Every Second Counts (10 page)

Losing, on the other hand, really does say something about who you are. Among the things it measures are: do you blame others, or do you own the loss? Do you analyze your failure, or just complain about bad luck?

If you’re willing to examine failure, and to look not just at your outward physical performance, but your internal workings, too, losing can be valuable. How you behave in those moments can perhaps be more self-defining than winning could ever be. Sometimes losing shows you for who you really are.

The following day I flew home to begin the off-season with an attitude adjustment. Luke took his first steps, and we celebrated his birthday at Chuy’s Mexican restaurant. “He told me that’s where he wants to eat,” I said. Luke scribbled on the menu, crushed tortilla chips all over the floor, and ate quesadillas, while Kik and I had long-awaited margarita swirls.

Kik surprised me by hanging the bronze medal in a place of honor. She continued to insist that it was one of her favorite days. I looked at her like she was crazy.

“My goal was the gold,” I said.

“My point exactly,” she said.

Maybe the difference between a boy and a grown man, and the difference between a chipped shoulder and nice smooth lines, is the way you handle yourself when you don’t get what you want. “I was never prouder,” she said, “not for one single second. Not even on the Champs-Elysées in the summers of 1999 or 2000. It was one of the happiest things I’ve ever seen in my life. Because you wanted that gold medal really bad, and you’d never really tell anyone that. But you wanted it.”

She was right about that. “Yeah, but I didn’t get it,” I said. I’d failed.

“You know what?” she said. “A day will come when Luke will miss the mark, and fail. He will be brokenhearted, and he will think his champion dad will never understand. But there will be this videotape, of a day in
Sydney
that he was too young to remember, but where an example of how to lose was set. And I’ll show it to him, and tell him that I never loved you more.”

O
n Thanksgiving Day
of 2000, shortly after I got back from the Olympics, French authorities announced I was under criminal investigation for doping.

I was dumbfounded. I wasn’t just being called a
cheat,
I was being called a felon, under formal investigation.

I picked up the phone and called Bill Stapleton, who was taking a holiday walk in the park with his wife and family. “What the hell is going on?” I said. Bill promised to find out and get back to me. After a while, he called back. “It’s ridiculous,” he said. “But we’re going to have to be patient.”

What happened was this: during the Tour, someone surreptitiously videotaped two of our medical staff as they threw away a couple of trash bags. The tape was sent anonymously to a government prosecutor, as well as to the
France
3 television station. Now the station was airing the tape while sensationally reporting our “suspicious behavior” as we disposed of “medical waste.”

French authorities had responded by launching a full-scale judicial inquiry.

I made some calls, and tried to figure out how we could be in such a situation. According to our team doctor and chiropractor, after a Tour stage in Morzine, they had bagged up the garbage left over from our medical care as they normally did. They didn’t want to leave it at the hotel where we had stayed, however, because the more unsavory media was always picking through our garbage in its relentless hunt to prove me a doper, and we resented it. So they decided to frustrate the press by taking it from the hotel in Morzine and throwing it away in a roadside garbage can. This was their “suspicious behavior.”

The “medical waste” consisted of some wrappers and cotton swabs and empty boxes, nothing more. In
France
, as in this country, there are strict rules about how to properly dispose of any serious medical products such as syringes and IV needles. Those had been handled as required, placed in yellow biohazard containers that were picked up by a French medical-waste service.

I immediately issued an angry denial through our Postal spokesman, Dan Osipow. Our team had “zero tolerance” for any form of doping, we said. It sounded like the usual clichéd statement, but we meant it. We were absolutely innocent.

But it quickly became apparent that innocence might not matter. The judicial system in
France
seemed to be the reverse of American law, with no presumption of innocence, and what little I knew suggested that French legal authorities didn’t need much evidence to act. I worried that when I returned to my home in
France
, they could decide to handcuff me, in front of the world, and haul me off.

Our first concern was to obtain a French lawyer, a gentleman named George Kiejman, and he explained the system to us. There was a
juge d’instruction
, or examining judge, who evaluated evidence and functioned similar to a grand jury in
America
. This judge, Sophie-Hélène Chateau, had broad subpoena powers.

She promptly subpoenaed all of my urine samples from the 2000 Tour as well as those of the rest of the U.S. Postal team. She appointed an assistant prosecutor, François Franchi, to conduct an investigation. We were charged with suspicion of using doping products, inciting the use of doping products, and using toxic substances.

At first, I tried not to take it personally, and to understand the motives behind the investigation. When an athlete doped, the competitors, spectators, and journalists were defrauded. International cycling had recently been through a drug scandal, and the French were protective of the integrity of the Tour, which was more than just a race, it was a national symbol, and they didn’t want it junked up by needles and vials. But I didn’t like being accused on no evidence.

Part of the problem, I realized, was a fundamental lack of awareness among the public (and the prosecutors) about just how grueling cycling really is. Medical treatments were an absolute necessity. The Tour de France is not a natural event. We ride more than 100 miles a day for three straight weeks, through incredible and changing conditions. Some cars wouldn’t hold up under that physical stress, much less a human body. We needed help, in the form of IVs of vitamins, minerals, and phosphates. You simply can’t eat or drink enough to make up for that kind of depletion, to replace all the things you expend.

Those IVs and syringes were health essentials. What’s more, every Tour rider suffered cuts, scrapes, and bruises from crashes, not to mention all the assorted rashes, like road rash and seat rash, and then there were the aches, sprains, tendinitis, etc. We were asking something inhuman of our bodies, and we simply couldn’t do it without medical assistance.

There was a double standard at work: when a football player got cramps and went to the locker room for a drip, and then returned to the field, everybody called him a hero. But because we were cyclists, we were suspected of doping if we showed a needle and vial.

Suspicion was the permanent state of affairs in the sport, and with reason. Unfortunately, cycling had a long history of doping. It had happened time and again: athletes had lied, had cheated, had stolen. In the 1998 Tour, which I missed while recovering from illness, a drug scandal resulted in multiple arrests and suspensions when a team car was found to be carrying large amounts of the blood-doping agent erythropoietin (EPO). Since then, Tour officials had worked with the International Cycling Union to develop new drug tests, and to restore public confidence in the race.

Drug inspectors arrived at each team hotel between 7 and
9
A.M
.
on the day that the Tour started and drew blood from the crooks of our arms. After that, there were surprise drug tests—you never knew when someone would bang on your hotel-room door and ask for blood. There were also daily urine tests in a mobile trailer after each stage. (Sometimes there was a long line, so often I would hold my water for the last hours of the stage, to be sure that I had some to give them. At the finish line I would literally leap off my bike and run to the trailer.)

Even out of season, I was, and am, tested by the United States Anti-Doping Agency. It’s a moment of wearying familiarity: I’m sitting in my kitchen early one
Texas
morning in the off-season, sipping coffee and whispering so as not to wake assorted children, when there’s a loud ringing at the doorbell. Standing on the front step of my home is a representative from USADA, coming on like John Wayne, holding out a piece of paper like a warrant and telling me to take a drug test, or risk being banned from my sport.

The drug testers in
Austin
were the same people every time, a husband and wife. I didn’t know their names, and wasn’t especially cordial with them, because they were never cordial with me. They would ring the bell, I’d open the door, and they would announce, “Random drug control,” and hand me a piece of paper instructing me on my rights. Or lack thereof: if I declined the test it was considered an automatic positive, and I would be banned.

What’s more, I was required to inform the USADA of my whereabouts at all times. No matter where I went. Anytime I changed locations, I was supposed to fax or e-mail them as to my movements. It was like being under constant surveillance.

But no matter how many tests came back clean, skepticism about my performances persisted, especially in
France
. The European media had been full of suspicion ever since I won my first Tour in 1999. Throughout that race, some in the French cycling and the French press communities suggested that my victory was too miraculous; that I must be on a drug, and had seized on a technicality and run with it: I used an analgesic cream that contained corticosteroid to treat a case of saddle sores, so the press reported that I tested positive for a banned steroid. It was untrue. I had received permission from race authorities to use the cream, disclosing its contents. In fact, all of my tests were clean, and I asked the Tour to release the results, which they did.

During the 2000 race, skepticism persisted. A headline in
L’Equipe
over my picture had said, sarcastically,
LES DEUX VITESSES.
“The Two Speeds.”
The insinuation was clear: that I was riding at a different, unnatural speed.

Hautacam was greeted as a classic climb by some, but to others it was more evidence that I was using some mysterious performance-enhancing drug.
Daniel Baal, the president of the French cycling federation (and the man who is scheduled to become the next director of the Tour de France), intimated as much to the press that afternoon after watching me.

“I would love to know what is happening today,” he said. “I do not know if we must speak of a new method, or a new substance. I saw many riders in difficulty on the climbs and that is good. But . . . must I have enthusiasm for how the race is being won?”

As much as I tried not to take the investigation personally, I couldn’t help resenting it. The French press had made a seamy habit of lurking outside my home in Nice, year-round, even when I was away and Kik was there alone. They smoked, stared at my windows, and engaged in their favorite sport: brazenly picking through my trash in plain view.

Unfortunately, there was no question in my mind that the investigation was launched in part out of anti-American sentiment. The Tour was as French as sunflowers and wine, and I wasn’t French. Worse, I was Texan, and only the second American ever to win since the race was founded in 1903. I’d won two consecutive
Tours
, while native Frenchmen had fared poorly in the race. It was hard not to feel I’d been singled out because I was successful and American. I rode for an American-owned team, on an American-made bike, a Trek. I wore a red, white, and blue Postal uniform, with the flag all over me.

“Why?” I asked my teammate Cédric Vasseur, a Frenchman. “Why are they doing this?”

Cédric said, “In
France
they don’t like the winner. They like the runner-up.”

For some reason, the French believed that I, the winner, was doped to the gills—while the guys who got second and third didn’t take anything? That didn’t make sense. But there it was.

Back in
America
, the only other American ever to win the race, Greg LeMond, jumped in and began making comments questioning my innocence. He suggested that I was one of the greatest “frauds” in the history of cycling. The investigation, he said, was the French way of guarding the Tour, which he said was more than just a race, it was a beloved French ritual based “on a deep love of the sport.”

I snapped back, “Their love of the sport is not greater than mine.”

I was mystified and disheartened by the hostility. I loved
France
, and I wasn’t one to say I loved something when I didn’t. I was entranced by the beauty of the country and I’d made a part-time home on the
Côte d’Azur
since 1997. Kik and I had been newlyweds there, and Luke had spent a portion of his first year there. I’d made a life in
France
, and done so happily. I spent far more time there than in
America
. I rode in French races to tune up for the Tour, I honored their present and past champions, and I made an effort to learn French and to speak it in public, even though I sounded foolish.