Every Second Counts (14 page)

And racing is what I do. But it was beginning to occur to me that it’s also the
easiest
thing I do. It was a lot easier than, say, defending
myself
from a drug investigation, holding together a marriage, or trying to reconcile the conflict between faith and science.

E
arly that spring
I visited
Lourdes
, not to light candles or bathe in the waters, but to ride my bike in the mountains above the city.

One day, I ascended seven mountain passes over a distance of 130 miles. Some of the peaks were snowed in and I couldn’t get to them. I’d go as far as I could, turn my bike around and coast to the bottom, and then ride up again, just to get another big climb in.

Obsessive training was one way to escape the frustrations of the drug inquiry, which still dragged on. First the French authorities said it would conclude before the Tour, but it remained open. The assistant prosecutor, François Franchi, had asked for a new round of tests—for what, he couldn’t say. “For now we haven’t found any EPO,” he said. “We don’t have anything concrete or positive.” They continued to try in vain to find something in my urine.

My friend Robin Williams joked, “What is it, a chardonnay? It gets better with age?”

The best revenge, I decided, was to win the Tour again. Another victory might not satisfy the skeptics, but at least it would satisfy me.

This time, my son would be old enough to understand a little bit of what I did for a living. I schooled him well.

“Who’s going to win?” I’d ask him.

“DADDY!” he’d yell.

The Tour began on the coast of northern
France
, at
Dunkirk
, with a short prologue in the rain to a seafront finish. Luke loved being at the race. He hung out with me at the team bus and showed off all the words he knew, by pointing to a bike, wheel, truck, and so on. He kept offering me bites of his sandwich as I warmed up for the prologue. I politely declined—it wasn’t the ideal pre-race snack.

“What is Daddy’s color?” I asked.

“Yo-yo,” he answered.

He couldn’t really say yellow, so everything was yo-yo, all day long. Yo-yo bus, yo-yo bike, yo-yo truck . . . you get the idea. It was a constant yo-yo commentary.

I grinned at the start—I’d been waiting for this moment. I beat the pedals down the straightaway, and across the rain-slick streets of
Dunkirk
. But I finished a faintly disappointing third. Daddy wasn’t wearing yo-yo. Luke would have to wait—for longer than anyone expected.

We wound through northeastern
France
, racing parallel to the
English Channel
, and Jan Ullrich and I marked each other. Once again, he was the rider to beat, the most talented and credible challenger in the peloton. He came into the race superbly fit, in much better form than in the previous year, with jutting cheekbones and muscles bulging under his racing skins. “It’s now or never,” Ullrich declared.

We went to Verdun, the garrison town about 160 miles from Paris where 600,000 soldiers from France and Germany and America lost their lives in World War I, and where I’d won my first Tour stage in 1993. This time, we raced in a team time trial. The 41.5-mile course was buffeted by wind and rain, and about halfway through, two of our Postal riders, Christian Vande Velde and Roberto Heras, hit a newly painted road line. Vande Velde’s bike skidded out from under him, and their wheels touched. They went down in a clattering heap. Christian broke his arm and had to abandon the Tour. Roberto would ride sorely for a week.

We rode on for days through a relentless downpour. Finally, we turned away from the coast and toward the mountains, and after eight stages we reached the foothills of the
Alps
.

By the time we arrived, we were behind, badly. A previously unsung French rider named François Simon and a talented young Russian named Andreï Kivilev had succeeded in a major breakaway, and Simon was the leader in the yellow jersey—by a huge margin of 35 minutes. It had happened because we were too conservative. When they got down the road, nobody wanted to chase them down—we thought it was more important to conserve our strength as much as possible early in the race, and so did everybody else. It was like a poker game to see who was bluffing, only nobody was willing to put their cards on the table, so Simon opened his huge gap unchallenged. I was well back in 24th place, and Ullrich was in 27th.

There would be some long, hard days of chasing ahead, particularly given the presence of Kivilev. Simon was not a climber and we all knew he would recede in the mountains. But Kivilev, a 27-year-old riding for Cofidis, was in fourth place, 33:14 ahead of me, and I suspected he wouldn’t go away. I’d been watching him for some time, and what I saw was a cyclist who was rising fast to the top of the sport, who had both work ethic and ability. The truth was
,
I wished he was on my team instead of someone else’s. But what I couldn’t know at the time was that Andreï would never get the chance to fulfill his potential: two years later, he would be killed in a high-speed crash. His performance in this Tour would become a haunting suggestion of what might have been.

The breakaway blew up Johan’s carefully plotted race plan for our Postal team. We had to sit down and make a new strategy. Johan kept calm. We would simply have to ride harder, he said; it would take us a few days longer to get the yellow jersey. “We’ll have to attack at every opportunity,” he said.

Once again the first mountain stage would be critical, psychologically and physically. The mountains were always where the field sorted itself out, and where real fitness prevailed. In this Tour, the first mountain stage would be the Alpe d’Huez, which was among the most mythically cruel mountains in
France
.

It was a stage of 130 miles, with 6,000 feet of climbing over three big peaks rated
hors de catégorie
—beyond category in difficulty. But the first two climbs were mere precursors to the Alpe d’Huez, a steep 12 miles up with 21 switchbacks.

I wanted the Alpe d’Huez. It’s among the most famous and most historically revered climbs in the Tour de France. It’s not very long, but it’s very steep, and all of the switchbacks have been numbered, and on every number a former winner’s name is written. It’s a cycling lover’s climb.

But as a team, we were not in good shape. It had been a hard first week, between the rain and a constant crosswind on the roads. Christian was out. Roberto had tendinitis in his knee, which was heavily bandaged. Also, Tyler Hamilton had crashed on a stage to
Antwerp
, and had tendinitis all through his left arm and wrist. Those of us who weren’t outright injured were sore and tired. The wind meant you could never take a rest on the bike, and the cost was beginning to show. The effects of the Tour were cumulative; every day took a little more away from your legs.

With so many riders on our team injured or not feeling well, we had doubts about how we would hold up over those three peaks. I was feeling okay—but I couldn’t ride at the front all by myself and still expect to have anything left for the Alpe d’Huez.

Meanwhile, Ullrich’s Deutsche Telekom team looked strong and healthy to a man—and leading Ullrich up the mountains would be my old friend Kevin Livingston.

That morning, Ullrich and his team did the hard work early, riding at the front of the peloton. We hung back and paced ourselves. Sometimes you have to be flexible; to employ a different style of riding than you’re accustomed to.

I radioed Johan that I wanted to come back to the car. Johan sped up, and I drifted over to talk to him. As I rode parallel to the car window, we discussed the situation. “Maybe it’s not a bad thing to show some weakness,” Johan said. “If they think you’re in bad shape, they’ll ride harder. We’ll relax until the bottom of the Alpe d’Huez. And then we go.”

Basically, Johan wanted me to bluff. By feigning fatigue, I might sucker Telecom into spending too much energy trying to put me away. I’d have to be both an actor and a cyclist for much of the day. But if it worked, it would give us a better chance of winning the stage, we decided.

As we rode up the first severe peak, the Col de Madeleine, I sagged over my handlebars and grimaced. The first mountain stage is always a shock to the body, and the riders who aren’t in great shape can crack right away. Halfway up the Madeleine, three riders abandoned the race—pulled over and quit. I acted as though I might soon join them. I lagged at the back of the peloton, in the posture of a suffering dog, head hanging, as if I’d rather be anywhere but on a bike. Other riders began to wonder if I was sick, and so did the television announcers covering the race. Even my own teammates were a little anxious.

Each team had a follow car with a TV in it, from which the race directors watched the action carefully and listened to the comments from other teams. Later, it would be hugely entertaining to watch a replay of the race and listen to the announcers. My friend, commentator Paul Sherwen, called the action for the
U.S.
telecast. “Armstrong looking in a spot of trouble,” he said.

I slogged along at the back of the group. The back was where the hangers-on were, barely keeping pace. A rider at the back was a rider in for a long day. “We haven’t seen Lance Armstrong riding anywhere near the front of this group,” Sherwen said. “He’s having a rough ride.”

Ullrich and his Telekom teammates took the bait—they surged to the front and started riding at a hot tempo, excited. Clearly, they had gotten the message that I was hurting. They responded exactly as Johan had predicted they would. They did all the work at the front, while we drafted at the back.

For the next several hours, Telekom led the peloton. They pumped at their pedals up and down the mountain passes, for miles and miles. Meantime, I rode along looking weak. I sucked water from a bottle, I hung my head, and my chest heaved with the supreme effort of turning the wheels.

My teammate José Luis “Chechu” Rubiera faded back to the car to pick up more water bottles, as if I needed them. Johan handed several bottles through the window to Rubiera. “There’s obviously a problem here for Armstrong,” Sherwen reported. “. . . Armstrong is obviously drinking an awful lot of liquid today.”

Johan asked Chechu how I was really doing. “Hey, he is flying,” Chechu said. “He’s just easy.”

A member of the TV press came by on a motorbike and interviewed Johan through the window of his car. Johan knew that whatever he said would be picked up by the other teams, listening to the coverage.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” Johan said. “This is not normal for Lance, I’ve never seen him like that, and the rest of the team is not so good, either. So for the moment we’ll just try to survive.”

At the front, Telekom drove on all the harder, surging. The road began to bite into everyone’s legs. The hillsides were verdant and grew steeper. The road narrowed, and the cliffs crept closer to our shoulders, and around corners you could see glaciers in the distance.

The announcers continued to provide useful commentary on my weak form. “It’s a long way back to see Armstrong, he does not look good, and he should not be riding so far down the group, he’s obviously having a horrendous day.”

We went over the top of another big climb, the Col du Glandon, and headed down the most beautiful descent in the entire Tour, past a dammed lake at the bottom of an undulating, green valley, with jagged ice peaks looming.

“Don’t you think we should move to the front?” Chechu asked.

“Just wait,” I said. I added, in Spanish, “
Miramos, esperamos, decidimos,
atacamos
.”

“Let’s see, let’s wait, let’s decide, and then attack.”

I slipped up to 12th place over the Glandon. We skirted a lake, and ran along the edge of a giant granite cliff. The shifting temperatures began to get to us; it was hot in the valleys and cold on the
peaks,
and the disparity made your muscles seize up.

The stage leader up to that point was a Frenchman, Laurent Roux, and just behind him was Ullrich. I was more than seven minutes behind.

“Just a little?”
Chechu asked. “Shouldn’t you move up just a little?”

“Chechu,” I said.
“
Miramos, esperamos, decidimos, atacamos
.”

Johan drove the team car up, and I consulted with him in person. Johan stuck his head out the window and I rode close to the car. Over the years, I’ve picked up some Flemish from Johan, and as we put our heads together, we talked half in English and half in Flemish.

“Okay, this looks great,” he said. “Everything’s perfect. When we get to the bottom of the Alpe d’Huez, that’s when you go. And when you go, go
vollebak
.”

Vollebak
means “full gas.” Floor it.

“
Vollebak
,” he said again. “You got it?”

“You’re going to see
vollebak
like you’ve never seen
vollebak
,” I said.

I rejoined Chechu. We began to approach the Alpe d’Huez. Ullrich was still riding at the front.

Chechu said, “Now?”

“Okay. Watch the show,” I said.

We surged forward. The huge crowds on the sides of the road seemed to part as we accelerated.