Every Second Counts (8 page)

Fortunately, the last few miles of the stage were all downhill. Once Bart and my other friends had pulled me to the top of Joux-Plane, I sagged over the handlebars and coasted to the bottom. In the end I lost only 90 seconds off my lead. But I might easily have lost everything, and I knew it.

“I could have lost the entire Tour today,” I told the press frankly afterward.

When I saw my friend Jeff Garvey from
Austin
, I said, “So how’d you like amateur hour at the Tour de France?”

I have very little recollection of anything else I said or did between the time when I first began to suffer, and when I finally crossed the finish line. For instance, Chris Carmichael came over to the hotel and met me in my room.

I said, “Where the hell have you been?”

“What do you mean?” he said. “I was there, right there when you crossed the line.”

“You were?”

That night at dinner, I apologized to the entire Postal team. I had nearly wasted the efforts of everyone involved. “I will never, ever do that again,” I promised. In retrospect it was a great lesson: the mountains were so unforgiving that in one bad hour, or one bad minute, you could lose it.

The next question was
,
would I be able to recover? How much had it torn me apart getting up that mountain? It was like driving a car with no oil in it; the potential damage to my body could have undermined the whole transmission, ruined the fitness I’d worked for months to build. Sometimes riders had terrible stomach problems—like Pantani, who had cramps and awoke the next morning unable to race, and dropped out. If I wasn’t able to revive myself, I could have another disaster. But to my relief, I felt fine that night, and just wanted some hard sleep.

Back home, Kik had to watch the whole thing on TV, and it was wrenching, because she knew what must be happening and how much I was suffering.

I called home. “Well, that was the worst day I’ve ever had on a bike,” I said. “I almost lost the Tour de France today.”

Kik said, “But you didn’t.”

I
t was my
last doubtful moment. All that remained were the flats, uneventful stages toward
Paris
, and as we neared the finish, I finally allowed myself to accept that I was the winner. But I wasn’t quite satisfied. I wanted to make up for the stage win I’d given away. I still cringed over that.

On July 22, I did what I’d failed to do previously, and finally
won
a stage, a 36-mile individual time trial between the French and German borders from Fribourg to
Mulhouse
. I went all-out, as the leader in the traditional yellow jersey should. I wanted to represent the jersey, and to feel like an outright winner. I crossed the line spent. My eyes were glazed, and spit was hanging out of my mouth. When someone asked me a question, I couldn’t even respond verbally. I just moved where I was directed. I was barely conscious of what I’d done: I’d won with the second-fastest time in the Tour’s 87-year history, in one hour, five minutes and one second, averaging about 33.5 miles per hour.

In
Paris
, a large
Texas
flag flew from the Hôtel de Crillon. During that last ride, I finally let myself have champagne, and sipped a glass as we rode along. Finally I crossed the finish line with a time of 92 hours, 33 minutes, and 8 seconds for the 2,270 miles. On the podium, Kik handed me our nine-month-old son, and I raised him up, with tears in my eyes.

Ullrich was a generous runner-up. “Armstrong earned it,” he said. “He met our every attack.” It meant a great deal after all the remarks by other cyclists who said I couldn’t repeat. You could field a whole team with the people who thought they could win the Tour and beat me.
Well, they’re all here now
, I thought. But it wasn’t about revenge anymore; I’d left my taste for revenge on Joux-Plane. There comes a time in every race when a competitor meets the real opponent, and understands that it’s himself.

That night, we had a huge victory dinner at the Musée d’Orsay, in a private ballroom with a frescoed ceiling. There were hundreds of people there, including about 80 who had flown in from
Austin
. Finally I stood up and spoke to my teammates. The reason we were celebrating, I said, was because we had worked harder than anyone else, and the result was that we were no longer the long shots, the flukes; we were established champions. “I feel like we know how to do this now,” I said. “We learned how to do it, and now we can do it again and again.”

I no longer viewed my cycling career as a one-time comeback. I viewed it as confirmation, and continuation of what I’d done in surviving cancer. But in repeating the victory, I made a pleasant discovery: no two experiences are alike. Each was like a fingerprint, fine and distinct.

How were they different? I’d suffered more in winning the Tour a second time, experienced more physically taxing moments. I could tell that from the thinness of my neck, and the way my ribs and shoulder blades jutted out of my shirt. But in a way, suffering made it more gratifying.

Suffering, I was beginning to think, was essential to a good life, and as inextricable from such a life as bliss. It’s a great enhancer. It might last a minute, or a month, but eventually it subsides, and when it does, something else takes its place, and maybe that thing is a greater space.
For happiness.
Each time I encountered suffering, I believed that I grew, and further defined my capacities—not just my physical ones, but my interior ones as well, for contentment, friendship, or any other human experience.

The real reward for pain is this: self-knowledge. If I quit, however, it would have lasted forever, that surrender, even the smallest act of giving up, would have stayed with me for the duration. When you felt like quitting, you had to ask yourself which you would rather live with.

After it was all over, someone gave Bart a picture. It was of me, pale and delirious as I suffered on the climb up Joux-Plane. In the background, Bart is running alongside me, urging me on. Behind Bart is a guy dressed up as the Devil, one of those costumed characters who haunt the roadsides of the Tour and give it a circuslike atmosphere. It was as if they represented the two choices, either to keep on or to quit.

To me, it was a classic photograph of Bart, because that’s the kind of friend he is, the kind who is there on your worst day ever.
Your
very worst, not the glory day. That day, my worst, one of my best friends was right behind me, on foot, screaming at me to keep going. Maybe it was the real victory to have the same people around me, whether it was a day spent in a hospital bed, or a day when I almost lost a race.

Bart signed the picture and gave it to me. “Lance, we’ve been to a lot of places . . . but let’s not go back there again, OK?” he wrote.

I framed it and hung it on my wall.

CHAPTER 3

The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday

S
ome things you can’t win, though I don’t like to admit it. I’m not used to losing much of anything, whether it’s a race or a debate, but among the things I’ve nearly lost are my life, my neck, and my good name, and I’ve gained a realization: a life of unbroken success is not only impossible, it’s probably not even good for you.

Some losses are more tolerable than others, and some things are unrecoverable, and the echelons of loss change in crisis. It’s surprising what you can let go of, depending on the circumstances. When I need reminding of this, I think of Sally Reed’s hair.

When Sally was undergoing cancer treatment that summer of ’99, she watched me ride in the Tour de France. She was in bed, sick and exhausted for an entire week after an infusion of chemo, but she’d turn the TV on and follow the stages, as I rode through the mountains and in the lead of the Tour. She’d go into the bathroom and get sick, and then get in bed again, and watch me ride an alp. Then she’d get up, go into the bathroom and get sick again. “I’d get sick and then come back to the TV to get my hope back up,” she says.

I won the race on her 50th birthday. On the morning that I crossed the finish line in
Paris
, she was 50, and losing all of her hair. It was falling out in handfuls. But because I had won the Tour, she didn’t mind the loss anymore. She was so full of . . .
something
. . . that she didn’t care. Instead, she and her daughter went out on the deck, and as the breeze blew the loose strands of her thinning hair around her face, she stood there and gently pulled the rest of her hair away. She turned and threw the strands into the wind.

“Let the birds make nests out of it,” she said.

Any temptation I have to brood over losses is tempered by the knowledge that I can afford to lose just about anything, except my life and the lives of the people I care for. The less-than-excellent season of 2000–2001 would include losses, both on and off the bike, but it would have been immeasurably harder without that context. Like Sally says, my house is burned, but I can see the sky.

That year saw the beginning of a long, hard defense of my character. I’m surely the most drug-tested man on the planet. I’m tested anywhere from 30 to 40 times a year, both in and out of competition, and I welcome it, because frankly, it’s the only proof I have of my innocence.

How do you prove a negative? All I can do is to submit to the endless needles and cups, no matter what the time of day or how disrupting to my private life. Innocence is something I’ve had to declare and demonstrate on an almost daily basis, and not always successfully, either. “Doper,” the French scream at me. That’s okay. I have an easy heart.

I’ve never once failed a test. Not one. Nor do I intend to, ever. You know why? Because the only thing you’ll find evidence of is hard work, and there’s no test for that.

But no matter how many tests I took, there were still those who considered me guilty, a doper-mastermind who outwitted scientific communities across the globe, and the suspicion reached a height in 2000–2001.

For a while some people even believed I was given a miracle drug during chemo. Reporters used to call my oncologist, Dr. Craig Nichols, and grill him about what he had done to me: exactly what medications had I taken, and what were their effects?

Finally, one day, while yet another reporter was interrogating him as to how he had Frankensteined
me,
Dr. Nichols wearied of all the questions.

“I put in a third lung during surgery,” he said.

He waited for laughter. But there was none.

Dr. Nichols decided that much of the skepticism was based on disbelief that someone could not just survive cancer, but
prosper
. Most people thought if you had it, you were going to die, and even if you survived the treatment, it was inconceivable that you didn’t come out a cripple. But I challenged that assumption by returning to a full, productive life. I had behaved, Nichols said, “as if death was an option.”

“The treatment is very rigorous,” Dr. Nichols said. “There are some risks.”

“Such as?”

“Well, something as simple as an infection could become life-threatening.”

“You can’t kill me,” I said.

“I assure you I can.”

In some ways, fighting cancer and winning bike races were much simpler, more direct confrontations than the ones ahead in the coming months. How do you fight an invisible opponent like suspicion? You can’t; but that sort of acceptance doesn’t come easily to any of us, and sometimes the hardest thing in the world to do is . . . nothing.

How do you learn to cope with doubt, and, more important, self-doubt? And how do you learn how to lose?

Trouble is
,
you’re going to lose more than you’re going to win, no matter who you are. Most of us overreact when we lose, and over-celebrate when we win, and I’m no exception. I have a love-hate relationship with losing: it makes me brooding and quarrelsome. But the fact is, a loss is its own inevitable lesson, and it can be just as valuable as a victory in the range of experiences, if you’ll examine it.

When you ride a bike for a living, you see a lot of stuff, and after a while you understand that the races aren’t really races but expressions of human behavior; and that behavior can be brave, fraudulent, funny, seeking, uplifting, and downright parasitical. Some of what you see you like, and some of it you don’t like very much, and
it’s
all very interesting, and telling, but it ain’t war and it ain’t death and it ain’t childbirth, either, and what losing does is, it restores the perspective.

In August of 2000, I had yet another crackup on my bike. In
Italy
they say a cat has 12 or 13 lives, instead of nine. I must be an Italian cat, because it was my second life-threatening crash in a year.

I was out on a training ride in the hills above Nice with my Postal teammates Frankie Andreu and Tyler Hamilton, just a cruise to get our legs back after the Tour and begin preparing for the Olympics in
Sydney
,
Australia
.

A single lane ribboned up into the mountains above the city, and we followed it until it grew so narrow it didn’t have a center line. It was remote, which was why we chose it: you could ride it for hours and not see a single car. It was purely a chance deal that one ran straight into me.