Encore

It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
by Lance Armstrong, Sally Jenkins

(Page 2 of 2)

Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever. That surrender, even the smallest act of giving up, stays with me. So when I feel like quitting, I ask myself, which would I rather live with? Facing up to that question, and finding a way to go on, is the real reward, better than any trophy, as I would learn all over again in the 2000 season.

By now you've figured out I'm into pain. Why? Because it's self-revelatory, that's why. There is a point in every race when a rider encounters his real opponent and understands that it's himself. In my most painful moments on the bike, I am at my most curious, and I wonder each and every time how I will respond. Will I discover my innermost weakness, or will I seek out my innermost strength? It's an open-ended question whether or not I will be able to finish the race. You might say pain is my chosen way of exploring the human heart.

I don't always win. Sometimes just finishing is the best I can do. But with each race, I feel that I further define my capacity for living. That's why I ride, and why I try to ride hard, even when I don't have to. I don't want to live forever, I'll die when I'm done living, but until then I intend to ride my bike-and I'll probably keel over on it.

Every year that I get back on the bike and try to win another Tour de France is another year that I've survived the illness. Maybe that's why winning a second Tour de France was so important to me-because to me, cycling is the same as living. I intended to win another Tour, and the reason I intended to was because nobody thought I could. They figured that my comeback of 1999 was miracle enough. But I no longer viewed my cycling career as a comeback, I view it as a confirmation and a continuation of what I've done as a cancer survivor.

The 2000 Tour would go counterclockwise around France, and include some of the most difficult stages any of us had ever ridden. We would start at Futuroscope, with a time trial of just over ten miles. From there we would ride a series of flat early stages, once again favoring the sprinters, and then, as far as I was concerned, the real race would begin when we entered the Pyrenees for Stage 10.

It was strange to arrive at Futuroscope. It felt as though I had just been there a few days earlier, when it had been a full year. The time seemed out of proportion and the sense of déjà vu was enhanced by the fact that we stayed in exactly the same hotel as we had the previous year. In a way that was reassuring: it made me feel like I knew how to win a Tour de France. My teammates felt the same; this was the fourth year for most of us on the Postal team, and we had started out with a couple of rickety campers, but now we had a caravan of trucks and buses jammed with every amenity.

We managed to get through the first stages unscathed, with no one on the team losing any time to crashes. There was one occasion of near-disaster, though, in the middle of the first week. It came during a tricky team time trial through the Loire from Nantes to St. Lazaire. In a team time trial, each team's stage time is determined by the time of the fifth man across the finish line. That time is then added to each rider's overall time. We had to finish as a group of five, or I would lose substantial time, which could perhaps even have implications for the Tour itself.

There was a huge bridge into St. Lazaire, and the arch of it was the equivalent of a hard uphill climb. As we rode up the span, we were hit by a giant blast of wind, with gusts of up to 50 miles per hour. To make matters worse, it was a crosswind. Its roar was so loud, we couldn't hear each other. When Frankie Andreu screamed, "Slow down!" none of us-including me at the front-heard a thing. Our team was strung out all across the bridge. It was only with an amazing effort that Frankie and Tyler managed to link back up with us, and cross the line together. We took second place, but here's how costly it could have been: Zulle lost four minutes that day, and Escartin two, because of their team performances. Their race was almost over before it began.

But another of the most difficult climbs in the world was still to come, the ride to the top of the Mont Ventoux, a peak of 6,263 feet where there was hardly any air to breathe. The top of Ventoux is absolutely desolate, a windy and cratered moonscape. It is an airless, treeless place. Every rider feared it. My friend the legendary Eddy Merckx won a stage to the peak of Ventoux in 1970, but he passed out shortly after crossing the finish line and had to be fed oxygen and carried away in an ambulance. And of course everyone in cycling knew of the tragic death of Tommy Simpson of Britain, who died on the climb in 1967. Simpson collapsed near the summit, from a combination of alcohol and amphetamine consumption in combination with heatstroke. But the mountain itself played a part.

The stage was a relatively short 149K, but it would end with that torturous climb of 21K straight up. Later I heard that more than 300,000 spectators came out to see us take on the Ventoux. As we launched into the first steep part of it, I was with six other riders, including Ullrich, Virenque, and Pantani, altogether probably the strongest riders in the race. About 5K from the summit, Pantani attacked. I jumped up and went after him, and finally joined him with about 3K to go. In my poor Italian, I said to Pantani, "Vince!" It means, "You can win. You can have it." But Pantani misunderstood me. He thought I said, "Vitesse," which is French for "hurry." He felt I was antagonizing him.

We rode together, at the same tempo, battling fierce winds and our own fatigue, until it was time for the one-kilometer final sprint to the finish. Then I did something that unintentionally provoked him even more. As the finish line came into view, and we pumped toward it, I made a decision not to fight him for the stage win. I considered Pantani a great cyclist who'd had a difficult year with the drug controversy. He was struggling to regain his confidence and mental fortitude. He was a rider who cut an unmistakable figure in his pink racing skins, bald head with bandana, and earring, and he had given himself a nickname, The Pirate. He had ridden a courageous race that day, and I thought he deserved a victory. I eased up and conceded him the stage, and finished in second place for the third time in the 2000 Tour.

It was a decision that I would regret.

I thought Pantani was a gentleman, but he was not. Instead of accepting my gesture, he announced that I was not the strongest rider that day. I was offended in turn, and we began a feud that lasted for the remainder of Pantani's presence in the race. "It's unfortunate that he's showing his true colors," I told the press. Then I called him Elefantino, another of his nicknames-but one he hates, because it refers to his ears. He prefers to be called the Pirate. Pantani replied, "If Armstrong thinks he's finished with me, he's mistaken." When Pantani won another mountain stage a couple of days later, into the ski resort of Courchevel, he said that he wanted revenge against me, "and that's what we saw today."

I still hadn't won a stage outright. There was one opportunity left: the last time trial would come at Stage 19, from Fribourg to Mulhouse in Germany. Ullrich is from Merdingen, which the route would pass through. He would be the overwhelming crowd favorite. It was his last-gasp chance to beat me to the podium in Paris. We would race across 58.5 kilometers, over an hour of riding at top speed. What's more, there was always the specter of the unexpected accident. "It only takes one guy to do something devastating," I told the press. One spectator lunging into the road could send you crashing. Much as I wanted a stage win, I needed to finish safely to protect the overall lead.

Ullrich started three minutes ahead of me. As soon as he went off, the crowd started roaring, and it seemed to me that they never stopped, not for an hour. As I left the start area the noise was almost a physical presence. In the follow car was the U.S. Postmaster General, Bill Henderson.

At first I rode with one eye on my heart monitor, to make sure I stayed within my physical limit and didn't push too hard. Then Johan reported that Ullrich and I had the same time after 11K. Johan gave me the green light to go for the win.

I upped my cadence and gradually began to make up time on Ullrich. Johan fed his stream of reports into my earpiece: I was two seconds ahead of Ullrich after 15K, five seconds after 20K, 15 seconds after 33K. By the 52K mark my lead was 29 seconds. Ullrich tried to fight back, but I was riding at too frantic a pace, just under Greg Lemond's epic time-trial record of 54 kilometers per hour, which he had set in 1989.

I hit the finish line ahead by 25 seconds. I had ridden the second-fastest time trial in Tour de France history. Lemond still ruled. But for the first time in the grueling 2000 Tour, I finally felt like an outright winner. I hated to admit it, but something would have been missing had I arrived on the Tour podium without a single individual stage win.

The longest stage of the Tour was still to come, but the Postals plodded through it safely, and that night we finally allowed ourselves to celebrate. We had beers and ice cream with our dinner. The ice cream tasted so good to us that we made the kitchen send out the barrels, and we dug into them in a frenzy. On that same night, Kik was in Paris with her parents and Luke. They finally felt secure enough to start celebrating, too. They gathered for a private party at the George V hotel and hosted a dinner for friends of mine who began to arrive from Austin. The next morning the team boarded the Orient Express for Paris, to ride the ceremonial final stage.

I crossed the finish line, in another swirl of American and Texas flags. We were the only team to arrive in Paris with all nine riders still on their bikes, a huge accomplishment given how difficult the route was. There could be no more doubters. As I stood on the victory podium, Kik had a surprise for me: she had dressed Luke in a yellow jersey. She handed him to me and I sat him on my shoulders.

I had another goal in mind for that summer-winning gold at the Sydney Olympics-and I wouldn't be as successful at attaining it. But that experience had its own value, too. I had been waiting four long years for the Summer Games, because I had been unknowingly ill in the previous Olympics, in Atlanta, and my performance had suffered as a result. My twelfth- and sixth-place finishes there in the road race and time trial had been huge disappointments at the time. It was only later that I realized I had competed with a dozen lung tumors. But now I was healthy. I wanted the Sydney Games to be a celebratory occasion, and it just so happened that they would end on October 2, the anniversary of my cancer diagnosis.

Sydney was everything we'd imagined it would be. The emerald-green bay seemed to lap right at the feet of the skyscrapers, and mangrove trees sheltered the older Victorian buildings. The only disappointment of the Olympics was my actual performance. I finished 13th in the road race, which was won by Jan Ullrich. I could swallow that without too much frustration, because the flat course didn't suit me. My more realistic medal expectations were in the time trial.

But then I got outdueled in that event, too, and took the bronze.

I could not have gone any harder. When you prepare for an event, and you do your best and go your hardest, and then you don't get it, you just have to say, "I didn't deserve to win." And I didn't. Eki deserved every once of gold in his medal. As upset as I was to lose, I was also that happy for him, because he had put his effort all on the line to help me win the Tour.

After the medal ceremony, I walked past my bike, and cheerfully kissed my wife. Kik was proud of me; she said later that she wished Luke had been old enough to understand what went on that day, because she wanted him to see the kind of man we'd like him to be in the face of a loss. That made me as proud as anything I've ever done in front of her.

Sometimes I think the biggest thing cancer did was knock down a wall in me. Before cancer I defined myself purely in terms of "winner" or "loser," but I don't have that kind of rigid vanity anymore. It's kind of like my hair. I used to care about the way I looked, I worried about my appearance all the time, and I had to make sure my hair was just right before I walked out the door. Now I cut it all off. My wife trims it with a clipper, and it's so easy to take care of that I'll wear it this way for the rest of my life.

Since the illness I just care a lot less if people like me or not. I still care a little, but with the birth of my son, it's diminished even more. My wife likes me, and I hope my son will like me. It's their good opinion that I desire now. We had a party to get to. It was October 1, and the next day, October 2, would mark the four-year anniversary of my cancer diagnosis. In the world of cancer patients it's a very significant date, and for me personally, it was the most important date in my life, more important than any birthday or any holiday. No victory or loss could compare to it.

Kik calls my anniversary Carpe Diem Day, to remind us to always seize the moment. Every year we spend that day celebrating our existence. We remind ourselves that it's a myth to say that I beat cancer. The drugs beat cancer. The doctors beat cancer. I just survived it. We remind ourselves that according to most recent cancer-survival rates, I am not alive.

I'll spend the rest of my life puzzling over my survival. Cancer no longer consumes my life, my thoughts, or my behavior, but the changes it wrought are there in me, unalterable. I've learned that intense movement is a necessary thing in my life, something as fundamental and as simple as breathing. I don't believe I could ride, or live, any differently. Also, I've learned to be more thoughtful, and resist saying the first thing that otherwise might come out of my mouth. Above all, I've learned that if I have a tough week, all I have to do is sit back and reflect. It's easy to say, "These things don't bother me anymore."

Reprinted from It's Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong by permission of Putnam Pub. Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright © 2000 by Lance Armstrong. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

About the Author

Born September 18, 1971, Lance Armstrong was raised by his mother Linda, a single parent, in their hometown of Plano, Texas. Gravitating to sports at an early age, Lance won the Iron Kids Triathlon at 13 and became a professional triathlete when he was just 16 years old. In 1999 Armstrong won the Tour de France, setting a new record for speed. By winning the four most important stages of the race, the three time trials and the first mountain stage, he earned a place among the great Tour winners of history. Only four cyclists before him had won the three time trials.

Sally Jenkins is the author of Men Will Be Boys, and coauthor of Reach for the Summit and Raise the Roof (both with Pat Summit) and A Coach's Life (with Dean Smith). She is a veteran sports reporter whose work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Condé Nast's Women's Sports & Fitness, and The Washington Post.