Every Second Counts (9 page)

We whirled around a blind left-hand curve, me in the lead. Meantime, a French couple in their car sped into the curve from the opposite direction—and halfway around the turn, we piled into each other head-on. Behind me,
Tyler
swerved into a ditch. Frankie managed to steer clear.

There was a metallic clap, and my bike disintegrated. I sailed into the air over the hood of the car.

Frankie watched the wreckage of my bike as it clattered along the asphalt, a heap of broken and twisted metal tubes,
a
couple of them with Trek stickers.

I lay on the ground, dazed. Slowly, I sat up. I stared at the pieces of my bike. The frame itself was in three pieces, the fork was in two pieces, and the wheels were everywhere. The rear part of the bike had been torn from the chain, which was snapped in two.

I wondered if my arms and legs were in similar condition, and began a mental checklist of my body parts. My shoulder and neck hurt, bad. I glanced down and saw my helmet lying next to me. It was cracked in half like a walnut.

I moved a little, and felt an incredible stabbing pain in my back. It was as if a bone was trying to poke through my skin.

“Frankie, look at my back,” I said. “Is anything sticking out?”

“No, there’s nothing sticking out.”

“It’s got to be sticking out. I can feel it.”

Suddenly, I felt like lying down again. “Unnhhhhh,” I said, and fell back on the tarmac.

A Frenchman had gotten out of the car, and now he started yelling at us. Frankie and Tyler asked him for help, but it quickly became clear he wasn’t going to do anything but yell. Frankie and Tyler tried their cell phones, but the reception was lousy in the mountains and they couldn’t get through. They eyed the Frenchman. He wasn’t going to let us use his cell phone to call somebody, either.

Frankie and Tyler squatted in the dirt next to me, and the three of us conferred. We decided
Tyler
should ride down the mountain, until he either found help or until his cell phone worked and he could call Kik to come get us.

Tyler
rode off, and as I lay back down in the road, something occurred to me.

“Frankie,” I said, “
slide
me out of this road, so I don’t get run over.”

Frankie and I just sat there. To tell you how remote the road was, we didn’t see another car for the next two hours—and then it was Kik’s. That’s how desolate the road was, and how unlucky we were.

Meanwhile, Kik was experiencing her own drama.
Tyler
finally got through to her and explained what had happened, but she couldn’t hear well enough to make out the name of the village closest to us. The phone connection started breaking up. Kik heard, “We’re in (crackling noise), a place called (crackling noise).” Then the phone went dead.

Kik opened a map and stared at the tiny printed names of villages, trying to find one that sounded sort of like what she had heard. Finally, she saw it, and jabbed a pen at it.

She grabbed her keys and raced to a taxi stand, and found a driver we’d gotten to know, and asked if he would show her the way. He jumped in his car, and they took off, winding through the mountains. Finally, after about an hour and a half, they found us.

We were still sitting by the side of the road when Kik pulled up. She did a good job of seeming calm as she surveyed the wreckage, and loaded me and the remnants of my bike into the car.

As we drove down the mountain she asked, “Where does it hurt?” I said, “Right where my back meets my neck.”

Kik drove me straight to a local hospital for an
X
ray—but it didn’t show anything. “It’s just strained,” the doctor told me. I said to Kik, “That can’t be right,” but I went home and took some aspirin and waited for the pain to go away. Instead it got worse.

I went to a chiropractor, thinking maybe my back was out of alignment, but as soon as he touched me it felt like my spine was breaking in half. As I lay on the table, I began to cry. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried because something hurt—I must have been a boy. That did it; I went back to a hospital, this time a modern clinic in
Monaco
, for a CT scan.

The doctor said, “You’ve got a big problem here.” There on the screen was an unmistakable crack, and he explained that I’d fractured the C-7 vertebra of my spine, the link between my back and my neck.

“What’s that mean?” I said.

“Your neck is broken.”

I had no trouble believing it, after all that pain. I asked what it meant for my cycling. I explained that I planned to ride in the 2000 Olympics and was about to start my most important training. How long would I be off the bike? Would I be able to ride in
Sydney
?

The doctor looked at me skeptically. “You better think long and hard about that,” he said. “I wouldn’t advise it. You just won the Tour, what do you need the Olympics for? And if you fall on this injury again, it could be devastating.”

He explained the risks: it might be weeks before I regained range of motion in my neck and was able to fully turn my head. Without peripheral vision, all kinds of crashes could occur. It would be a day-to-day thing whether I’d be healthy enough to train, and even then, he didn’t think I should risk it. I told him I’d consider what he’d said, and went home to rest.

I had a decision to make. To me, it wasn’t a hard one: if I could ride, I was going. Crashes were unavoidable in cycling, and so was bad luck, and if you worried about falling off the bike, you’d never get on. I simply couldn’t pass up the Olympics; they were too meaningful. I could win six
Tours
, and yet if I lost the Olympic gold medal, people would say, “What’s wrong with this guy? I thought he was supposed to be a good cyclist.”

They were personally meaningful, too. So far, the Olympics represented nothing but failure and loss to me, and I wanted to change that. I hadn’t competed well in them in two tries.

I rode miserably as an inexperienced hothead in the 1992 Barcelona Games. I’d gone into the Atlanta Games in 1996 as an American favorite, but I rode disappointingly and finished out of the medals again, 6th in the time trial and 12th in the road race. It felt like I was dragging a manhole cover. I assumed it was the result of nerves, or because I hadn’t trained right, but shortly afterward I was diagnosed: it turned out I’d ridden with a dozen lung tumors. Cancer had cheated me out of a chance to win an Olympic medal on native soil.

There was an additional motive for going to
Sydney
. The Games would end on October 2, an important anniversary, four years to the day after the initial cancer diagnosis. To be at the Olympics on that day would be another way to kick the disease. Also, the coach of the
U.S.
team was my close friend Jim Ochowicz, who had sat at my bedside during all of my hospital stays and chemo treatments. It was Jim who, early in my career, shaped me into a champion cyclist, and he was also Luke’s godfather. I wanted to ride for him again, and I wanted to celebrate the cancer anniversary at the Olympics, with a gold medal as the centerpiece.

After a couple of weeks, my neck was still stiff but getting better, and I was able to ride, so I began training. Meanwhile, some prominent track stars dropped out of the Games, and there were suggestions in the press that they’d done so to avoid drug testing. I began to get calls from reporters, wondering if I would show up in
Sydney
. The implication was clear: a no-show would suggest that I had something to hide. What no one knew was how hectically I was trying to train to get there.

I arrived in
Sydney
, thrilled to see
Australia
for the first time. I felt I was in decent shape, and I still had every expectation of winning: to me, there was no other real reason to be there. I’d been to the Games twice before and come home without a medal—and I wasn’t in
Sydney
for a vacation, much as I loved the Australian scenery.

The first event was a 148-mile road race, and it would be the more difficult of my two events. The course was a long, flat one that didn’t especially favor our
U.S.
team, because there were no hard climbs on which to separate from other riders, which meant a pack finish. The winner would have to fight through a dense crowd of riders, and the field included Jan Ullrich and his German team.

Nothing went right, from the start. Our team was plagued by problems with our radios, and they went out at a crucial moment when we needed to communicate, screwing up our tactics. For a good portion I didn’t know where Ullrich was on the course. I thought he was behind me, so I bided my time, pacing myself. Late in the race I pulled up to my great friend and teammate George Hincapie, thinking that a big surge could win it.

“George, George, is anybody away?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

I got ready to make my final push. Then we passed one of the big Jumbotron monitors out on the course. It showed Ullrich—pulling for the finish line. It turned out he was in front of me—way in front. He had gotten away from me and I never even knew it.

“George, who’s that?”
I asked.

Ullrich sailed across the finish line for the gold, while I faded and crossed the finish line in 13th place. I had to laugh at the mishap. I wasn’t too disappointed, because we had been an outside shot at the medals to begin with. It was in the next event, the time trial, that I had the best, most realistic shot at a gold medal.

The 29-mile course snaked through the streets of
Sydney
and finished at a historic old cricket ground. Time trials were my strength; they required a rider to be as precise and technical as he was fast, and I’d won four of them over the last two years to claim Tour de France stages.

But again things just didn’t go quite right. There was no huge breakdown, just some minor slippage in form that cost me. After the first lap, I was a second off the lead pace, and the gap just widened from there. By the end of the second lap, I was six seconds down and clearly out of the running for the gold.

I finished more than a half a minute behind the winner, Viacheslav Ekimov.

There was some consolation: Eki was my U.S. Postal teammate and a man I was inordinately fond of and who I deeply respected. Ullrich got the silver medal. I got the bronze.

As upset as I was to lose, I was that happy for Eki. I’d lobbied hard to get him on our Postal team and he’d put it all on the line for me at the Tour, done hours of thankless work while I got the glory. Our friendship and respect was mutual. “Today I’m gold and he’s bronze,” Eki said. “He understands. Next year we’re together.”

I’d simply been beaten. I’d gone as hard as I could: my heart rate was pegged at a maximum rate of 190, which told me I’d gone all-out. When you prepare for an event and you do your best and then you don’t get it, you just have to say, I didn’t deserve to win. Someone was better.

“I felt good,” I told the press. “I can’t say that I had any major problems. No mechanical problems, no discomfort on the course, no problem with the neck. My preparation was good. I have no excuses. I gave everything and I got third place. The two riders in front of me were better and faster and stronger.”

After the medal ceremony I walked past my bike and kissed my family. Kik swore she had never been prouder of me. My mother summed up how she felt to a reporter.

“The thing is, he’s just lucky to be here,” she said. “Nothing can compare to that fact alone.”

But I couldn’t see that yet, I was too disappointed in myself. That night, we went out on a boat in
Sydney
Harbor
with several of our closest friends, and as I sat on deck and sipped wine, I felt as if I’d let down everyone who believed in me. I’d asked USA Cycling for a lot: extra bikes, extra mechanics, and special accommodations, and then I didn’t win. I stood up and offered a toast, and an apology.

“I just want everyone to know how sorry I am,” I said. “I know how much effort you all put into helping me get here, and into being here. I appreciate everything everybody did, and I just want you to know that. I couldn’t have gone any harder, any faster. And I’m sorry that I didn’t win.”

The next day was October 2, and Kik planned a trip for us into the Australian wine country, but by then my disappointment at losing the gold had seeped into me. I tried to enjoy the day, sampling the local wines, as we had lunch on a beautiful terrace overlooking the countryside. But I struggled to make conversation, and by the end of the day I was all but wordless.

The next morning I flew to
San Francisco
for a long-standing speaking engagement. I was still upset with myself when I landed, and when I called Kik to check in, she could hear it in my voice. Suddenly, she was upset, too.

“You know, I’ve never been more proud of you than when you lost,” she said. “But you just don’t get it. You don’t get it at all. You’re just being moody to everybody around you. You took a perfect day, when we had everything to be thankful for, and you ruined it.”

She was right, and I knew it. I apologized, and gave some thought to winning and losing, and how to handle each. When you win, you don’t examine it very much, except to congratulate yourself. You can easily, and wrongly, assume it has something to do with your rare qualities as a person. But winning only measures how hard you’ve worked and how physically talented you are; it doesn’t particularly define you beyond those characteristics.