Every Second Counts (25 page)

One day, Johan went to him and said, “The tape is too flashy. People see the tape, and they think we’re all screwed up.”

Jeff said, “What do you want me to do?”

“Tone down the tape,” he said. “Can’t you get the gray color?”

But the pink tape worked, so we kept it, because it could fix things. It could seriously fix things.

At the end of the day there was a line of riders waiting to see Jeff, because we believed Jeff could fix any and all of our problems. Sometimes guys weren’t really hurt, they were just tired, or screwed up mentally, or emotionally. Pena got tired, Pavel got tired,
even
Roberto got tired. Jeff could fix that, too. While he fixed us physically, he also fixed us mentally. He’d say, “You know, you look a lot better today.”

I’d say, “Really?”

“Yeah, I can see it in your face.”

If you judged the most important man on the Postal team by the foot traffic in and out of his door, then it was Jeff. Without him, we knew we’d never make it to
Paris
.

B
ig Blue kept
coming. By now other riders feared us, they dreaded our accelerations, and when they saw us coming, they parted. We’d surge to the front, and they’d say, “Can you please just slow down a little bit?” We’d hear riders from the back of the peloton, yelling, “Please just take it easy,
take
it easy!” We rode until they slumped over their handlebars, their heads hanging low from their necks like dying tulips.

The idea was not to torture people, but to make them uncomfortable enough that they would have trouble keeping up, much less attacking. We rode as a single entity, the same set to our shoulders and hips, no wasted motion swaying on the bikes, as if we all breathed at the same pace and pedaled at the same cadence.

We won a second mountain stage victory the day after La Mongie, this one to the Plateau de Beille. It was a stage with five vicious ascents, the last to a ski station at the top of a climb that was
hors de catégorie
—“beyond category,” meaning, you don’t want to know. The day was so hard that six riders abandoned the Tour. But I felt great. While other riders felt miserable, I rode behind Big Blue.

We climbed 4,000 feet in ten miles. Again, Chechu and Roberto put everybody out of the race except for me and Beloki—and we still weren’t going full-bore. Now we had a chance to stamp our authority all over the race. Roberto sat on Beloki’s wheel while I blew by him. I lengthened the lead comfortably and then checked over my shoulder. At the finish I threw up a big two-armed salute, because I knew we had laid the foundation of the overall victory.

For the rest of the race, we just ground our opponents down, putting a little more time on them each day. Stage 14 took us to my old friend Mont Ventoux, which could be seen looming over all of
Provence
. By the end of the day we’d all but won the overall title, racing up the stony wasteland almost two minutes ahead of Beloki to increase the overall lead to
4:21
.

You’re supposed to hit the brakes when you’re going downhill, but you don’t hit the brakes when you’re going uphill. That day, we rode so strongly that we were hitting the brakes—uphill. We went so fast into some of the turns that we actually had to slow down.

Afterward, Beloki conceded the race. “I’m going for second,” he said. “Today we went to the moon and saw the astronaut.”

The last test was a final individual time trial in Mâcon. Sun blazed over a course that undulated through vineyards, alleys of spectators lining the way. I wanted to win it badly—to show that I was still the strongest rider, to make up for the one I had lost early in the Tour. This time I felt good and everything went right, and I did tear up the road.

The rest of the way to
Paris
, we concentrated on riding safely and luxuriated in our accomplishment. The team was infallible, every man as strong as the next. Pavel rode good tempo in the flats. Roberto and Chechu were awesome on the climbs. Floyd suffered like a dog, but he came through it and added depth. George and Eki were like linebackers, escorting me around like a couple of personal bodyguards, riding in the wind and in crowds.

The race wasn’t even over yet, but I said to Bill, “Your first priority is to get every guy back on this team.” Chechu was sure to have some other offers, and I knew he was stressing because he loved being on the team as much as we loved having him. I had a talk with him, and assured him we’d pay what it took. He said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Over the years we’d worked to improve the team, staff, and mechanics, and this time it was close to perfect. They’d made life almost easy for me. The most trouble I was in during the whole Tour de France was at La Mongie, on my own teammate’s wheel.

Just before the finish in
Paris
, a young Dutch woman with cancer came to our hotel. Again, it gave me a sense of peace and perspective to talk to a fellow patient. I invited her to come into the dining room with me, and we took a table next to the Postal team and talked for 45 minutes or so. She had a tough story: she had been treated and had relapsed, and been treated again. We talked for a while about her treatment options, and she was curious about the
U.S.
She asked me, “What did you do?”

“I got treated, I fought like hell, and I got better,” I said.

We discussed the treatments in the States, and the merits of American hospitals. She asked me what I ate, and how much I exercised. I told her the truth. “I started out eating a lot of spinach, and then in the end all I could keep down was apple fritters,” I said. I told her I’d tried to ride my bike as much as I could, until I fainted one day.

Finally, the conversation drew to a close, and she gave me a present. She had brought clogs, real Dutch clogs, for my whole family. There were five pairs, including tiny ones for the children. I now treasure them as remembrances; she’s since passed away.

A few days later, Big Blue rode me into
Paris
, and I crossed the finish line with an official time of 82 hours, 5 minutes, and 12 seconds and a winning margin of
7:17
. I was inexpressibly proud. We hadn’t made the slightest tactical error. Not one. We’d grown stronger as the race went on, more secure in our craft, more patient. I felt a sense of achievement I hadn’t felt in any of my previous three Tour victories, because of the sheer beauty of that team performance.

Other people seemed to feel it, too. In
Paris
, for the first time, the headlines seemed warm toward us. The
Le Parisien
headline saluted both Jalabert and me in the same sentence:
MERCI JAJA . . . BRAVO ARMSTRONG.
I was grateful for the compliment. A French wine dealer was quoted as saying, “A man’s value is his spirit, not his country.” Also, suddenly the French had a nickname for me: the Boss.

At the finish line, I spoke French to the local press. “I love
France
,” I said. Perhaps people finally understood what I’d been trying to express, whether in French or English, all along: the Postal riders weren’t robots, or cold corporate American merchants. Rather, we were on a search for the perfect ride, the most excellent technique, and that was not a matter of coldness, but of love. “This is not theater,
it’s
sport,” I said. “I believe in performance and in the beauty of the race.”

But more than anything, I believed in my teammates—and I wanted to do something for them. Each year we had a Postal Service victory party for 300 or so people at the Musée d’Orsay, the grand old train station that had been converted to a
museum
of
French
painting. It was a luxurious party, but we would be scattered at separate tables. I wanted to do something more personal, so we could have a celebration together, just the nine of us. For weeks they had slaved, dealing with tendinitis and road rash, sleeping cramped and sore in small hotels. For this night I wanted them to feel like rock stars, because to me, that’s what they were. I wanted them to feel like every inch the winners.

Kik helped me arrange for a small private-party room at the Hôtel de Crillon, where I always stayed on the last night in
Paris
,
because they flew the
Texas
flag over the Champs-Elysées (the place earned my lifelong business for that). Five S-class Mercedes picked the guys up and drove them to the hotel. Every other team rode buses to get to their parties, but our guys got picked up by Mercedes.

The cars brought the team and their families to a private reception room at the Crillon, where a banquet was laid out. We all shook hands and I passed each one of them an envelope, and they stuck them in their pockets, to open later.

We sat around with our families, nibbling from a buffet table, drinking and telling stories, and falling out. We laughed about trying to translate ZZ Top lyrics. Kik came down and joined us, and she strolled into the room like a fashion diva in black slacks and a white blouse with a string of pearls. All of the guys burst out singing ZZ Top, “She wore a PEARL NECK-LACE!”

Finally, we split up and the guys left to make the rounds of some
Paris
nightspots. As they got back into the limousines, some of them opened their envelopes. It was
traditional,
and only right, for the Tour winner to give the $400,000 prize money to his teammates, and they assumed their checks were in the envelopes. What they didn’t know was that I had doubled the amount,
as a
personal thanks from me. Guys started calling me on my cell phone from their cars, and screaming. In the background, I could hear an envelope tearing, and someone said, “This is a mistake, right? He put in one too many zeroes.”

We scattered across
Paris
and were out till the late hours; I don’t know where all of them landed in the end. Some, like George, stayed up all night. Floyd went to bed earlier than anybody. He hadn’t seen his wife in two months, so they left at
midnight
. He was so tired he didn’t know how to put it into words. Even taking a shower felt like an effort.

He fell into bed—and he didn’t wake up until
four
P.M
.
the next day. Even then he was only awake long enough to eat something, and then he went back to sleep
again
until ten the next morning. He wouldn’t feel normal for a month afterward.

But he had helped us win, and in doing so, he had helped himself. He paid off all his debts, and he got a new Postal contract: a generous two-year deal that would pay him more than
double
his salary. “I’ve never had a two-year contract—at anything,” he marveled.

Why engage in a collective effort rather than an individual one, even when you wonder, “What’s in it for
me
?”? Self-interest is isolating. When you work in collaboration, you’re responsible to each other, and therefore much less likely to shirk your responsibilities or cheat your partner. Teamwork is not only performance-enhancing, it’s comforting. You are never alone, and whether you have a six-mile climb up an alp and a cadre of attackers behind you, or a round of chemo in front of you, that’s extremely reassuring.

Pro athletes talk all the time about “my game.” But your game doesn’t belong to you when you’re on a team—there’s no such thing as “my” game, there is only
the
game. Your effort belongs to your teammates and theirs belongs to you, and they’re inextricable. The same is true of any gathering of people in one place, for any purpose.

To me, the definition of a team is a group of people who share the same aim, experience, and values. By that definition, the alliance between people fighting cancer qualifies as my team also. I am always aware of them, just as they are of me, and I still meet people who are frightened and fearful, who constantly remind me that I used to be sick, that I got well, that they are following the story. And unlike a race, the story doesn’t end.

You think it’s over, but it’s not. It’s never over.

On the morning after I crossed the finish line in
Paris
, Bart came to see me at the Hôtel de Crillon. I was in a suite doing interviews and struggling with the sleepiness and a mild hangover when he appeared in the hall outside my room, pale and red-eyed. Bill met him at the door, took one look at him, and said, “What’s the matter?”

Bart struggled to speak. He’d gotten a panicked call from
Austin
that morning: his younger brother, David, had just been diagnosed with a horribly aggressive form of cancer and was in St. David’s Hospital, receiving blood transfusions.

I came out to the hall. “What’s going on?”

“He just found out his little brother has cancer,” Bill said.

I stared at Bart for a second. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go to work. Let’s fix it.”

I put my arm around Bart’s shoulders, and Bill put an arm around him, and together we steadied him and got him into the suite. My room was in chaos; we were trying to pack, and the kids were running around, and some press people were there. Bill asked the press to leave.