Every Second Counts (15 page)

We swooped over a bridge, passed a rushing white waterfall. We came around a long, sweeping left-hand turn—and hit the foot of the mountain. The road kicked up.

There was Ullrich just ahead.

I raced up to his wheel.

“Armstrong has maybe been playing an incredible poker game today by sitting at the back and letting everybody else do the work,” Sherwen said.

I locked onto the back of Ullrich’s bike, with Chechu next to me.

Until that moment, Ullrich had thought I was done. All he had heard all day was that I was hurting and out of contention. And now here I was.

I passed him.

I purposefully looked over my shoulder. I stared into Ullrich’s sunglasses for a long moment.

It was important to really look at the face of a rival: a guy’s mouth, the way he’s sweating, and whether he’s squinting behind his glasses. The look told you everything: whether he was tired or fresh, how much he had left in him. Ullrich was clearly hurting. His earpiece dangled down, his jersey hung open, and so did his mouth.

I stared over my shoulder for a moment longer, and later spectators would say it seemed I was taunting Ullrich, as if I was saying, “I’ve been playing with you all day, and now the real race is just starting. Catch me if you can.” But the truth is that I was checking to see what the shape of the other riders was, too. I wasn’t looking only at Ullrich—I was looking over his shoulder. What I saw convinced me to make my move.

I faced front again. I stood up on the pedals, and took off.

I was gone. Within seconds I was out of his view. It was a shock tactic, totally spontaneous, and it worked. With that one acceleration, I was away, and Ullrich couldn’t respond.

Johan babbled excitedly in my ear. “He’s dropped, he’s dropped!”

I steadily lengthened the lead, ticking my legs over. As I worked uphill, here came the last man between me and the finish line, Laurent Roux, who had started the climb with a seven-minute lead. I passed him.

I kept my eyes trained on the road just ahead of me, sightless except for the next hairpin turn. About halfway up the climb, I thought I passed Chris Carmichael standing on the mountainside, grinning like an idiot. I noted that he was wearing a pair of electric-blue Oakley shoes.

I crossed the finish line. I bared my teeth and shook my fists so hard I nearly threw myself off the bike. I had been riding for six hours and 23 minutes.

I braked and dropped off the bike, exhausted. We’d won one of the most famous of Tour stages, on a day when no one expected me to, and with tactics rather than aggression. It was as oddly satisfying as any stage victory could be. We’d never be able to use the same trick again—but it had succeeded this once.

Later,
Carmichael
came to visit me at the team hotel. I said, “You were wearing those ugly-ass shoes, weren’t you? I saw those shoes.
Carmichael
, how can you wear those things?”

I
wanted that
yellow jersey. I wanted to pull it on and show it to my son, so he could say, “Yo-yo, Daddy.” But I was still riding from behind; despite the Alpe d’Huez performance, I continued to trail the overall leader, Simon.

Luke and Kik arrived the next day, in time to see me win a romantic time-trial stage in the mountains, from the ski town of
Grenoble
to the winter resort of Chamrousse. It moved me into third place overall, still chasing Simon. But something far more significant happened that day.

Kik met me at the finish line, and we went to our hotel, so we could have a few minutes to ourselves in my room before dinner. She pulled out an envelope. In it was the result of the ultrasound test that would tell us whether the babies she was carrying were boys or girls.

When we had decided to try in-vitro a second time that fall, we knew it meant that Kik would have to go through part of the process alone, because of my training schedule. Before, we had carefully planned our attempts to get pregnant in the off-season so that I could be with her for her appointments, but this time we didn’t have that choice; if we wanted another baby, Kik would have to do it while I was racing. She had found out we were having twins without me. We didn’t want her to find anything else out by herself, or have any more long-distance phone conversations.

Instead, she asked the doctor to write the answer down on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. Kik carried the envelope home and sat it on a desk for several days, and then packed it in her backpack.

It was a beautiful alpine evening as Kik and I lounged in my hotel room, which looked out on the village. From the window we could see her parents down below, having a drink and relaxing at a sidewalk café table, along with Bill Stapleton and Bart Knaggs, while Luke ran around on a grassy lawn.

Kik took the envelope out of her backpack, and announced that she was so nervous she had sweaty palms.

“Give me that,” I said.

I snatched it out of her hand, while Kik giggled. I tore it open, stared at the sheet of paper, and threw back my head and shouted with laughter.

“Let me see, let me see,” Kik said.

I teased her for a moment, holding the paper above my head, and then I gave it to her. Kik glanced down and saw the number 2, and the letter “g.” For an instant she misread it, she thought it said, “
garçons
,
” French for “boys,” but then she looked again and it said, “Two girls, congratulations.” Kik squealed in delight.

For some reason it was the last thing we expected. I’d loved the idea of twins from the get-go; I was fascinated by the possibility, the uniqueness and yet sameness of them. We talked about two boys, or a boy and a girl, but the notion of twin girls simply never occurred to us. Now that they were a reality, we were ecstatic. Bart Knaggs and his wife, Barbara, had twin girls. They were beaming comical little blond things, and Bart had taught them each to say, “I’m a genius!” Now that we’d have our own set, it seemed to me a beautiful completion of our family chemistry, to have a pair of female counterparts to Luke.

I hugged Kik and stuck my head into the hallway and yelled the news to my teammates. Then I went over to the window and threw it open, and leaned out over that beautiful span of grass, and I shouted the news out the window.

“Hey, Ethel!”
I yelled down to Kik’s mother.

“Yeah!” she answered, looking up.

“It’s two girls!” I yelled.

The whole terrace erupted. Everyone below screamed and cheered. Ethel wept, and then Kik wept and we just stood there waving the piece of paper out the window. A little later, we came down and had dinner with everybody, and toasted our daughters.

The family visit was only a brief respite from racing. Over the next couple of days, we rode deep into the
Pyrenees
. It was a different kind of scenery; the
Alps
were covered with industrial towns or ski resorts with condo developments big as skyscrapers, but the
Pyrenees
were wilder, smaller yet somehow more dramatic, with long green valleys and snow-capped peaks. As we rode, the mountains kept taking their toll. Another rider, Christophe Moreau of
France
, threw his bike down in disgust and quit the race with lung problems.

Ullrich and I continued to shadow each other, sometimes riding side by side. He crunched his large gears while I bobbed up and down on the pedals in smaller gears. The difference in our styles was visible: he pedaled 75 times a minute, while I pedaled 90. He was a big, rolling, pantherish rider, while I looked, someone said, like a cat climbing a tree.

Simon was still 13 minutes ahead of both of us, in first place. But in the
Pyrenees
we faced three huge mountain stages, with a total of 11 major peaks to climb. We knew the day would come when Simon would break, and suspected it would come on a grueling climbing stage called Pla d’Adet, a long, 120-mile day that would take us over six peaks.

The stage took us past the place where my old friend Fabio Casartelli had died during a Tour descent in 1995. A beautiful marble monument marked the place, and during the spring in training I’d pulled over and stood in the mist. The other Postal riders went on, but I stayed for a few long minutes. I was taken aback by how much emotion I still felt each time I rode past, and I remembered how I’d sobbed in my hotel room.

But during the race itself I didn’t have time to contemplate. There was too much else to pay attention to, between Ullrich, Simon, the pursuit of the yellow jersey, and the constant climbing and descending.

Shortly before we reached the final climb, something frightening happened that reminded us all again of just how perilous and tragic the sport could be. I was riding just behind Ullrich on a difficult descent at about 50 miles per hour. There weren’t many turns, but it was fast, and there was gravel that made your wheels slide around.

Ullrich glanced back over his shoulder for his teammates, and fussed with his microphone. He reached for his mike with one hand, and began talking into it. He pulled the mike closer and ducked his head; it was hard to communicate in the wind from the speeding descent.

Ahead, a turn came up.

He didn’t see it.

I thought,
Uh-oh.
I was already leaning on my own brakes.
He’d better brake,
I thought.
Why doesn’t he brake?

Ullrich’s head came up, but not in time. He sailed straight over the shoulder of the road and down a precipice. One second he was there and the next he had vanished.

It looked horrific—like he had gone headfirst over a cliff.

He’s finished
, I thought. I immediately slowed down and radioed Johan to see if Ullrich was all right.

As I slowed down, other riders did, too. Kevin Livingston pulled over, and stopped. “We’re waiting,” I told the other riders. “We’re all going to wait for him.”

After a moment, Johan radioed me to say that he could see Ullrich climbing up the cliffside, and he seemed fine. Luckily, he had fallen onto a grassy bank of a steep gully, and was struggling to get his bike upright and rejoin the race.

I continued to ride slowly, waiting for Ullrich to catch up. This was what racing custom dictated. It’s not something American audiences necessarily understand, but it’s an intrinsic part of the sport and any other top rider would have done the same for a respected opponent.

Ullrich deserved the respect of the entire peloton. He had never broken; he fell back, but he always fought to the head of the pack again, and I could never completely ride away from him. No matter what, he was always there, next to my shoulder, unwilling to concede the race. You should always honor your fiercest opponent: the better your opponent, the better you have to be.

He caught up to me. I said, “You okay?” He nodded. “I’m fine,” he said. We accelerated up the road. We resumed race pace, and stayed shoulder to shoulder, dead-even until the last 3.7 miles.

The final climb, to Pla d’Adet, was one that I knew well: I’d rehearsed it three different times in the spring, studying the steep parts. It was a slope where you could put some time between yourself and the other riders, and now I was ready to. Much as I admired Ullrich and was glad he was all right, I wanted to get rid of him now. I wanted that yellow jersey, and a stage win would give it to me. I thought,
Yo-yo Daddy.

When we hit the final climb, I jumped out of my seat and charged. Ullrich made no real attempt to follow. Within seconds it seemed like I was 100 yards ahead of him. Behind me, he put his head down and kept on.

I rode on alone, and within a half-mile I passed the last cyclist ahead of me, Laurent Jalabert of
France
. Later Jalabert said, “He made it look so easy that it was beautiful.”

But Jalabert was wrong, it wasn’t easy. It hurt, deep inside where muscle met bone. I simply pretended it didn’t hurt, controlling my demeanor. I understood how demoralizing it was to spend a day like that on a bike and get passed by a rider who doesn’t seem to suffer. It’s a mental and physical defeatedness that no one else knows except the cyclists themselves.

Of course it hurt. If you looked closely you could see that it did, in my bloodshot eyes. The truth is that there’s no such thing as riding effortlessly in the Tour. It simply didn’t hurt as much as it could have, because all the training I had done through the year paid dividends. I was well prepared, I knew which parts of the mountain were the worst, and I’d learned to use even, consistent efforts, and avoid crises. But it still hurt.

I crossed the finish line alone, and toppled off the bike, spent, the new leader of the Tour de France. We had done what Johan asked, and attacked at every opportunity—and the result was that we had won three of the last four stages, and made up 35 minutes and 24 places in the standings. In two days alone, we’d made up 22 minutes. It set a record for the biggest deficit ever overcome.

Johan pulled up in the team car, exultant. That day, he had a passenger, Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike. Knight had been to virtually every great event in the world, and witnessed countless thrilling moments, but he had never seen a Tour de France stage before, and now as he climbed from the car, he looked stunned by it all: the rainbow colors of the peloton jet-streaming by, the wrecks and recoveries, the precipitous climbs under scorching sun. I looked at his face and knew we’d created another cycling enthusiast. “That is the single greatest day in sport that I have ever seen,” Knight raved.