Every Second Counts (22 page)

The 2002 USPS team was made up of like-minded riders. By that I don’t mean that we agreed on politics, or music. We simply shared an ethic. The reason we did so was that Johan and I had spent the previous five years carefully identifying, recruiting, and signing the kind of people we wanted to work with. Cycling is a free-agent world: it’s a sport full of riders who will subtly hold back, and ride for themselves rather than the team, with only their own contracts in mind. We didn’t have room for that. We’d had riders on the team we suspected of feeling that way—and they weren’t on the team anymore.

Over the years, other riders had come and gone simply because they were so good that they were lured away to lead their own teams.
Free agency makes it doubly difficult to form a cohesive team, because the personnel changes regularly from year to year, and 2002 was no exception: Tyler Hamilton, who’d helped me to three Tour victories, was stolen away from us to lead a Danish squad. (He remained a good friend and close neighbor.) But hopefully all of our riders, present and future, are of a type, committed to the team strategy and to doing the small things right.

At the start of each season we started training with 20 USPS riders from all over the world. Various factors went into selecting the nine team members who would take the start line in the Tour de France, including who was riding well at that time of year, and what roles they could fill—we needed some climbers, we needed some guys for the flats, and we needed domestiques—but what mattered most was how much they were willing to sacrifice. If you weren’t thinking “team,” you got left home. It was that plain.

We called it Dead Man’s Rules. If you violated the ethic, broke the rules, crossed the line, you were off the team. Everybody went into the Tour knowing there was no self-interest. It was all-team, or all-nothing. If a guy wasn’t thinking this way, then we didn’t want him, not even if he was one of the best riders in the world, because it wasn’t a good fit for us. That didn’t always make us the best of friends with people outside the organization—I was viewed by some as a cold-blooded tyrant. I didn’t talk much to other riders. If you weren’t on the Postal team, I wasn’t a social butterfly.

We wanted riders who rode with 100 percent aggression. The Postal formula to prepare for the Tour was simple: measure the weight of the body, the weight of the bike, and the power of the legs. Make the weight go down, and the power go up. We watched our diet, were consistent in training habits, and went over every inch of the course. (You’d think every team would do it, but they don’t.) We didn’t accept slacking—you have to know that everybody is working as hard as you are—but we encouraged good humor, because we believed it was excellent painkiller. You had to mix laughs with the hard work, and be able to tease each other without getting offended.

A couple of weeks before the 2002 Tour, Johan named the nine who would be on the start line. Each rider would have to play a different role and serve a different need over the various stages of the race. But their main job was to keep everybody out of the winner’s circle but me.

The team:

George Hincapie was a dryly funny man and one of the most accomplished men in American cycling. He was true-blue, like a brother to me, solid and serious about his professional responsibilities every day. Nothing ever seemed to faze
George,
or his chronic wit—not even the hardest stage of the Tour.

I described George’s style as “fingers in the nose.” You could see other people breathing hard, with their mouths hanging open, gasping for air through their ears, through their eyes, through their pores. But even when George was in a full sprint, you never saw his nostrils flare. It was as though he didn’t need to breathe, didn’t even have to use his nose. That was George, fingers in the nose.

Victor Peña (
Colombia
), Pavel Padrnos (
Czech
Republic
), and Benoît Joachim (
Belgium
) were consummate Tour domestiques, professional cyclists who could and did win different types of races around the world, but who for three weeks were willing to subjugate their efforts to the peculiar job of the world’s longest stage race, for the sheer honor of the thing. They were formidable, stone-faced, and hard-bodied, and some people were afraid to talk to them because of how they looked, but the truth is, they were big teddy bears who gave of themselves every day and always looked for a way to help. They protected me from 200 other riders who wanted to beat up on me, guarded me against crashes and sideswipes, chased down breakaways, ferried food and water,
sheltered
me from the wind. The longer they could stay in front of me, the fresher my legs would be at the end.

I liked to say of my old friend Viacheslav Ekimov, the Olympic champion, that he was nails.
Meaning, “hard as.”
He never complained, never whined, always delivered. We’d rather have his ethic on the team than some million-dollar talent who only rode hard when he felt like it.

Ekimov had retired at the end of the 2001 season, but he already missed cycling. He called Johan in February, when we were in a training camp in
Europe
, and said he wanted to race again, and he asked if there was still a place for him. “For you there’s always a place on the team,” Johan said. Eki started training, but we figured he wouldn’t be race-ready until after the Tour. Typically, he showed up in early May at training camp, race-fit, the most in-shape of any of us.

Johan watched him for a few days, and said, “Eki, what do you think of the Tour de France this year?”

“What about it?” Eki said.

“Would you like to do it?”

“Yeah, I would love to do it.”

“Well, you have no choice. You have to do it. We need you.”

From then on, Ekimov was one of our freshest riders. He had the mentality of a junior, excited to be there again, and happy every day that he was on the bike.

Roberto Heras and José Luis “Chechu” Rubiera were young Spaniards with beautifully civilized manners, but on bicycles they climbed mountains with leg-breaking intensity. Heras was slightly-built and reserved, but when he was on the bike scaling an alp he seemed to flutter with a hyperkinetic, hummingbird quality. He was so good that there were times when I had trouble keeping the pace he set.

Chechu was an easy laugher, one of the more gregarious and well-loved men on the team, but he had his serious side, too. He was an engineering student who brought his textbooks on the team bus. Both of these guys gave of themselves on every ride, no matter how sore or banged up they were. They never held back, or seemed to have an off day. Or a bad mood, either.

Then there was Floyd Landis. One afternoon we were out riding together, and I said, “Who do you think we should pick for the Tour?”

“Well, obviously, I’m going to say me,” he said.

I laughed. Then I named our seven top riders. I finished up by saying, “And, obviously, you.”

Floyd almost jumped off his bike with excitement.
“Really?
Really?”

“If things keep going the way they are,” I said.

The last big tune-up race before the Tour was called the Dauphiné Libéré. I won it—and Floyd got second. It was the first time Floyd had done anything in a European race, a huge result for a novice, and it was obvious he was the right choice for a teammate. I patted myself on the back for being smart enough to recognize how good he was before he saw it for himself. He was well-rounded, he could climb, he could time-trial, and he could handle himself in the peloton, didn’t get scared with the high-speed pushing and shoving. Mainly, he wouldn’t quit; he was a stubborn bastard.

With so many different languages on the team, we ended up speaking a kind of pidgin or shorthand with each other. We swapped phrases and colloquialisms, and developed our own jokes. I taught Chechu to “raise the roof.” He was so studious that it was doubly funny when he would act silly, and it sent us all into fits when he raised the roof.

“Chechu, where is the roof?” we’d ask.

The surest way to crack up the boys at dinner or on the team bus was to teach some Americanism to a civilized man like Eki or Pavel. They spoke excellent English, but they puzzled over our more casual terms.

Eki would say to Hincapie, “George, what is that thing you always say, ‘How you doing?’ ”

Pavel was one of the quieter riders, who just did his job and rarely spoke up. We almost never heard from him on the team radios, until finally one day as we were riding, he asked for a mechanic because something was wrong with his bike. Johan dispatched a staffer to fix the problem, and then we heard Johan say, “Okay, Pavel, is it better now?”

“Less or more,” Pavel said.

We all cracked up. I tried to explain it to him. “It’s ‘
more
or
less
,’ ” I said. “The term is ‘more or less.’ ”

“Well, it’s the same thing.”

“No. No it’s not.”

“How can it be different?” he said.
“Less or more, more or less?
What is that?”

He argued with me for the longest time.

We traded harmless insults, based on each other’s nationalities, limitations, personalities, and habits. Mostly we shared jokes that nobody else would think were funny.

Every day, I’d go to the gym to work out with George, and we’d sit side by side on the stationary bikes.

One afternoon, George said, “Got any tape?”

“Why?”

“’Cause I’m ripped,” he said, and made a muscle.

Laughter took away the suffering of training. Our jokes were profane and boyish and silly, but within the team, among nine people who knew and loved and trusted each other, mouthing off was an important part of every day, our ritual morale-builder.

“Give me a frickin’
tricycle,
and I’ll kick some ass,” I’d say.

We would make up jingles on the bike. Floyd would ride along beside me, and he would start to sing, “Somebody’s going to be my bitch today, bitch today,
bitch
today.” All the guys would start screaming, “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!” and get excited.

George had a saying, when he was feeling really good: “No chain.” The chain on the bike cranked the wheels and created the tension in your legs that drove the bike forward. But imagine if you didn’t have a chain. You’d spin nothing, air, which would feel real easy. So George and I had this thing.

“Man, can you check something for me?” he’d say.

“What?”

“I don’t feel a chain,” he’d say. “Is there a chain on my bike?”

It became shorthand, “No chain.”

I’d say, “Hey, how good do you feel today, George?”

“No chain, no chain.”

A
t the start
line of the 2002 Tour de France, I decided to wear a plain, regular workaday blue jersey, indistinguishable from those of my teammates. I wanted to set the tone for the entire race: it was traditional for the defending champion to begin the race in the yellow jersey, but I didn’t want to single myself out, and we hadn’t done anything to deserve the jersey yet in this year’s race. I said to Johan, “Let’s earn it.”

The prologue would be a seven-kilometer sprint through the majestic streets of
Luxembourg
, with spires looming as a backdrop, and it was important to me to earn the yellow jersey on that very first day. I’d lost a couple of time trials in tune-up races, and there were the inevitable murmurs in the peloton that maybe I was slipping; every rider would be watching for signs that I was beatable. I wanted to promptly disabuse them of the notion. A win in the prologue would send a message that said, “Hey guys, I’m here, this is the Tour, not some tune-up, and things are different.”

There was history at stake, too: I was trying to become only the fourth rider ever to win four straight
Tours
. The list of others who had done so was short and illustrious: Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx,
Miguel
Indurain.

But it would be difficult: 189 other riders would try to beat me to the finish, and then there was that timeless opponent, the course itself. It would cover 2,034 miles, and three days before the finish into
Paris
, we’d still be in the mountains. What that meant was that if you had a bad day, you could run out of road before you could make up the time.

The Tour organizers had made a significant alteration to the route: it would be shorter, but more severe. It was clear that they wanted to design a race that would be more difficult for me, specifically. I’d ridden so strongly and taken such big leaps in the mountains during the previous Tour victories that there was a feeling the race had been boring in the later stages. This time, the course was set up to keep the outcome in doubt until the end, with four key mountain stages in the final eight. Three days before we rode into
Paris
, we’d still be in the mountains.

In the end, the winner would be the one with the best team, who had managed to stay fresh. I was convinced that Postal was the strongest and best team, especially when we surveyed a field of riders that didn’t include Jan Ullrich. He’d had a tough year, injuring his knee, and then wrecking a car after a night out, and he was absent.