It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (27 page)

THE BIKE SWAYED UNDER ME AS I WORKED THE PEDALS,

and my shoulders began heaving with fatigue. I felt a creeping exhaustion, and my body was moving all over the top of the bike. My nostrils flared, as I struggled to breathe, fighting for any

extra air at all. I bared my teeth in a half-snarl.

It was still a long haul to the finish, and I was concerned Zulle would catch me. But I maintained my rhythm.

I glanced over my shoulder, half expecting to see Zulle on my wheel.

No one was there.

I faced forward again. Now I could see the finish line–it was all uphill the rest of the way. I

drove toward the peak.

Was I thinking of cancer as I rode those last few hundred yards? No. I’d be lying if I said I was. But I think that directly or indirectly, what had happened over the past two years was with me.

It was stacked up and stored away, everything I’d been through, the bout with cancer, and the disbelief within the sport that I could come back. It either made me faster or them slower, I

don’t know which.

As I continued to climb, I felt pain, but I felt exultation, too, at what I could do with my body. To race and suffer, that’s hard. But it’s not being laid out in a hospital bed with a catheter

hanging out of your chest, platinum burning in your veins, throwing up for 24 hours straight, five days a week.

What was I thinking? A funny thing. I remembered a scene in Good Will Hunting, a movie in which Matt Damon plays an alienated young math prodigy, an angry kid from the wrong side of

the South Boston tracks, not unlike me. In the film he tries to socialize with some upper-class Harvard students in a bar, and wins a duel of wits with a pompous intellectual to win a girl’s

affections.

Afterward Damon gloats to the guy he bested, “Hey. Do you like apples?”

“Yeah,” the guy says, “I like apples.”

“Well, I got her phone number,” Damon says triumphantly. “How do you like them apples?”

I climbed those hundreds of meters, sucking in the thin mountain air, and I thought of that movie, and grinned.

As I approached the finish line, I spoke into my radio to my friends in the support car, Johan and Thorn Weisel.

“Hey, Thorn, Johan,” I said. “Do you like apples?”

Their puzzled reply crackled in my ear.

“Yeah, we like apples. Why?”

I yelled into the mouthpiece, “How do you like them fuckin’ apples!” I hit the finish line with my arms upraised, my eyes toward the sky. And then I put my hands to my face in disbelief.

IN HER HOTEL ROOM IN ITALY, MY WIFE SAT IN FRONT of the television, sobbing.

Later that day in Indianapolis, LaTrice Haney and the staff of the medical center, and all of the patients on the ward, stopped what they were doing to watch the taped coverage. As I mounted

the hill, increasing my lead, they stared at their televisions. “He did it,” LaTrice said. “He conquered it. He conquered it.”

With the climb into Sestriere I now led the Tour de France by six minutes, three seconds.

You DON’T REALLY SEE THE MOUNTAINS AS YOU RIDE through them. There is no time to dwell on the view, on the majestic cliffs and precipices and shelves that rise on either

side of you, looming rock with glaciers and peaks, falling away into green pastures. All you really notice is the road in front of you, and the riders in back of you, because no lead is safe in

the mountains.

On the morning after Sestriere I rose early and had breakfast with the team. We went through 25 boxes of cereal each week, and dozens and dozens of eggs. First I powered down some

muesli, then a plate of three or four eggs, and after that I shoveled in some pasta. It would be another long, hard climbing day, and I needed every ounce of carbo-driven energy I could find.

We would be riding the Alpe d’Huez, a stage that held as much mystique as any in the Tour, a 1,000-meter climb over 14 kilometers, with a nine-degree gradient. The ascent in-eluded 21

tortuous hairpin turns, a seemingly endless series of switchbacks leading to the summit. It was hot going up and cold coming down, and in some places the road was only as wide as my

handlebars. Back in the early 1900s, when the mountain climbs were added to the Tour for the first time, one rider completed the journey up on his ponderous old contraption, and then turned

to race organizers at the roadside and screamed, “You’re all murderers!”

I wanted to avoid any high drama on the Alpe d’Huez. I didn’t need to attack as I had at Sestriere, I simply needed to keep my chief opponents in check: Abraham Olano was six minutes

and three seconds behind me, and Alex Zulle was in fourth place, trailing by seven minutes, 47 seconds. Fernando Escartin was in eighth place, down by nine minutes. The goal for the day

was to be steady and not to give back any of the time I had gained at Sestriere.

We reached the base of the Alpe d’Huez. I wanted to let the team know I was in good shape, because morale was critical on a tough climb. Everybody had an earpiece and access to the

two-way radio, so I knew they could all hear me.

“Hey,Johan,” I said.

“Yes, Lance,” he said, in that monotone.

“I could do this thing on a damn tricycle. It’s not a problem.”

I could hear cackling in the background.

We rode at a fast tempo, to limit the attacks and whittle down the riders who could challenge us. First, Tyler Hamilton pulled me up the mountain. I sat on his wheel and talked to him the

whole way, right into his ear. We moved past Olano. Johan came over the radio, reporting,

“Olano is dropped. Great job.” Here came Manuel Beltran, one of Zulle s teammates. I yelled at Tyler. “Are you going to let Beltran do that to you?”

We had 10K to go, about 30 minutes of work, straight uphill. Suddenly, here came Escartin and his teammate, Carlos Contreras, accelerating into the climb. Then Pavel Tonkov, a teammate of

Tom Steels, launched an attack. Tyler was done. He had nothing left, so I had to chase down Tonkov myself. Then came Zulle, with Beltran pulling him, while the French climber, Richard

Virenque, came up and sat on my wheel. They were all trying to put me on the ropes.

But I wasn’t tiring. All of this action was fine by me, because as long as I stayed with them no one could make up any significant time on me. I continued along in fourth place, keeping an eye

on everything. We had 4K to go to reach the summit, about six and a half more minutes of duress. An Italian, Giuseppe Guerini, a decorated rider who had twice finished third in the Tour

of Italy, charged. But Guerini was 15 minutes down in the overall standings, and I didn’t need to counter him. I let him go. Meanwhile, Zulle finally cracked. He couldn’t keep the pace.

Guerini opened up a 20-second lead–and then, unbelievably, he hit a spectator. The spectators had been flirting with disaster for days, skipping across the road in front of the peloton, and now

a frenzied fan had leaped into the middle of the road with his Instamatic, and stood there taking pictures. Guerini moved one way and then the other, trying to avoid him, but plowed right into

him with the handlebars, and went over. It was a classic Tour moment, proof that no lead was safe. Guerini jumped up unhurt and continued on, but now Tonkov was breathing on him.

Fortunately, Guerini got over the line first, the stage winner.

I finished the stage in fifth place. I now had a lead of 7:42 over Olano in the overall. Zulle, for all his work, had made up only seconds, and trailed by 7:47.

Just a typical day in the Tour de France.

I WAS MAKING ENEMIES IN THE ALPS. MY NEWLY ACquired climbing prowess aroused suspicion in the French press, still sniffing for blood after the scandal of the previous

summer. A whispering campaign began: “Armstrong must be on something.” Stories in L’Equipe and Le Monde insinuated, without saying it outright, that my comeback was a little

too miraculous.

I knew there would be consequences for Sestriere–it was almost a tradition that any rider who wore the yellow jersey was subject to drug speculation. But I was taken aback by the

improbable nature of the charges in the French press: some reporters actually suggested that chemotherapy had been beneficial to my racing. They speculated that I had been given some

mysterious drug during the treatments that was performance-enhancing. Any oncologist in the world, regardless of nationality, had to laugh himself silly at the suggestion.

I didn’t understand it. How could anybody think for a second that somehow the cancer treatments had helped me? Maybe no one but a cancer patient understands the severity of the

treatment. For three straight months I was given some of the most toxic substances known to man, poisons that ravaged my body daily. I still felt poisoned–and even now, three years after

the fact, I feel that my body isn’t quite rid of it yet.

I had absolutely nothing to hide, and the drug tests proved it. It was no coincidence that every time Tour officials chose a rider from our team for random drug testing, I was their man. Drug

testing was the most demeaning aspect of the Tour: right after I finished a stage I was whisked to an open tent, where I sat in a chair while a doctor wrapped a piece of rubber tubing around

my arm, jabbed me with a needle, and drew blood. As I lay there, a battery of photographers flashed their cameras at me. We called the doctors the Vampires. “Here come the Vampires,”

we’d say. But the drugs tests became my best friend, because they proved I was clean. I had been tested and checked, and retested.

In front of the media, I said, “My life and my illness and my career are open.” As far as I was concerned, that should have been the end of it. There was nothing mysterious about my ride at

Sestriere: I had worked for it. I was lean, motivated, and prepared. Sestriere was a good climb for me. The gradient suited me, and so did the conditions–cold, wet, and rainy. If there was

something unusual in my performance that day, it was the sense of out-of-body effortlessness I rode with– and that I attributed to sheer exultation in being alive to make the climb. But the

press didn’t back off, and I decided to take a couple of days off from talking to them.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Postal team was a blue express-train. We entered the transition stages between the Alps and the Pyrenees, riding through an area called the Massif Central. It was odd

terrain, not mountainous but hardly flat, either, just constantly undulating so that your legs never got a rest. The roads were lined with waving fields of sunflowers as we turned south toward the

Pyrenees.

It was brutal riding; all we did was roll up and down the hills, under constant attack. There was never a place on the route to coast and recover, and riders came at us from all directions.

Somehow, we kept most of them in check and controlled the peloton, but the days were broiling and full of tension. It was so hot that in places the road tar melted under our wheels.

Frankie, George, Christian, Kevin, and Peter worked the hardest. Frankie would start the rolling climbs, setting a strong tempo and dropping riders. When Frankie got tired, George would pull,

and a few more riders would fall by the wayside, unable to keep our pace. Then came Tyler, who would pick up the pace, dropping even more of our competitors. Finally, I would be left

with Kevin, pulling me through the steeps. In that way we whittled down the field.

Each day, the attacks continued. The other riders still felt we were vulnerable, and they were determined to wear us out. We reached a section called the Homme Mort, the Dead Man’s

Climb, a series of undulations that lasted for miles. The breakaways were constant, and our guys were falling apart: Peter Meinert-Neilsen’s knee was sore, Kevin was sick as a dog from the

temperature changes in the Alps, and Frankie and George were blown from carrying the load. Everybody’s feet hurt, because they swelled in our bike shoes in all that heat.

All of a sudden 30 guys sprinted up the road, and we had to chase them down. It was a flash of my old self–I took off. I didn’t wait for Tyler or Frankie or anybody. I just went. I caught up to

them, and rode at the front, alone. Then the radio crackled, and I heard Kevin’s voice yelling at me. “Goddammit, what are you doing?” I had fallen back into my oldest bad habit, a senseless

charge and waste of energy. “Just back off,” Kevin warned me. “You don’t need to do that.”

I sat up and said, “Okay,” and I faded back, to conserve myself, while the other Postal riders did the chasing.

What did I think about on the bike for six and seven hours? I get that question all the time, and it’s not a very exciting answer. I thought about cycling. My mind didn’t wander. I didn’t

daydream. I thought about the techniques of the various stages. I told myself over and over that this was the kind of race in which I had to always push if I wanted to stay ahead. I worried

about my lead. I kept a close watch on my competitors, in case one of them tried a breakaway. I stayed alert to what was around me, wary of a crash.

For five monotonous days and nights, we rode through Central France toward the Pyrenees, from Saint-Etienne to Saint-Galmier to Saint-Flour to Albi to Castres to Saint-Gaudens. Stage

13 was the longest of the tour, and the hottest, with seven climbs and no flats. Frankie said the route profile looked like the edge of a saw blade, and that’s what it felt like. Peter

Meinert-Neilsen finally abandoned with his bad knee. Some of the hotels were so tiny, Frankie complained that when he sat on the toilet, his knees hit the bathroom door. George claimed that

he and Frankie, who were rooming together, couldn’t open their suitcases at the same time.

On the bike, we were always hungry and thirsty. We snacked on cookies, tarts, almond cakes, oatmeal-raisin cookies, nutrition bars, any kind of simple carbohydrate. We gulped sugary

thirst-quenching drinks, Cytomax during the day and Metabol at the end of it.