As I began to slowly
recover, we found that we had less and less to talk about. Maybe it was just a case of
exhaustion; we had spent so much energy fighting the illness and gotten through all of the hard
parts, but in the end it left us numb, too. One day in March, she said, "Let's see other people."
"Okay," I said.
But soon we were hardly seeing each other at all. Lisa certainly understood that I had been
sick–but it was harder for her to understand why I didn't have any emotional wherewithal left.
We continued to see each other on and off–you don't just completely sever a relationship like
that. But it ended, just the same.
I was so confused about what to do with myself that one afternoon I went for a bike ride with
Bill (ordinarily, I would never ride with such a novice), and as we pedaled slowly around my
neighborhood, I said, "I'm going back to college to be an oncologist. Or maybe I'll g o
to business school."
Bill just shook his head. He had a master's degree in business, and a law degree from the
University of Texas as well. "You know, I went to college for eleven years," Bill said. "I had to
sweat it out in school, and I'll have to sweat it the rest of my life. You don't ever have to do
that, dude. Why do you want to go to work every day on a trading floor at four-thirty in the
morning, if you don't have to?"
"You don't get it, Bill," I said. "I keep telling you, I'm not a biker now."
FOR A WHILE, KlK STOPPED CALLING ME BACK; I
couldn't reach her no matter how hard I tried. She was unsure about me, because she had heard
about my reputation as a player, and she didn't intend to be a casualty. I wasn't used to being cut
dead, and it drove me crazy. I left message after message on her machine. "Are you ever going to
call me back?" I demanded.
Finally, Kik relented. I didn't know it, but her life was in transition, too. She split with the man
she had been seeing, and she changed jobs, all within a few weeks. Finally, one afternoon she
answered her phone when I called.
I said, "Well, what's new?"
"A lot. I just started this new job, and I'm busy." "Oh," I said. Then I took a deep breath. "Damn.
I thought you were going to tell me that you were single."
"Well, funny you should mention it. I am. I broke up two days ago."
"Really?" I said, trying to sound casual. "You're single?"
"Yeah."
"So what are you doing tonight?" I asked.
"Something with you," she said.
We've been together ever since.
I knew instantly I had met my match. Kik could handle herself; she was tough, independent,
sensible, and unspoiled. Although she had grown up around money–her father was an executive
of a Fortune 500 company–she was used to taking care of herself and didn't expect anything to
be handed to her. I think I get it now, I thought to myself.
I felt safe with her. She liked me bald and sick with no eyebrows, and the insecurities I might
have had about my hair, my scars, my body, didn't seem to matter. Kik became my hairstylist.
She would take my head in her hands and gently trim my hair with a pair of clippers until I
looked like a 1960s astronaut.
I'd always had the upper hand in my relationships, but not with Kik. Sometimes I would lead,
and sometimes I would follow, but mostly I would go where she wanted me to go. Still do.
North, south, east, and all the rest. That summer, Kik had plans to go to Europe. She had never
been overseas, and a friend of hers from college, an exchange student who lived in Spain,
wanted her to come visit. "Why are you going to Spain?" I said. "Spain's a dustbowl."
"Shut up," Kik said. "Don't ruin my fun, I've been saving for this for years."
She would be gone for over a month. That was totally unacceptable, I decided. There was only
one thing to do: go with her. I was supposed to make an appearance at the Tour de France, as a
courtesy to my sponsors and to show that I was still a potentially viable competitor, and I
decided to time it with Kik's trip. I was curious to see the Tour from a spectator's point of view,
anyway, and I hoped it would revive my desire to cycle. I asked to go with her, and she agreed.
-
It was an awakening. I felt like I had never seen Europe before, and the truth is, maybe I hadn't.
I had seen it from a bike, at 40 miles an hour, but I hadn't seen it as a tourist, and I hadn't seen it
in love. We went everywhere. I showed off my French, my Italian, and my Spanish.
I had missed most of my 20s. I was too busy being a pro athlete and making a living from the
age of 15 on to do the things most people in their 20s do, to have fun the way Kik and her
college friends had fun. I'd completely skipped that phase of my life, but now I had a chance to
go back and live it. I was still tentative about what would happen to my health, not knowing
what I had left, if it was just one day, or two years, or a long life. Carpe diem, I told myself,
seize the day. Whatever I had, I was going to spend it well. And that's how Kik and
I found each other.
I had never embraced my life. I had made something of it, and fought for it, but I had never
particularly enjoyed it. "You have this gift," Kik said. "You can teach me how to really love life,
because you've been on the brink, and you saw the other side. So you can show
me that."
But she showed me. She wanted to see everything, and I was the guy who got to show it to her,
and in showing it to her, I saw it for myself. In Italy, we sat at sidewalk cafes and ate ham with
shaved Parmesan cheese. Kik teased me, "Before I met you, Parmesan came
in a green can."
We went to San Sebastian, where it had rained so hard that it hurt and the crowds had laughed
at me as I finished last in my first pro race. This time, I gazed at the tiled roofs and the steppes
of the city along the Bay of Biscay and decided that, contrary to my dismissive statement about
dustbowls, there was nothing more beautifully old than Spain.
In Pamplona we saw the running of the bulls. Kik said, "Let's stay up all night long."
I said, "Why?"
"For fun. You mean you've never stayed up all night, and walked home in the sunrise?"
"No," I said.
"What do you mean, you've never stayed up all night?" she said. "That's insane. What's wrong
with you?"
We stayed up all night. We went to every nightspot and dance club in Pamplona, and then we
walked back to the hotel as the sun came up and lighted the gray plinth streets until they turned
gold. Kik seemed to think I was sensitive and romantic–although few of my friends would have
believed it. Chris Carmichael had always described me "kind of like an iceberg. There's a peak,
but there's so much more below the surface." Kik was certain of i t .
In Monaco, I told her that I loved her.
We were dressing for dinner in our hotel room, when suddenly we both grew quiet. Up to that
moment, it had all been undercurrents. But as I watched her from across the room, I knew
exactly what I was feeling, the tangled twisted strands of love. Only Kik was clear to me. Other
than her, I was living in a state of utter confusion; I didn't know if I was going to live or die, and
if I did live, I had no idea what I would do with my life. I didn't know what I wanted out of
cycling anymore. I didn't know whether I wanted to ride, or retire, or go to college, or become a
stockbroker. But I loved Kik.
"I think I'm in love with you," I said from across the room.
Kik stopped in the mirror and said, "You think you are? Or you know? Because I need to know.
I really need to know."
"I know."
"I know it too," she said.
If you could ever hope to meet someone and fall in love, it should happen just as it did for us,
blissfully, perfectly. Our relationship tended to be unspoken, a matter of a lot of deep, intense
gazing, and a complex strum of emotions. The funny thing is, we never discussed my cancer–the
only time we talked about it was when we talked about children. I told her that I did want them,
and about the trip to San Antonio.
But it was frightening for us, too. Kik used to say, "I would never do anything for a man. I
would never change my life just for a guy." §he was like me, always in control of her
relationships, emotions in check, independent, never the one to get hurt, didn't want anything
from anyone, too tough for that. But by now our guards were totally down. One night, she
admitted it to me. "If you want to just annihilate me, you can," she said. "Because there's
nothing left to block you. So be careful what you do."
We went to the Tour de France. I tried to describe the race to her; the chess match among riders
and the ten million fans lining the roads, but when she saw the peloton for herself, the palette of
colors streaking by with the Pyrenees looming in the background, she screamed
with joy.
I had business to do at the Tour, sponsors to see and reporters to talk to. By then I was so
caught up in Kik and enjoying my second life that I sounded ambivalent about ever riding
again.
"I'm just not as competitive as before," I told reporters. "Maybe I'm just a recreational cyclist
now." Even though I was back on my bike, I told them, "I'm a participant, not a competitor."
The Tour, I said, "is most likely impossible."
"Look," I said. "Cycling for me was really a job. It was very good to me. I did it for five or six
years, lived all over Europe, did all the traveling. Now I have time to spend with my friends and
family, do the stuff I missed doing my entire childhood."
BY THE END OF THE SUMMER I RESEMBLED A HEALTHY
person. I no longer looked sick, and I had all of my hair. But I still worried constantly about a
relapse, and I had continuing ghost pains in my chest.
I had nightmares. I had strange physical reactions; for no apparent reason I would break out in a
sweat. The slightest stress or anxiety would cause my body to become shiny with perspiration.
While I was being treated I was actively killing the cancer, but when the treatment stopped, I
felt powerless, like I wasn't doing anything but waiting for the other shoe to fall. I was such an
active, aggressive person that I would have felt better if they'd given me chemo for a year. Dr.
Nichols tried to reassure me. "Some people have more trouble after treatment than during. It's
common. It's more difficult to wait for it to come back than it is to attack it."
The monthly checkups were the worst. Kik and I would fly to Indianapolis and check into the
hotel adjacent to the medical center. The next day I would rise at 5 A.M. to drink a contrast dye
for the various MRIs and scans and X rays, nasty stuff that tasted like a combination of Tang
and liquid metal. It was a grim experience to wake up in that hotel again, and to know that I
would have to sit in another doctor's office and perhaps hear the words You have cancer.
Kik would wake up and sit with me as I choked down the cocktail of dye, slumped over and
miserable. She would rub my back while I swallowed it down. Once, to make me feel better, she
even asked to taste it. She took a swig and made a face. Like I say, she's a stud.
Then we'd walk over to the hospital to face the blood tests and the MRIs. The doctors would
line the chest X rays up on the light box and flip the switch, and I would duck my head, afraid
that I would see those white spots again. Kik didn't know how to read an X ray, and the tension
was racking for both of us. Once, she pointed at something and said, nervously, "What's this?"
"That's a rib," I said.
As we sat there, we both thought the same thing: I've finally found the love of my life, the
person who means everything in the world to me, and if anything takes that away now I will
come unglued. It was a sickening sensation then, and it's still sickening now, just to think about
i t .
But each X ray was clear, and the blood tests remained normal. With every passing month the
chances of a relapse lessened.
I was no longer strictly convalescing. For all intents and purposes, I was healthy. As the
one-year mark approached, Chris Carmichael began to urge me to race again. Finally, he flew to
Austin to have it out with me. He believed I needed to get on my bike in earnest, that I had
some unfinished business in the sport and that I was starting to seem empty without it, and he
wasn't afraid to say so, either.
Chris had a long conversation with Bill Stapleton and said, "Everyone tells him to do what he
wants, and no one will talk to him about racing his bike." He thought I needed a push, and our
relationship had always been based on his ability to give me one when I needed i t .
I knew exactly why Chris had come to see me. I told John Korioth, "Carmichael is in town to try
to get me to race again, and I don't know if I want to." Chris and I went out to lunch at my
favorite Tex-Mex place, Chuy's, and my prediction was correct.
"Lance," Chris said, "what is with this playing golf? Cycling is what you're about."
I shook my head skeptically. "I don't know," I said.
"Are you afraid?"
I was. I had been strong as a bull on the bike, and what if I wasn't anymore? Or what if racing
could make me sick again?
"None of your doctors will say that you can race again," Chris said. "But none of them will say
that you can't, either. I think you should try it, give it a run. I know it's a big unknown, a big
risk, a big challenge, and a big scare. There are no givens. But here you are, back to life, and
now you need to get back to living."
I thought it over for a couple of days. It's one thing to undergo chemo and go back to work as
an accountant. But to be a cyclist? I didn't know about that. Chemo had made the worst climb
in the Alps seem flat.
There was another factor to consider: I had a disability policy that would pay for five years. But
if I made a comeback, I would forfeit the policy. I would be jumping off a financial cliff to race
again.
Chris hung out and met Kik, and continued to badger me about getting back on the bike. I
explained to him that I just wasn't clear on what I was supposed to do with the rest of my life,
but he refused to believe it. At one point, he turned to Kik, and said, "Do you think he should
race again?
"I don't really care," she said. "I'm in love with this man."
Chris looked at me. "Okay," he said. "You can marry her."
FINALLY, I MADE MY MIND UP: I WOULD TRY TO RACE again. I got back on the bike,
and this time, I felt good about it. I told Bill and Kik, "I think I can do this." I asked Chris to
formulate a training program for me, and I began to ride hard. But oddly enough, my body
refused to take its previous shape. The old me had weighed 175 pounds. Now I was 158, my
face looked narrow and hawkish, and you could see every sinew in my legs.
Bill called Cofidis and told them I was up and riding. "I want to talk to you about his racing
program; he's ready to make a comeback," Bill said. The Cofidis people suggested that Bill
come to France for a meeting.
Bill flew to Paris overnight, and then drove four hours into the country to reach the Cofidis
executive offices. He arrived in time for an elegant lunch. Among those at the table were Alain
Bondue and the Cofidis executive officer, Francois Migraine.
Migraine gave a five-minute speech, welcoming Bill to France. And then he said, "We want to
thank you for corning here, but we want you to know that we're going to exercise our right to
terminate his contract. We need to go in a different direction." Bill looked at Bondue and said,
"Is he serious?" Bondue looked down at his plate and simply said, "Yes." "Is there a reason I had
to fly all the way over here for you to tell me that?" Bill asked.
"We thought it was important that we tell you person-to-person," Bondue said.
"Look, you only have to pay him a minimal amount to ride," Bill said. "Just let him race. He
really wants to make a comeback. It's serious. It's not that we think he'll ride, we know he
will."
Cofidis wasn't confident that I would ever ride at that level again, and what's more, if I did ride,
and I happened to get sick again, it would be bad publicity for Cofidis.
It was over. Bill was desperate. "Look, he's been part of your team; you paid him. At least make
us an offer." Finally, the Cofidis people said they would consider i t .
Bill left without finishing lunch, and got back in his car for the long drive back to Paris. He
couldn't stand to break the news to me, and he drove to Paris unable to make the call. Finally,
he found a little cafe by the Eiffel Tower, pulled out his cell phone, and dialed my number.
"What?" I said.
"They terminated your deal."
I paused. "Why'd they make you fly all the way over there?"
Over the next few days, I held out hope that the Cofidis executives would change their minds.
Finally, Cofidis called and offered me about $180,000, with a big incentive clause to pay more if
I earned International Cycling Union (ICU) bonus points based on performance in various races.
The base salary they were offering was the equivalent of a league minimum, but it was all we
had.
Bill had a Plan B. In the first week of September, there was a large annual Interbike Expo in
Anaheim, California, and all the top team representatives would be there. Bill felt that if I
showed up healthy and announced I was ready to ride, I was sure to catch on with someone.
"Lance, we need to get in front of the press and tell everybody that you're serious about this, and
you're available," Bill said.
On September 4, 1997,1 went with Bill to the Interbike Expo to announce my return to cycling
for the 1998 season. I held a press conference and drew a roomful of newspaper writers and
cycling experts, and informed them of my plans to race. I explained the Cofidis situation and
made it clear that I felt jilted. I had missed a full calendar year with cancer, and Cofidis doubted
me just when I felt healthy and ready to compete again, I said. Now the whole cycling world
knew I was on the auction block. I sat back and waited for the offers to come i n .
None did.
They didn't want me. One of France's top cycling managers talked to Bill briefly, but when he
heard what Bill was asking for my services, $500,000, he said dismissively, "That's a champion's
wage. You're expecting the money of a big rider." Another team, Saeco–Cannondale, said they
might make an offer, and scheduled a meeting with Bill for the following day. No one showed
up. Bill had to go hunting for the guy, and finally found him in another business meeting. Bill
said, "What's going on?"
The executive replied, "We can't do it."
No European team would sign me. For every twenty calls Bill put out, maybe three were
returned.
As the days went by and no one made a solid offer, I got angrier and angrier. Bill Stapleton
caught the brunt of it, and it put a severe strain on our friendship. For a year and a half, he was
the guy who had nothing but bad news for me. He was the person who had to tell me that I had
no health insurance, that Cofidis had cut my contract. Now he had to tell me that no one
wanted me.
I called my mother and told her about Cofidis, and I explained that no other team would make
an offer. Not one. I could hear her tense up on the other end of the line, and the old feistiness
crept into her voice.
"You know what?" she said. "That's all they've got to tell us. Because, by golly, you'll show
them. They've made a terrible mistake."
All around, I encountered people who had given up on me, or who thought I was something less
than I had been. One night, Kik and I went to a cocktail party with a bunch of people from the
new high-tech firm she worked for. We got separated at the party, and Kik was talking across
the room from me with two executives at the firm, when one of them said to her, "So that's your
new boyfriend?" and then made a vulgar reference to my testicles.
"Are you sure he's good enough for you?" he said. "He's only half a man."
Kik froze. She said, "I won't even dignify that with a response, because it is so beyond not
funny." She turned her back on him, and found me across the room, and told me what had
happened. I was beside myself. To say something like that to her he had to be incredibly stupid,
or maybe he was just a fool who drinks too much at cocktail parties, but I wasn't going to let
him get away with it. I went to the bar on the pretext of getting another drink, and as I walked
by him, I shouldered him, hard.
Kristin objected to my behavior, so then we got into an argument. I was angry way past the
point of conversation. After I dropped her off at her house, I went home and sat down and
composed a scathing e-mail to the guy, explaining the nature of testicular cancer and some of
the statistics. I wrote dozens of different versions. "I can't believe you'd say this to anybody, let
alone my girlfriend," I wrote. "And you've got a real problem if you think something like this is
funny. This is a life-and-death situation. It's not about whether I have one 'nut,' or two, or fifty."
But when I got done I was still upset, so I went over to Kik's house in the middle of the night,
and we had a long discussion. By now she was worried that the guy would try to fire her, and
we talked for a while about principles versus employment.
BlLL CONTINUED TO SEARCH FOR A TEAM THAT WOULD
take me on. He felt like he was running around as the agent for some B-rate swimmer that
nobody wanted to talk to. People treated him like a pest. Bill just kept at it, and sheltered me
from the more brutal comments. "Come on," one person said. "That guy will never ride in the
peloton again. It's a joke that he could ever ride at that speed."
Finally, Bill had what he thought was a good possibility with the U.S. Postal Service team, a
new organization that was American-funded and -sponsored. The chief investor in the team was
Thomas Weisel, a financier from San Francisco, an old friend of mine and the former owner of
the Subaru-Montgomery team.The only catch was the money. Postal, too, was offering a low
base salary. Bill flew to San Francisco, and negotiations with the team's general manager, Mark
Gorski, seesawed back and forth over several tense days. We were unable to reach an
agreement.
I was on the verge of giving up. We still had the offer from Cofidis, but my resentment had
reached the point at which I almost preferred not to race at all rather than to race for them. My
disability policy was worth $20,000 a month for five years, which amounted to $1.5 million,
tax-free. If I tried to race again, Lloyds of London informed Bill, I would forfeit the policy. I
decided that if I was going to risk a comeback attempt, my heart should be in it. Otherwise it
just didn't make sense to jeopardize my disability.
Before Bill left San Francisco, we decided he should swing by Thorn Weisel's office just to say
goodbye and to speak with Thorn face-to-face to see if there was any chance we could work
things out. Thorn's office was an imposing suite in the Transamerica building »with sweeping
views, and Bill went there with some trepidation.
Bill sat down with Thorn and Mark Gorski. Abruptly, Thorn said, "Bill, what does he want?"
"He wants a base salary of $215,000," Bill said. "Also, he wants an incentive clause."
The International Cycling Union awarded bonus points on the basis of performances in big
races, and if I got enough good results, I could make up in bonuses what they wouldn't pay me
in salary. Bill told him I wanted $500 for every bonus point I collected up to 150, and $1,000 for
every point after that.
"Would you consider a cap on the maximum number of ICU points?" Thorn asked.
In a way that was a compliment, because it meant they were concerned that I might perform so
well that it would cost them big money.
"No way," Bill said.
Thorn stared at Bill with the long cold gaze of an expert negotiator. For weeks now, we had
gotten no results at the negotiating table, and Thorn Weisel was as tough and unflinching as
they came. But he also knew me and believed in me. Thorn opened his mouth to speak. Bill
braced himself.
"I'll cover it," Thorn said. "Consider it done."
Bill almost sighed aloud with relief. We had a deal; I was a racer again. I signed the agreement,
and we held a big press conference to introduce me as a team member. At the press conference,
I said, "I don't feel like damaged goods. I just feel out of shape, which I am." I would spend
November and December training in the States, and then go overseas in January to resume
racing for the first time in 18 long months. It meant returning to my old life of living out of a
suitcase and riding all over the continent.
But there was a complication now: Kik. I went to Piano to see my mother. Over coffee on a
Saturday morning, I said, "Let's go look at diamonds today." My mother beamed. She knew
exactly what I was talking about, and we spent the day touring the best jewelers in Dallas.
I returned to Austin and planned a dinner at home for just Kik and me. We sat on the seawall
behind my house, watching the sunset over Lake Austin. Finally, I said, "I have to go back to
Europe, and I don't want to go without you. I want you to come with me."
The sun disappeared behind the riverbank, and dusk settled over us. It was still and dark except
for the glow spilling out of my house.
I stood up. "Something came today," I said. "I want to show it to you."
I reached into my pocket and clasped the small velvet box.
"Step into the light," I said.
I opened the box, and the diamond collected the light.
"Marry me," I said.
Kik accepted.
We had never talked about my prognosis. She had come with me to my monthly checkups, and
sat with me in front of those X rays, but we never felt the need to discuss the big picture. When
we became engaged, however, a friend of her mother's said, "How could you let your daughter
marry a cancer patient?" It forced us to think about it for the first time. Kik just said, "You
know, I would rather have one year of wonderful than seventy years of mediocre. That's how I
feel about it. Life's an unknown. You don't know. Nobody knows."
Kik and I packed up all our things and drove cross-country to Santa Barbara, California, where I
entered an intense two-month training camp. We rented a small house on the beach, and we
became so sentimental about it that we decided we wanted to be married there. We planned a
wedding for May. First, however, we would move to Europe in January and spend the '98
winter and spring racing season overseas. I got back in the gym and did basic rebuilding work,
leg presses and squats, and I steadily lengthened my training rides. I surprised everyone with
how well I rode during training camp in Santa Barbara. One afternoon I rode some hills with
Frankie Andreu, and he said, "Man, you're killing everybody and you had cancer."
I was now officially a cancer survivor. On October 2,1 had celebrated the one-year anniversary
of my cancer diagnosis, which meant that I was no longer in remission. According to my
doctors, there was only a minimal chance now that the disease would come back. One day, I got
a note from Craig Nichols. "It's time to move on with your life," he wrote. But how do you
survive cancer? That's the part no one gives you any advice on. What does it mean? Once you
finish your treatment, the doctors say, You're cured, so go off and live. Happy trails. But there
is no support system in place to help you to deal with the emotional ramifications of trying to
return to the world after being in a battle for your existence.
You don't just wake up one morning and say, "Okay, I'm done with cancer, and now it's time to
go right back to the normal life I had." Stacy Pounds had proved that to me. I was physically
recovered, but my soul was still healing. I was entering a phase called survivorship. What shape
was my life supposed to take? What now? What about my recurring nightmares, my dreams?
eight
SURVIVORSHIP
WHHILE I WAS SICK, I TOLD MYSELF I'D NEVER
cuss again, never drink another beer again, never lose my temper again. I was going to be the
greatest and the most clean-living guy you could hope to meet. But life goes on. Things change,
intentions get lost. You have another beer. You say another cussword.
How do you slip back into the ordinary world? That was the problem confronting me after
cancer, and the old saying, that you should treat each day as if it might be your last, was no help
at all. The truth is, it's a nice sentiment, but in practice it doesn't work. If I lived only for the
moment, I'd be a very amiable no-account with a perpetual three-day growth on my chin. Trust
me, I tried i t .
People think of my comeback as a triumph, but in the beginning, it was a disaster. When you
have lived for an entire year terrified of dying, you feel like you deserve to spend the rest of your
days on a permanent vacation. You can't, of course; you have to return to your family, your
peers, and your profession. But a part of me didn't want my old life back.
We moved to Europe in January with the U.S. Postal team. Kik quit her job, gave away her dog,
leased her house, and packed up everything she owned. We rented an apartment in Cap Ferrat,
halfway between Nice and Monaco, and I left her there alone while I went on the road with the
team. A race wasn't an environment for wives and girlfriends. It was no different from the
office; it was a job, and you didn't take your wife to the conference room.
Kristin was on her own in a foreign country, with no friends or family, and she didn't speak the
language. But she reacted typically, by enrolling herself in a language-intensive French school,
furnishing the apartment, and settling in as if it was a great adventure, with absolutely no sign of
fear. Not once did she complain. I was proud of her.
My own attitude wasn't as good. Things weren't going so well for me on the road, where I had
to adjust all over again to the hardships of racing through Europe. I had forgotten what it was
like. The last time I'd been on the continent was on vacation with Kik, when we'd stayed in the
best hotels and played tourists, but now it was back to the awful food, the bad beds in dingy
road pensions, and the incessant travel. I didn't like i t .
Deep down, I wasn't ready. Had I understood more about survivorship, I would have recognized
that my comeback attempt was bound to be fraught with psychological problems. If I had a bad
day, I had a tendency to say, "Well, I've just been through too much. I've been through three
surgeries, three months of chemo, and a year of hell, and that's the reason I'm not riding well.
My body is just never going to be the same." But what I really should have been saying was.
"Hey, it's just a bad day."
I was riding with buried doubts, and some buried resentments, too. I was making a fraction of
my old salary, and I had no new endorsements. I sarcastically called it "an eighty-percent cancer
tax." I'd assumed that the minute I got back on the bike and announced a comeback, corporate
America would come knocking, and when they didn't, I blamed Bill. I drove him nuts,
constantly asking him why he wasn't bringing me any deals. Finally, we had a confrontation via
phone–I was in Europe, he was back in Texas. I began complaining again that nothing was
happening on the endorsement front.
"Look, I'll tell you what," Bill said. "I'm going to find you a new agent. I'm not putting up with
this anymore. I know you think I need this, but I don't. So I quit."
I paused and said, "Well, that's not what I want."
I stopped venting on Bill, but I still brooded about the fact that no one wanted me. No
European teams wanted me, and corporate America didn't want me.
My first pro race in 18 months was the Ruta del Sol, a five-day jaunt through Spain. I finished
14th, and caused a stir, but I was depressed and uncomfortable. I was used to leading, not
finishing 14th. Also, I hated the attention of that first race. I felt constrained by performance
anxiety and distracted by the press circus, and I wished I could have just shown up unannounced
and ridden without a word, fighting through my self-doubts anonymously. I just wanted to ride
in the peloton and get my legs back.
Two weeks later, I entered Paris-Nice, among the most arduous stage races outside of the Tour
de France itself, an eight-day haul notorious for its wintry raw weather. Before the race itself
was the "prologue," a time-trial competition. It was a seeding system of sorts; the results of the
prologue would determine who rode at the front of the peloton. I finished in 19th place, not bad
for a guy recovering from cancer, but I didn't see it that way. I was used to winning.
The next morning I woke up to a gray rain and blustering wind, and temperatures in the 30s. As
soon as I opened my eyes I knew I didn't want to ride in that weather. I ate my breakfast
morosely. I met with the team to discuss the strategy for the day, and we decided as a squad that
if our team leader, George Hincapie, fell behind for any reason, we would all wait for him and
help him catch up.
In the start area, I sat in a car trying to keep warm and thought about how much I didn't want to
be there. When you start out thinking that way, things can't possibly get any better. Once I got
out in the cold, my attitude just deteriorated. I sulked as I put on leg warmers and fought to
keep some small patch of my skin dry.
We set off on a long, flat stage. The rain spit sideways, and a cross-wind made it seem even
colder than 35 degrees. There is nothing more demoralizing than a long flat road in the rain. At
least on a climb your body stays a little bit warm because you have to work so hard, but on a flat
road, you just get cold and wet to the bone. No shoe cover is good enough. No jacket is good
enough. In the past, I'd thrived on being able to stand conditions that made everyone else crack.
But not on this day.
Hincapie got a flat.
We all stopped. The peloton sped up the road away from us. By the time we got going again,
we were 20 minutes behind the leaders, and in the wind it would take an hour of brutal effort
for us to make up what we had lost. We rode off, heads down into the rain.
The crosswind cut through my clothes and made it hard to steady the bike as I churned along
the side of the road. All of a sudden, I lifted my hands to the tops of the handlebars. I
straightened up in my seat, and I coasted to the curb.
I pulled over. I quit. I abandoned the race. I took off my number. I thought, This is not how I
want to spend my life, freezing and soaked and in the gutter.
Frankie Andreu was right behind me, and he remembers how I looked as I rose up and swung
off the road. He could tell by the way I sat up that I might not race again for a while–if ever.
Frankie told me later that his thought was "He's done."
When the rest of the team arrived back at the hotel at the end of the stage, I was packing. "I
quit," I told Frankie. "I'm not racing anymore, I'm going home." I didn't care if my teammates
understood or not. I said goodbye, slung my bag over my shoulder, and took off.
The decision to abandon had nothing to do with how I felt physically. I was strong. I just didn't
want to be there. I simply didn't know if cycling through the cold and the pain was what I
wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Kik was grocery shopping after school when I reached her on her cell phone. "I'm coming home
tonight," I said. She couldn't hear because the reception wasn't great, and she said, "What?
What's wrong?"
"I'll tell you about it later," I said.
"Are you hurt?" She thought I had crashed.
"No, I'm not hurt," I said. "I'll see you tonight."
A couple of hours later, Kik picked me up at the airport. We didn't say much until we got in the
car and began the drive home. Finally, I said, "You know, I'm just not happy doing this."
"Why?" she said.
"I don't know how much time I have left, but I don't want to spend it cycling," I said. "I hate it. I
hate the conditions. I hate being away from you. I hate this lifestyle over here. I don't want to be
in Europe. I proved myself in Ruta del Sol, I showed that I could come back and do it. I have
nothing left to prove to myself, or to the cancer community, so that's it."
I braced myself for her to say, "What about my school, what about my job, why did you make
me move here?" But she never said it. Calmly, she said, "Well, okay."
On the plane back to Cap Ferrat I'd seen an advertisement for Harley-Davidson that summed up
how I felt. It said, "If I had to live my life over again I would . . ." and then it listed several
things, like, "see more sunsets." I had torn it out of the magazine, and as I explained to Kik how
I felt, I handed her the ad, and I said, "This is what's wrong with cycling. It's not what my life
should be."
"Well, let's get a good night's sleep, and wait a couple of days and then make a decision," she
said.
The next day Kik went back to her language school, and I didn't do a thing. I sat alone in the
apartment all day by myself, and I refused to even look at my bike. Kik's school had a strict rule
that you weren't supposed to take phone calls. I called her three times. "I can't stand sitting
around here doing nothing," I said. "I've talked to the travel agent. That's it. We're leaving." Kik
said, "I'm in class."
"I'm coming to get you. That school's a waste of time." Kik left the classroom and sat on a
bench outside, and cried. She had fought the language barrier for weeks. She had managed to
set up our household, figured out how to do the marketing, and mastered the currency. She had
learned how to drive the autoroute, and how to pay the French tolls. Now all of her effort was
for nothing.
When I arrived to pick her up she was still crying. I was alarmed. "Why are you crying?" I said.
"Because we have to leave," she said.
"What do you mean? You're here with no friends. You can't speak the language. You don't have
your job. Why do you want to stay here?" "Because it's what I set out to do, and I want to finish
it. But if you think we need to go home, then let's do it."
That night was a whirlwind of packing, and Kik attacked it with as much energy as she had
getting us unpacked in the first place. In 24 hours we did more than most people do in two
weeks. We called Kevin Livingston, and gave him all of our stuff–towels, silverware, lamps,
pots, pans, plates, vacuum cleaner. I said to Kevin, "We're never coming back. I don't want this
junk." Kevin didn't try to talk me out of it–he knew better. Instead, he was very quiet. I could
see on Kevin's face that he didn't think I was doing the right thing, but he wasn't going to say a
word. He had always worried about my coming back, anyway. "Just watch your body," he'd say.
"Take it easy." He had lived through the whole realm of the disease with me, and the only thing
he cared about was my health. As I loaded him down with boxes he was so sad I thought he
might cry. "Take this," I said, handing him boxes full of kitchenware. "Take all of it."
It was a nightmare, and my only good memory of that time is of Kik, and how serene she
seemed in the midst of my confusion. I couldn't have blamed her if she was about to break; she
had quit her job, moved to France, sacrificed everything, and almost overnight I was ready to
move back to Austin and retire. But she stood by me. She was understanding and supportive
and endlessly patient.
Back home in the States, everybody was wondering where I was. Carmichael was at home at
eight o'clock in the morning when his phone rang. It was a French reporter. "Where is Lance
Armstrong?" the reporter asked. Chris said, "He's in Paris–Nice." The reporter said in broken
English, "No, he is stop." Chris hung up on him. A minute later the phone rang again–it was
another French reporter.
Chris called Bill Stapleton, and Bill said he hadn't heard from me. Neither had Och. Chris tried
my cell phone, and my apartment. No answer. He left messages, and I didn't return them, which
was unusual.
Finally I called Chris from the airport. I said, "I'm flying home. I don't need this anymore. I don't
need the crappy hotels, the weather, the lousy food. What is this doing for me?"
Chris said, "Lance, do whatever you want. But don't be rash." He continued calmly, trying to
buy me a little time. "Don't talk to thepress, don't announce anything, don't say you're going to
quit," he warned me.
After I called Chris, I reached Stapleton. "I'm done, man," I said. "I showed them I could come
back, and I'm done."
Bill kept his cool. "Okaaaay," he said. He had already talked to Chris, and he knew everything.
Like Chris, he stalled.
Bill suggested that I should wait on the retirement announcement. "Let's just give it a week or
so, Lance. It's too crazy right now." "No, you don't understand. I want to do it now." "Lance,"
Bill said, "I understand you're retiring. That's fine, but we need to discuss a few things. Let's just
give it a couple of days." Next, I called Och. We had one of our typical conversations. "I quit
Paris-Nice," I said. "That's not such a big deal." "I'm out. I'm not racing anymore." "Don't make
the decision today."
Kik and I flew back to Austin in a trail of jet lag. As we walked in the door, the phone was
ringing constantly, with people looking for me and wondering why I had disappeared. Finally,
things quieted down, and after a day of sleeping off the jet lag, Kik and I met with Bill in his
downtown law office.
I said, "I'm not here to talk about whether I'm riding again. That's not up for discussion. I'm
done, and I don't care what you think about it."
Bill looked at Kik, and she just looked back at him, and shrugged. They both knew I was in one
of those moods that couldn't be argued with. By now, Kik was a shell of a woman, exhausted
and frustrated, but in her glance to Bill, something passed between them. Kik's look got the
point across. It said, Be patient with him, he's a mess.
There was about a 20-second pause before Bill spoke. Then he said, "Well, we need to at least
make a statement, do this formally. Let's get it done right."
"Just issue a press release," I said. "What about that?"
"It's a bad idea."
"Why?"
"You know those races, Ruta del whatever, and Paris-whatever?" Bill said. "Nobody in America
has ever heard of those, pal. Nobody here even knows you got back on a bike. So you can
certainly have a press conference and tell everybody you're retired. I know you think you had
this fabulous comeback, and I agree with you. I mean, what you've done is amazing. Just
beating cancer is a comeback. But nobody else knows it."
"I was 14th at Ruta del Sol," I said, defensively. "Lance," Bill said, "you will be the guy who got
cancer and never rode again. That's what it's going to be."
There was another long pause. Next to me, Kik's eyes began to well up.
"Well," I said, "we can't have that."
Stapleton finessed me: he cited a thousand things that had to be done before I could formally
retire. "I understand you're retiring," Bill said. "But how are you going to retire?" He asked me if
I wanted to hold a live press conference, and suggested that we needed to have meetings with
sponsors. Then he said, "Shouldn't you ride at least one farewell race?" I couldn't leave the sport
without a final appearance in the U.S.
"Why not race at the national championships in June, and make that your last race?" he said.
"You can win that; you know you can. That's a comeback; that's something people will know
about."
"Well, I don't know," I said. "I don't think I want to get back on a bike."
Bill patiently manipulated me into holding off on a retirement announcement. With every
complication he summoned up, he bought more time. At the very least I couldn't retire before
the Ride for the Roses, he said, and that wasn't until May.
Finally, Bill wore me down. I told him I would wait to announce anything. But in the meantime,
I decided I would take a few days off.
My Postal team was patient. Thorn Weisel offered to wait. But a few days off turned into a
week, and then a week turned into a month. I didn't even unpack my bike. It sat in its bag in the
garage, collecting dust.
I WAS A BUM. I PLAYED GOLF EVERY DAY, I WATER-SKIED,
I drank beer, and I lay on the sofa and channel-surfed.
I went to Chuy's for Tex-Mex, and violated every rule of my training diet. Whenever I came
home from Europe, it was a tradition for me to stop at Chuy's straight from the airport, no
matter how jet-lagged I was, and order a burrito with tomatillo sauce and a couple of margaritas
or Shiner Bocks. Now I was eating practically every meal there. I never intended to deprive
myself again; I'd been given a second chance and I was determined to take advantage of i t .
But it wasn't fun. It wasn't lighthearted or free or happy. It was forced. I tried to re-create the
mood I'd shared with Kik on our European vacation, but this time, things were different, and I
couldn't understand why. The truth was, I felt ashamed. I was filled with self-doubt and
embarrassed by what I'd done in Paris–Nice. Son, you never quit. But I'd quit.
I was behaving totally out of character, and the reason was survivorship. It was a classic case of
"Now what?" I'd had a job and a life, and then I got sick, and it turned my life upside-down, and
when I tried to go back to my life I was disoriented, nothing was the same– and I couldn't
handle i t .
I hated the bike, but I thought, What else am I going to do? Be a coffee boy in an office? I
didn't exactly feel like a champ at much else. I didn't know what to do, so for the moment, I just
-wanted to escape, and that's what I did. I evaded my responsibilities.
I know now that surviving cancer involved more than just a convalescence of the body. My
mind and my soul had to convalesce, too.
No one quite understood that–except for Kik. She kept her composure when she had every right
to be distraught and furious with me for pulling the rug out from under her. While I was out
playing golf every day, she was homeless, dogless, and jobless, reading the classifieds and
wondering how we were going to support ourselves. My mother sympathized with what she
was going through. She would call us, ask to speak with Kik, and say, "How are you doing?"
But after several weeks of the golf, the drinking, the Mexican food, Kik decided it was
enough–somebody had to try to get through to me. One morning we were sitting outside on the
patio having coffee. I put down my cup and said, "Well, okay, I'll see you later. It's my tee
time."
"Lance," Kik said, "what am / doing today?"
"What do you mean?"
"You didn't ask me what I was going to do today. You didn't ask me what I wanted to do, or if I
minded if you played golf. You just told me what you were going to do. Do you care what I'm
doing?"
"Oh, sorry," I said.
"What am I doing today?" she said. "What am I doing? Tell me that."
I was silent. I didn't know what to say.
"You need to decide something," she told me. "You need to decide if you are going to retire for
real, and be a golf-playing, beer-drinking, Mexican-food-eating slob. If you are, that's fine. I love
you, and I'll marry you anyway. But I just need to know, so I can get myself together and go
back on the street, and get a job to support your golfing. Just tell me.
"But if you're not going to retire, then you need to stop eating and drinking like this and being a
bum, and you need to figure it out, because you are deciding by not deciding, and that is so
un-Lance. It is just not you. And I'm not quite sure who you are right now. I love you anyway,
but you need to figure something out."
She wasn't angry as she said it. She was just right: I didn't really know what I was trying to
accomplish, and I was just being a bum. All of a sudden I saw a reflection of myself as a retiree
in her eyes, and I didn't like it. She wasn't going to live an idle life, and I didn't blame
her.
Quietly, she said, "So tell me if we're going to stay in Austin. If so, I'm going to get a job,
because I'm not going to sit at home while you play golf. I'm so bored."
Normally, nobody could talk to me like that. But she said it almost sweetly, without fighting.
Kik knew how stubborn I could be when someone tried to butt heads with me; it was my old
reflex against control and authority. I don't like to be cornered, and when I am, I will fight my
way out, whether physically or logically or emotionally. But as she spoke to me I didn't feel
attacked or defensive, or hurt, or picked on, I just knew the honest truth when I heard it. It was,
in a quietly sarcastic way, a very profound conversation. I stood up from the table.
"Okay," I said. "Let me think about it."
I went to play golf anyway, because I knew Kik didn't mind that. Golf wasn't the issue. The
issue was finding myself again.
KIK AND STAPLETON AND CARMICHAEL AND OCH conspired against me, talking
constantly behind my back about how to get me back on the bike. I continued to say that I was
retiring, but as the days wore on, I began to waver. Bill persuaded me to commit to one last
race, the U.S. Pro Championships, which would be held in Philadelphia in May.
Chris Carmichael flew to Austin. He took one look in my garage, at the bike still in its carrying
bag, and shook his head. Chris felt like Kik did, that I needed to make a conscious decision
about whether I belonged back on the bike. "You're alive again, and now you need to get back
to living," he repeated. But he knew I wasn't ready to commit to another full-scale comeback
yet, so the surface excuse he gave for coming to Austin was simply to put together a training
plan for the U.S. Championships. Also, the second Ride for the Roses was coming up, and the
race would be a criterium around downtown Austin requiring that I be at least minimally fit.
"You can't go out like this," Chris said, gesturing at my body. "You don't want to embarrass
your foundation."
Chris insisted that regardless of what I decided about retirement, I needed an eight- to ten-day
intensive training camp to get back to form–and I needed to do it somewhere other than Austin.
"Let's get out of town," he said. "You can't focus here, there's too much golf, too many
distractions."
We tried to think of a place to go. Arizona? Too hot. Colorado? Too high altitude. Then I said,
"Remember Boone? That little hippie town in North Carolina?"
Boone was high in the Appalachians on the route of the old Tour Du Pont, and I had fond
memories of it. I had won the Tour Du Pont twice there, and I had spent many afternoons
cycling and suffering on its biggest peak, Beech Mountain, which was the crucial climbing stage
of the race. It was arduous but beautiful country, and Boone itself was a college town full of
students and professors from nearby Appalachian State University. Conveniently, it had a
training facility at the university, and plenty of cabins for rent in the woods.
I got on the Internet and rented a cabin sight unseen. Next, I decided to invite an old friend
named Bob Roll to be my training partner; Bob was a high-spirited 38-year-old former road
racer who had switched over to mountain biking, and he would be easy company for ten days.
We flew to Charlotte, North Carolina, and drove three hours into the mountains. Our first stop
was Appalachian State, where Chris arranged with the athletic training center to do some
testing with me on a stationary bike, to find out where I stood fitness-wise. Chris looked at my
VO2 max and lactate threshold numbers, and they confirmed what he already knew: I was fat
and in lousy shape. Usually, my physiological values were the elite of the elite. My VO2 rate,
ordinarily at 85, was now at 64.
Chris said to the Appalachian State trainers who helped us, "Watch. When we come back he's
going to be at 74, and he'll do it after only a week."
Chris knew that my body responded to new thresholds after a very short period, and he felt I
could be back in peak shape in just a few days. But just to challenge me, he made me a bet that I
couldn't up my wattage–the amount of work in pedaling–in the space of a week. "A hundred
bucks says you can't get over 500," he said. I took the bet.
From then on, all we did was eat, sleep, and ride bikes. Spring had just begun moving up into
the mountains, creating a constant fog and drizzle that seemed to muffle the piney woods. We
rode in the rain every day. The cold seared my lungs, and with every breath I blew out a stream
of white frost, but I didn't mind. It made me feel clean. We rode winding back roads, only some
of which were paved and mapped. We cycled over gravel and hardpan and beds of pine needles,
and under hanging boughs.
At night, Chris made big pots of pasta and baked potatoes and we sat around the table wolfing
down the food and having unprintable conversations. We told stories and laughed about old
times and the start of our friendship, and my first years as a pro.
I called home each night, and Kristin could tell that I was starting to sound like my old self; I
was having fun, joking, I didn't seem depressed. When I would tell her about the cold and rainy
weather or how far we had ridden, I would laugh. "I'm feeling really good," I said, almost
puzzled.
I began to enjoy the single-mindedness of training, riding hard during the day and holing up in
the cabin in the evenings. I even appreciated the awful weather. It was as if I was going back to
Paris-Nice and staring the elements that had defeated me in the eye. What had cracked me in
Paris were the cold, wet conditions, but now I took satisfaction in riding through them, the way
I'd used t o .
Toward the end of the camp, we decided to ride Beech Mountain. Chris knew exactly what he
was doing when he suggested it, because there was a time when I owned that mountain. It was
a strenuous 5,000-foot climb with a snowcapped summit, and it had been the crucial stage in my
two Tour Du Pont victories. I remembered laboring on up the mountainside with crowds lined
along the route, and how they had painted my name across the road: "Go Armstrong."
We set out on yet another cold, raining, foggy day with a plan to ride a 100-mile loop before we
returned and undertook the big finishing ascent of Beech Mountain. Chris would follow in a car,
so we could load the bikes up on the rack after we reached the summit and drive back to the
cabin for dinner.
We rode and rode through a steady rain, for four hours, and then five. By the time we got to the
foot of Beech, I'd been on the bike for six hours, drenched. But I lifted myself up out of the
saddle and propelled the bike up the incline, leaving Bob Roll behind.
As I started up the rise, I saw an eerie sight: the road still had my name painted on i t .
My wheels spun over the washed-out old yellow and white lettering. I glanced down between
my feet. It said, faintly, Viva Lance.
I continued upward, and the mountain grew steeper. I hammered down on the pedals, working
hard, and felt a small bloom of sweat and satisfaction, a heat under my skin almost like a liquor
blush. My body reacted instinctively to the climb. Mindlessly, I rose out of my seat and picked
up the pace. Suddenly, Chris pulled up behind me in the follow car, rolled down his window,
and began driving me on. "Go, go, go!" he yelled. I glanced back at him. "Allez Lance, allez,
allez!" he yelled. I mashed down on the pedals, heard my breath grow shorter, and I
accelerated.
That ascent triggered something in me. As I rode upward, I reflected on my life, back to all
points, my childhood, my early races, my illness, and how it changed me. Maybe it was the
primitive act of climbing that made me confront the issues I'd been evading for weeks. It was
time to quit stalling, I realized. Move, I told myself. If you can still move, you aren't sick.
I looked again at the ground as it passed under my wheels, at the water spitting off the tires and
the spokes turning round. I saw more faded painted letters, and I saw my washed-out name: Go
Armstrong.
As I continued upward, I saw my life as a whole. I saw the pattern and the privilege of it, and
the purpose of it, too. It was simply this: I was meant for a long, hard climb.
I approached the summit. Behind me, Chris could see in the attitude of my body on the bike that
I was having a change of heart. Some weight, he sensed, was simply no longer there.
Lightly, I reached the top of the mountain. I cruised to a halt. Chris put the car in park and got
out. We didn't talk about what had just happened. Chris just looked at me, and said, "I'll put
your bike on top of the car."
"No," I said. "Give me my rain jacket. I'm riding back." I was restored. I was a bike racer again.
Chris smiled and got back in the car.
I passed the rest of the trip in a state of near-reverence for those beautiful, peaceful, soulful
mountains. The rides were demanding and quiet, and I rode with a pure love of the bike, until
Boone began to feel like the Holy Land to me, a place I had come to on a pilgrimage. If I ever
have any serious problems again, I know that I will go back to Boone and find an answer. I got
my life back on those rides.
A day or two later we went to the university training center to test my wattage. I pedaled so
hard I blew out the odometer. I spun the machine so fast Chris couldn't get a digital readout.
Laughing, he smacked $100 into my palm.
That night at dinner, I said to Chris casually, "I wonder if I could get into that race in Atlanta."
"Let's do it," Chris said.
'That evening, we started figuring out my comeback. Chris placed a bunch of calls, trying to find
me some new racing wheels. Then he called Bill Stapleton, and said, "Get ready. He's coming
back a different guy. The guy we used to know."
I DIDN'T JUST JUMP BACK ON THE BIKE AND WIN. THERE were a lot of ups and
downs, good results and bad results, but this time I didn't let the lows get to me.
After Boone, I enjoyed every day on the bike. Every day. Even when I was in bad shape,
suffering, crashing, trying to come back, I never once, never, ever, ever, thought about
abandoning again.
I even took the bike to my wedding. My trip to Boone was in April of '98, and Kik and I were
married that May in Santa Barbara. We invited about a hundred people, and we exchanged
vows in a small Catholic ceremony–Kik is Catholic–and afterward we had a dance party. No
one sat down for the duration of the night, people were too busy rocking all over the room, and
it was such a good time that Kik and I didn't want it to end. We ended up in the hotel bar with
our guests in our wedding getups, and had cocktails and cigars.
We stayed on in a beach house for a few days, but it wasn't the ideal honeymoon, because I was
so intent on training after my Boone experience. I rode every day. Finally we returned home to
Austin for the Ride for the Roses, which had grown to be a big-time event. Part of downtown
was blocked off, lights were strung up through the streets. I won the criterium over a pretty
good field. When I took the podium, Kik shrieked and jumped around, as thrilled as if it were
the Tour de France. It struck me that she had never seen me win anything before. "That's
nothing," I said, shrugging, but I was secretly delighted.
It was nice to have a little taste of competition again. I got another in June, when I made my
official return to the cycling circuit and finished fourth in the U.S. Pro Championships, while my
friend and teammate George Hincapie won i t .
One morning I said to Kik, "Okay, maybe it's time to try Europe again." She just nodded
cheerfully and started packing. The thing is, I could have said to her: "We're going back to
Europe," and when we got to Europe, I could have said, "We're going back to Austin," and
when we got to Austin, I could have said, "You know what? I made a mistake. We're going
back to Europe," and she would have made every trip without complaint. Nothing was a huge
crisis to her.
Kik liked the challenge of a new place and a new language, so when I said: "Okay, let's try it
one more time," that was an easy one for her. Some wives would have thought it was hard, but
that's why I didn't marry some wives. A lot of wives wouldn't have made it over there in the first
place. My wife, on the other hand, is a stud.
Kik and I tentatively rented a little apartment in Nice, and she enrolled back in school and
started French lessons again, while I continued to race. I entered the Tour of Luxembourg–and I
won it. After the first stage, I called home, and Kik wanted to know why I wasn't more excited,
but by now I was so wary of the psychological pitfalls of a comeback that I kept my emotions
and expectations in check. It was just a four-day race, not the kind that the major riders would
have celebrated as a big victory. But from a morale standpoint it was great, because it meant I
could win again–and it was worth some ICU bonus points, too. It erased the last lingering bit of
self-doubt.
Next, I traveled to the weeklong Tour of Holland, and finished fourth. In July, I skipped the
Tour de France, not yet ready for the strenuous routine of a three-week stage race. Instead, I did
some TV commentary and watched from the side of the road as it turned into the most
controversial and traumatic bike race in history. In a series of raids On team cars, French police
found trunkloads of EPO and anabolic steroids. Team members and officials were thrown in
French jails, everyone was under suspicion, and the cyclists were furious at the tactics used by
authorities. Of the 21 teams that began the race, only 14 finished. One team was expelled and
the other six quit in protest. Doping is an unfortunate fact of life in cycling, or any other
endurance sport for that matter. Inevitably, some teams and riders feel it's like nuclear
weapons–that they have to do it to stay competitive within the peloton. I never felt that way,
and certainly after chemo the idea of putting anything foreign in my body was especially
repulsive. Overall, I had extremely mixed feelings about the 1998 Tour: I sympathized with the
riders caught in the firestorm, some of whom I knew well, but I also felt the Tour would be a
more fair event from then on.
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