Every Second Counts (12 page)

I’d always loved
Spain
, and now I threw myself into renovating a lovely apartment that had been part of an old palace and needed special care. I set about finding artisans who could restore it—it gave me something to do other than simmer about the investigation.

We felt buffeted, between the separations, the investigation, the departure of my best friend to a rival’s team, the decision to move, the difficulty of finding a new home, and a disappointing IVF treatment. But as lousy as those months were, Kik and I tried not to get too discouraged, because we always had illness as a context: career reversals and the indignities of a drug investigation couldn’t scare us.

Whenever we needed a reminder of the difference between the small troubles we were experiencing and truly terrible vagaries, there was a cancer checkup.

I still visited my oncologist, Dr. Nichols, twice a year for blood work and scans, and it was always an uneasy experience. I wouldn’t be declared formally cured until the five-year mark. That fall, Kik and I had flown to
Oregon
for my four-year exam.

The funny thing was
,
everyone thought I was done with cancer. They thought I’d beaten it, whipped it, willed it away. But surviving cancer was an evolution, rather than a limited experience confined to a time span or a location.

Some days the disease seemed like it had happened ages ago, and other days it seemed like it had happened yesterday. I had the odd sensation that I was still expelling poisons from my body, that there were still toxins in me. My body had been suffused not just with the scourging poisons of chemo, but also with anesthesia during two surgeries. Anesthesia could linger in the cells. It was a near-death experience; you were flooded with drugs, brought to a state of such deep, gassed unconsciousness that you were within a millimeter of death. And then they just held you there, chemically.

My head was shaved, and covered with small markers. The surgeon explained the procedure, as if he were talking about a piece of lumber.

“We’re just going to cut a little hole, pop it out, remove the lesions, put it back in, and cover it up.”

He was talking about my skull.

I still worried continually about my health. Little things other people might blow off, a bump, or an ache, provoked the thought, “My cancer is back.” The slightest head cold was trouble around our house, and cause for in-depth analysis, deep pondering, and distress.

Even a little fatigue was a matter for concern and phone calls to my doctors and trainers. I was always putting socks on, never running around in bare feet, always with something on my neck. A sniffle was a case for long discussion, a bowl of hot soup, and a nap. If I didn’t feel quite right or simply had a tired day on the bike, I was withdrawn, and you could feel the tension radiating off my body.

Kik and I arrived at the
Oregon
Health
Sciences
University
in
Portland
for the battery of cancer tests. We always tried to treat the visit to Dr. Nichols like a routine checkup, but it wasn’t. The results would be either perfect or terrible: I would be cancer-free or not. If the cancer came back, the only defense the second time around would be even more intense chemotherapy, and it wouldn’t have very good odds of success.

I
was tired
when I woke up, tired when I ate, tired when I took a shower. I slept 20 hours a day; it was like taking the strongest sleeping pill known to man. One morning I was too tired to make it to the bathroom alone. “I think I’m going to be sick,” I told my mother. She helped me out of the hospital bed and I leaned on her as I hobbled across the room, bent in half, my gown falling open.

I swore silently at the nurses who poked me with needles, drew blood, or took my blood pressure. I lay in bed, hemmed in by the colorless walls of the hospital room, a 10-by-14-foot rectangle with a window looking out on a brick building next door, with gray-green linoleum, beige walls, and light-brown blankets, but I was too tired to get up and do anything about it. Stapleton and Och and I played cards, games of hearts, until my eyes involuntarily closed again. We played so many card games we made up our own language. Jacks were Hooks, Kings were Cowboys. I stared balefully at the TV mounted in the corner. “I hate baseball,” I said. I watched it anyway. I was too tired to change the channel.

The annual checkups always made Kik and me tense, but on this occasion we were especially so, given all that was going on in our lives. The doctors and nurses were far more confident about my health than I was, so perhaps they didn’t realize how anxious we were.

A camera crew was on hand, doing an educational film about cancer, and they asked if they could film me as I went through the various cancer screenings. I agreed, but regretted it almost instantly. I underwent a chest X ray, and thought,
Look,
we don’t know how this is going to come out. Get your camera out of here
.

As I went from scan to scan, there seemed to be people everywhere, nurses with a hundred things to sign, technicians who wanted to chat. Nobody seemed to realize that in a flashing moment on a CT scan screen we could see catastrophe. They were standing around, eating doughnuts, asking for autographs, taking pictures. To them, my good health was a foregone conclusion.

Suddenly, I wanted to be alone. I felt exposed. Rationally I knew the chances of the cancer coming back were negligible, but I still dreaded the test results. I’d do anything for the cancer community, show up anywhere, sign anything, or talk to anyone, but I didn’t want to do it at that moment, because that moment still scared the crap out of me.

I just wanted to be a normal patient, to have some privacy and room for whatever might happen. Whether it was cause for relief, or something awful, I didn’t want that moment captured.

The tests were fine.

“Everything looks good,” Dr. Nichols said. Kik threw her arms around me, and I smiled with relief.

I never got accustomed to the attendant sensation: it was of sheer cleanliness. I was clean. My
X
rays and scans were the pictures of my well-being, literally the proof that my being was well. That sort of exposure I didn’t mind. They showed the pictures of a man: five senses, an appetite, an admittedly selective intellect, an animal soul with a nervous system, four limbs and a backbone with vertebrae in various states of disrepair but not too bad, a pierce-mark on the chest, a horseshoe surgical dent in the scalp, a slash at the groin. A little scarred-up in places and missing a thing or two, perhaps.
But not much.

T
he investigative dossier
the French accumulated on me got thicker. On the front cover of the folder was a picture of me, a Tour de France victory photo, as I rode down the Champs-Elysées with a flag.

On top of this, someone had superimposed a picture of a syringe.
So much for the presumption of innocence, and the impartiality of the investigators.

The months passed, and still no test results came back. I was certain the samples were crystal clear—and surely they knew it too after all this time. It was hard to believe any amount of testing could take longer. But the prosecutors refused to confirm or to announce anything; instead they claimed they needed more tests and kept the case open.

Meanwhile, everyone who worked with me was guilty by association. My coach, Chris Carmichael, was raked by the press. Some journalists wrote that if I was on drugs he must have given them to me.

“Can you imagine?” Chris said. “You work your ass off, and then people say you didn’t really do it.”

I said, “Let it go. You’re falling into their trap.”

Chris was working with a hockey player named Saku Koivu, the captain of the Montréal Canadiens, who had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma and was attempting a remarkable comeback. Koivu was declared cancer-free just as the Canadiens were fighting for a playoff spot, and Chris was hired by George Gillett, the Canadiens’ owner, to help Koivu in his recovery. A month after Koivu finished chemo, Chris started him on a gradual daily regimen, with 30 minutes on a stationary bike and light weight-lifting. Soon Koivu was working out five hours a day, six days a week.

He came back before the end of the regular season, accounted for ten points in 12 games, and led the Canadiens to a victory in the playoffs as well. It was an unbelievable story.

“Was I doping him, too?” Chris asked, bitterly.

The investigation that should have concluded in January was still ongoing as spring approached. It was as though they had decided, “We’ll keep testing until we find something.” There was nothing I could do. I was used to controlling my own fate, whether on a bike or in business, or even in a sickbed, but now I was helpless.

Everything seemed to take forever, every minor legal point. The investigation would go quiet for long periods, and I wouldn’t have any idea of what was going on, and it drove me crazy. I couldn’t defend myself, couldn’t talk to the judge or prosecutors, couldn’t control the science, couldn’t scream at anybody (except Bill), and I couldn’t make it go faster. I hated all of these things, and in turn, I drove Bill crazy.

“What are we doing about it today?”

“Why is the judge always on vacation?”

“We’re not doing enough. Why aren’t we doing something?”

My lawyer in
France
wrote letters imploring the French authorities to speed up the investigation. I wrote the judge personally, offering my full cooperation. When the ICU balked at turning over my blood and urine to prosecutors in a jurisdictional quarrel, I asked the cycling authorities to please cooperate.

None of it made a difference. We had absolutely no influence over the speed at which the process moved, and that was hard for me. In fact, Bill came to believe that the more we tried to hurry them, the more likely they were to drag their feet. Sophie-Hélène Chateau had all the power and she could make it last as long as she wanted to.

At night I stared at the ceiling and thought about a worst-case scenario: what if the test results came back screwy because of bad science, or what if someone was so determined to find drugs that they rigged the results? If a false positive came back, all the world would ever remember about me was that I was a doper. The one verdict no one seemed willing to arrive at was that their case was baseless.

Bill tried to reassure me. “It’ll be like this,” he said. “All of a sudden we’ll wake up one day, and it will be over, with just a little announcement that the investigation has come to a close.”

“I don’t know.”

“You wait,” he said. “This thing will go away in the dark of the night.”

Finally, April came, and with it, what seemed to be good news. We heard via a reporter from Reuters that all of our tests were clean—exactly as we had insisted all along. My lawyer in
Paris
called the judge, Chateau. She confirmed it.

I was already in
France
for a bike race, and I went to
Paris
and called a press conference at the Hôtel George V to announce the results: all of the Postal team samples, not just mine, were negative. Nor had they found anything in our trash. Boxes and wrappers, that’s all.

I couldn’t help taking a few digs at the pace of the investigation, pointing out that while the press conference was going on, the judge was on vacation somewhere. “I’m losing sleep over this, I want my name exonerated, and she’s on the beach for three weeks,” I said. I added that I hoped the investigation would conclude swiftly now that there was positive proof that I was clean and so was our team.

But no sooner had I finished than Chateau began hedging. When reporters called her for confirmation, she admitted that our tests were negative—but she called my press conference “premature,” and suggested that all of the evidence wasn’t in.

A reporter mentioned that I hoped the investigation was drawing to a close.

She replied, curtly, “
Il rêve
.”

Translation: “He’s dreaming.”

Someone asked me what it would take to convince skeptics of my innocence. I answered, “I don’t know.” I was beginning to think I would be presumed guilty for the rest of my life.

Everything I had worked so hard for, my career, my reputation, what I’d done as an athlete, everything I had could go away, all the things you lose when people don’t think you’re a good guy.

What if I lost them? I had lost other things, and survived it. I thought about the things I could lose as a result of the doping charge, and wondered if I could do without them. My name was being attacked, and I felt that would be hard to replace. It was my own and no one else’s, and it represented my values, my livelihood, and my family. I could do without money, or a Coca-Cola deal, but what if I lost my good name and my reputation? I might never be able to earn that back.

“It’s so important to me,” I told Kik. “Luke’s name is Armstrong and people know that name, and when he goes to school I don’t want them to say, ‘Oh yeah, your dad’s the big fake, the doper.’ That would just kill me.”