Every Second Counts (23 page)

On the day of the prologue, Kik went to the cathedral to light the usual candles for good luck, and then she brought the children to the course to see me before the race began. As she moved through the crowds, she wound up on the wrong side of the course, with bikes and follow-cars whizzing by. She had to ask some police officers to help her over the barricade and across the avenue. She carried Luke, while some helpful onlookers in the crowd hoisted the stroller with the girls in it in the air, as if they were crowd-surfing at a concert. When they finally made it across, the crowd cheered.

I sat on a stationary bike, warming up my legs, while Luke drank my Gatorade and examined all the wheels and bike parts with the team mechanics. The twins sat in the stroller facing me, staring up at me, while Kik shoveled baby food into their mouths.

It was time to go. I kissed everybody, and I mounted my bike and headed to the start ramp. Then, after all the other riders had started at one-minute intervals, I flew down the ramp and onto the course. It was a tight, technical course that required a precise ride, and Johan kept up a stream of instructions and chatter in my ear. I kept my eyes on the road in front and ignored the alleys of spectators beating on the barricades.
“Very good, Lance, very good, very good,” Johan said, and read off my split times.

Johan informed me that the leader was Laurent Jalabert of
France
, a huge crowd favorite who had announced he would retire after the Tour. I barreled down the last straightaway, chasing the time that “Jaja” had just ridden. I got it—and the stage win—by two seconds. As I crossed the finish line, Kik and Luke shrieked, “Go, yo-yo Daddy!”

The yellow jersey was ours. I knew we would give it right back—it’s impossible to defend the jersey from start to finish. It would be smarter to yield it for a few days and conserve energy, and then reclaim it on the way to
Paris
. Still, it was reassuring to hold it for a day. “It’s just good to know I’ve got it back,” I told Bill Stapleton.

After the prologue, I returned to the team hotel and visited with my family. It would be the last relaxed time we’d have together for three weeks. I held the girls, one in each arm, and kissed them, and once again, I schooled my son in who would win the Tour de France.

“What does Daddy do?” I asked.

“Daddy makes ’em suffer in the mountains,” he said.

But first we had to get there.

T
he days were
as long as the blacktop in front of you. We rode through the flat champagne country of
Reims
, and
Epernay
, a high-speed chase through northern
France
. We kept ourselves alert and entertained by cranking ZZ Top on the team bus every morning.

ZZ Top was one of Floyd Landis’s contributions to the team, and it was an indelible one. Floyd was a loud, rampantly funny presence on the bus, and it was a source of daily entertainment to watch him try to explain ZZ Top to Heras or Rubiera or Eki, jumping around to the lacerating guitar-rock of songs like “She Wore a Pearl Necklace.” Finally, Heras—quiet, gentlemanly Roberto—tried to put his foot down. “No more ZZ Top,” he pleaded. “No more.”

But like it or not, ZZ Top had become our ritual, and so had our morning gathering on the bus. First we’d discuss the strategy and receive our riding orders from Johan, and then the meeting would degenerate and we’d start fooling around. We realized that the bus windows were tinted so darkly that no one could see in, and we’d point out and roar with laughter at autograph peddlers, ticket scalpers, and the loonies in costumes.

Sometimes my friend Robin Williams would climb on the bus and do comedy routines for us. He would imitate a pissed-off Frenchman, smoking Gitanes and drinking Pernod, or he would turn on me and make the guys howl by calling me “The Uniballer,” or “The Big Zipper.”

One morning when the material had gotten particularly raucous, we decided we should test the privacy of the windows, just in case. We made Johan go outside and look through the windows—and we all mooned him. He never knew it.

It was immature, but it was our way of breaking the tension and the boredom of the flat stages. We wanted to avoid mishaps until we reached the mountains, but these were dangerous sprint stages, windy, with a lot of attacks from out of the pack and always the threat of crashes. The team was riding strongly, but it was wearing on us, especially on Floyd, who we used hard. Floyd had gained such a hotshot reputation from his finish in the Dauphiné that the field was aware of him. We’d make Floyd sprint out hard, and the peloton would go after him, chasing him down and wearing itself out.

Floyd didn’t complain. He listened, and he rode hard, and he soaked up knowledge from the veteran riders, and he wouldn’t quit. But he had one weakness—his youth. The Tour isn’t a young man’s event, and in fact it’s most punishing on rookies who aren’t yet fully hardened and conditioned for a three-week race.

Floyd was nervous. He wasn’t sleeping well, and his heart was racing at night. He was worried that he wasn’t ready, that he was a liability. One morning we were on the bus together, just the two of us, and we talked. He stared at me, wide-eyed and goateed. “Look,” I said, “I need you.”

“I know, I know, I know,” he chattered.

“Quit it,” I said. “Quit fucking freaking out. You’re fine. Quit worrying about the team. We’re fine.”

“But Lance, man, my heart is racing . . .”

“Don’t give me any of that,” I said. “You’re afraid. What are you worried about?
Your contract with the team?”

“No.”

“I think you are. You need to quit thinking about that. Here’s what you need to think about: remember why you’re here.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“No bullshit,” I said. “I don’t want any excuses. Now you deliver, okay?”

But Floyd wasn’t the only tense or tired rider. We all were. We lost track of what day it was, we didn’t even know which stage we were riding. Some mornings you woke up feeling like you’d been run over by a truck. But you got back on the bike, and after an hour you felt better. If you were race-hardened, eventually you got in a zone. You reached a point where you had no other concern in life, it consumed everything. You didn’t even have the spare energy for a phone call. It was a netherworld state in which we just cycled, and then we’d go lie down until it was time to get up and deal with it again.

In addition to the wind, and the pushing and shoving in the crowded peloton, we were nagged by small mechanical problems. A couple of our guys had to go back to the car for repairs, and it made us jumpy.

One morning I decided to try to ease the strain for all of us. I got on the radio and said, “Johan, I need to come back to the car.”

Johan said, “What do you need?”

“I got a problem. I need you to look at my bike.”

There was a pause, and I could feel Johan worrying on the other end of the radio. It would take some reorganizing of the team to get me back to the car.

“Johan, you hear me?”

Johan started snapping out instructions. He said, “Okay. Floyd, Chechu, Eki, and Pavel, you go with Lance. He’s coming back to the car. We’ve got to bring him back.”

I said, “No, no, I don’t need all that. I just need confirmation of something.”

“What?”

“I need to know if there’s a chain on this bike.
Because I can’t feel it.”

There was another pause, and then Johan’s voice crackled on the radio.

“You motherfucker.”

Around me, my teammates broke up in laughter.

“I’m serious. Is there a chain back there?”

Stage Four was a team time trial through
Epernay
. It was a test of our ability to ride together as a group, and also a kind of loyalty test, because you had to get at least six riders across the finish line together or take a time penalty. That was easier said than done, given what could happen at high speeds: flat tires, crashes, or riders falling off the pace. We would be timed collectively, and our time as a team would also be each rider’s individual time. In other words, if enough Postal riders rode slowly, it could potentially cost me the overall Tour title.

The ONCE team, led by some superb individual time-trial specialists, was the traditional favorite; no American squad had ever shown much aptitude for team time trials, and in fact it was said to be a Postal weakness. But this time we felt we could challenge the European powers. We went off decked out in our Postal blue skin suits, atop mean-looking black carbon Trek Time Trial bikes. We whirled down the road, averaging around 30 miles per hour, and in some places on the course our speeds rose to around 45. Each guy took a rotation at the front, pulling the others, and when the guy got tired, he faded to the back. There were no mistakes or disasters. Everyone kept up.

We rolled through the finish line together, all nine of us, with a time of
1:20:05
—just 16 seconds slower than ONCE, and in second place for the day.

We got through the first week with just one real mishap: about a mile from the end of the seventh stage, Roberto and I got tangled up. We were riding in the middle of the tightly packed peloton, trying to avoid the wild rush to the finish line. Roberto, whose daily assignment was to protect my back, was right behind me. Somebody clipped his wheel, and he fell, and as he went over, his handlebars caught in my rear wheel. My bike locked up—and just stopped.

I hopped off the bike, and yanked on Roberto’s handlebars, trying to get them out of my spokes. It took about a minute to get them disentangled, and then I kicked my wheel back into place. Eki pushed me from behind to help me accelerate to the finish. The crash was enough to drop me from third place to eighth. It could have been worse.

But then something worse did happen. Stage Nine was an individual time trial around
Lorient
, a coastal city with a beautiful boat-studded harbor that had been painted by Impressionists. The time trial was a Tour ritual called “the race of truth,” because it was just you against the road and the clock, going flat-out. It was a discipline that rewarded a good technical rider who could make a big solo ride, take a calculated risk without crashing, and I was considered one of the best in the world at it. Since the start of the 1999 Tour, I’d won seven out of nine time trials.

As I warmed up for the stage, I teased one of our mechanics, Jean-Marc Vandenberghe. His father was a road builder, and we had a running joke about it. If I was feeling good, I’d say, “You better call your dad, because I’m going to tear this road up.”

The joke was such an old gag between us that by now he didn’t even have to ask me how I was feeling. All he had to say was, “Do I need to call my dad?”

That morning I didn’t wait for him to ask. I said, “Look, you better call your dad ’cause this road’s going to be fucked up when I get done.”

But I didn’t tear up the road that day. Sometimes you do everything right, and then there are the days when you can’t do
anything
right, and this was one. The course didn’t especially suit me, and my technique wasn’t good. I got off to the wrong cadence, too high, but I couldn’t correct it. I knew something was going wrong, but I couldn’t quite figure out what.

I lost to Santiago Botero, another great time-trialer who was having a strong season, by 11 seconds. Second place was still a good performance, but because I’d been a heavy favorite, it was treated as a shocking loss and set off a buzz among the peloton: I wasn’t quite the Armstrong of the past. Igor González de Galdeano of
Spain
, who had worn the yellow jersey through the flats, suggested that perhaps my dominance of the race had ended. “The Tour has changed,” he announced to the press.

I went back to the hotel in low spirits, and quietly alarmed. If others questioned me, I questioned myself, too. I was also angry at myself for bragging to Jean-Marc that I’d tear up the road.

Standing outside the hotel waiting to see me was a family with a small son who had cancer. The boy’s father was a chef from
Lyons
, the cuisine capital of the world, and they had driven all the way from
Lyons
to
Lorient
just to talk to me. They had even brought a French edition of
It’s Not
About
the Bike
. I paused to chat with them on a grassy hillside, and as we spoke, as the sun was setting, the events of the day receded. What they couldn’t know was that talking about cancer was like medicine for me.

My encounters with other cancer fighters are often misconstrued: I don’t stay involved with cancer just to help others. I do it to help myself. That night, talking with that little boy and his family put me back on my feet. While the rest of the team went to dinner, I stood on the lawn in front of that hotel and kept talking with them, or rather, trying to, as I stammered in my Texas French, and I learned about what the boy had been through. He had spent two five-week stretches in a sterile bubble environment because his immune system had shut down completely—but now he had been cancer-free for a year. It was unimaginable to me what they had been through.
Give me cancer 50 million times more, but don’t give it to my kids
, I thought.