Every Second Counts (30 page)

After a week of riding, we were heading into the
Alps
and I still didn’t feel great. I kept telling myself that it was a long race, and I waited to feel strong again, but anyone who knew me could see that I was struggling—especially when we arrived at Alpe d’Huez for the eighth stage. In the past I’d taken control of the Tour in the
Alps
, and the presumption was that I’d mount another huge attack. But Alpe d’Huez was the site of yet another mishap, and a reckoning.

The stage included a monstrous climb up the Galibier, a 30-kilometer ascent that was among the highest in the
Alps
. I felt uncharacteristically leg-weary as we climbed, and I couldn’t understand it. Finally, on the descent, I looked down and realized that my back brake was rubbing against my wheel.

On the radio, I called Johan. “Johan, I have good news and bad news,” I said.

His voice crackled. “Okay, tell me the good news first.”

“No, I’m going to tell you the bad news first. The bad news is
,
I feel like shit. The good news is
,
I think I know why. I just looked back and my brake has been rubbing the whole time.”

I’d ridden the first 120 kilometers or so of the stage with the brake on. It was like trying to swim in a pair of boots. It was almost embarrassing; I should’ve noticed sooner.

I fixed the bike problem, but I couldn’t fix the body problem. I was tired. It was 100 degrees again, and now we were heading into the final climb up Alpe d’Huez, and other riders started attacking. There went Joseba Beloki. There went a talented young Spaniard named Iban Mayo. There went the rising Russian star Alexandre Vinokourov. There went my friend Tyler Hamilton, riding with his broken collarbone.

I couldn’t chase them. I struggled up the mountain and finished fourth. It put me in the overall lead, but it was hardly the dominant performance that people had expected. The numbers didn’t lie: my personal time up Alpe d’Huez was four minutes slower than it had been in 2001. I had the yellow jersey, but it was bittersweet; I knew I wasn’t the strongest rider that day, and I had to face the fact that I wasn’t riding well and could lose the race.

The next day we journeyed from Bourg d’Oisans to Gap, and again the attacks kept coming. Vinokourov, Mayo, and Beloki pounded at me. The heat was so intense by now that the tar roads were melting, which made the dueling that much more intense—and dangerous, too.

What happened next was one of those instances when good luck and bad collided in the same moment. Finally, we reached the last big descent of the stage. We whirled into a corner that was sticky and slick with tar. Beloki was intent on chasing down a break by Vinokourov, and I hung back, 15 yards behind him. We came into the turn at about 50 miles an hour.

Beloki’s wheel started to slide.

He tried to brake—and his wheel locked. Then it caught hard, and the bike jerked, and went over to the side.

Beloki was whipsawed off the bike. He slammed onto the pavement right in front of me. Man and machine skidded across the road, tangled up together.

I tried to brake—and now my rear wheel started to lock up, too. I was losing it. I had two choices: I could either pile into Beloki, or
swerve off
the road. I swerved.

I hurtled into a field. I had no idea what had happened to Beloki behind me. All I knew was that I was lucky to still be upright. There could have been a cliff at the side of that road, or a wall. Instead, there was an open field. I was lucky, too, that the field had been harvested and wasn’t full of crops.

The bike jounced over tractor furrows and broken stalks. I thought about trying to turn around, but that would cost me precious time. I glanced up and saw that the road hairpinned back toward me. I thought,
Maybe I can off-road through the field and pick up the race route again.
On instinct, I veered sharply and kept going, wheeling over crunchy stalks, certain that at any moment I would go over the handlebars, or get a flat tire. Finally, I got across the field. There was the road.

Suddenly, there was a ditch, a rain gutter. I braked hard, almost plunging into it headfirst. There was no way around it, so I jumped off the bike and hoisted it over my shoulder, potato-sack style. I leaped across the rain gutter. My back foot slid about two feet, and kicked up a cloud of dust as I jumped.

I landed on the other side, ran to the road, and vaulted back on my bike. Just then,
Tyler
sped by me and
waved,
a kind of salute. I pedaled to catch up with the lead group. I rode on, relieved to still be in the race.

I finished the stage in decent shape, still in the yellow jersey. But I felt lousy for Beloki. That evening, I called his team doctor, a gentleman named Pedro Celaya, to see how he was doing, and found out he’d broken his thigh, wrist, and elbow.
Celaya
was in the hospital visiting with Beloki when I called, and I passed along my sincere regrets. “I’m really sorry this happened,” I said. “Tell him I thought he looked great.” I meant it. You never want to see a great competitor put out of the race by a crash. Accidents like that don’t help the contest.

Afterward, Beloki and I became comrades of sorts. For the rest of the Tour, he would call Johan every now and again to say good luck and pass on his best wishes.

I hoped the trip into the field was my last mishap—surely nothing more could go wrong. But it was just the opposite. A couple of days later, I took the start line in a critical stage, an individual time trial of 47 kilometers from Gaillac to Cap’Découverte. Again, the sun was intense, and as I warmed up, I sweated through my clothes. I already felt sapped and thirsty as I waited in the starting gate. Ahead, I knew Jan Ullrich was riding a fast time.

I shot out of the gate and hunched down over my racing bars. At first, everything went okay, but it was so hot that I kept pulling at my water bottle. A third of the way around the course, Ullrich and I were dead even.

But now the heat was inside my helmet, and inside my racing skins, and I couldn’t seem to cool off. I drank and drank. Dehydration starts days before it really hits you. Now it hit me: suddenly I was parched, and powerless.

Then I ran out of water.

At the second time check, I’d lost 39 seconds to Ullrich, and I was slowing. There was no way to get more water; time-trial rules forbid a rider to get help on the course. I didn’t care what my split times were anymore. I just wanted to drink.

By the time I hit the finish line, I’d lost a minute and 36 seconds to Ullrich, and there was a huge ring of white salt around my mouth. I slumped off the bike. I’d lost nearly 15 pounds in fluids in a single ride. Somehow I’d hung on for second place, and I still wore yellow, but I was a very shaky, ill leader.

I didn’t know how to face my teammates. Johan just patted me and said, “Look, we’ll get it back tomorrow.” But dinner that night was quiet. I could almost hear the guys wondering what was going to happen, whether I still had it in me to win the race. I felt miserable, and guilty. The boys in blue were working tirelessly on my behalf, and I wasn’t able to make their hard work pay off. Instead, every day seemed to bring some new mishap, and now I’d failed physically on a crucial stage. I could barely look at them. But no one whispered or complained, or questioned aloud. They just ate their meals and kept their jaws tightly shut and went about their work.

The next morning, as we rode into the
Pyrenees
, George rolled up next to me. I was still at rock bottom, and George could see it. “I just want you to know something,” he said.

“What? I suck?”

“No. What you did yesterday may be the most impressive thing I’ve seen you do.”

“Why?”

“Because I could see that you were suffering, and you hung in there.”

George’s words helped me through the wretched day ahead. We were now entering the most difficult mountain stages of the entire Tour, and I was in no shape to defend a lead. When you have severe dehydration, you can’t recover from it in a day, or even two. That day we had a hard climb to a village called Bonascre, and I was going to suffer badly. I knew it—and so did everyone else.

By the end of that day I’d lost more time to Ullrich. Now he was just 15 seconds behind me.

At the finish, I looked terrible again. I had sunken eyes, and I looked old. Word around the peloton was that I couldn’t hang on much longer; that I was going to lose the Tour any day now to Ullrich.

Through it all, my teammates kept me going, with the help of Johan. None of them panicked. Instead, Johan insisted that I would eventually feel stronger, and that Ullrich was bound to weaken at some point. He also looked for some practical ways to protect our lead. He came up with an inspired tactic to help defend me from constant attacks other riders were launching: he decided to turn the tables. He sent our climbers, Chechu and Manuel Beltrán (whom we called “Tricki,” which is Spanish for Cookie Monster), on the attack. They shot up the road, forcing other riders to chase them. It worked: the other riders were so busy chasing Tricki and Chechu, they couldn’t attack me. I was able to ride at a more comfortable pace.

Then one day, as Johan had promised, I did begin to feel a little better. Johan swore he could see my pedaling getting stronger. “You’ve worked hard and you’re prepared,” he said. “Things have gone wrong, but in the last week of the Tour it’s the experience, the mentality, and the determination that make a difference, and I don’t think anybody is stronger in those three things than you.” He still believed in me—and that helped me believe.

Breakfasts and dinners continued to be quiet, grim affairs, with everyone determined to preserve our slim lead. I just needed one big day, I told myself.

But I needed it soon—practically overnight, in fact. We now had just one final climbing stage, to a summit called Luz Ardiden. If I was going to win the Tour, I’d have to do it there.

Fear gnawed at me: what if I lost, after all we’d been through in the race? When you carry the hopes and expectations of a team, you feel a lot of responsibility. I was carrying other things, too. In the middle of the Pyrenean stages, shortly before Luz Ardiden, Kik sent me a text message. She’d had a dream that I was riding up a mountain. But hitched to the back of my bike was a cart, and in the cart were people—cancer survivors, sponsors, well-wishers—and I was trying to pull all of them up the hill. In her dream, she wrote, I unhooked the harness and rode away. “Throw off the weights that are holding you back,” she urged.

Kik was right. I was trying to pull this thing along, and feeling too much weight. It was a message that meant a lot, and I saved it.

On the evening before Luz Ardiden, Bill Stapleton came to visit me, and he told me something else that encouraged me. We talked about how close the race was, and how much pressure I was feeling. Bill just stared at me calmly, and said, “Dude, you’re the guy who makes the eight ball.”

I didn’t know what he meant. “The eight ball,” I repeated.

“Clear the table,” he said.
“Eight ball, corner pocket.
You call it, you make it.”

That night, I slept soundly, and the next morning, I woke up feeling well, better than I had since the Tour began. I went down to the team bus for a cup of coffee. “I think I’m back,” I told Johan.

I sipped my coffee and thought about Luz Ardiden. Ullrich and his Bianchi team director, Rudy Pevenage, were telling everyone that he would lead the race by the time we reached the summit. I was going to lose the Tour that day, thanks to them, they said.

As I sat on the bus still sipping coffee and thinking, one of our operations managers, Geert Duffy, came over and told me a story. The year before, Pevenage had asked him for a souvenir yellow jersey. Duffy had promised to get one for him, but then forgot. Now that Ullrich was within 15 seconds of me, Pevenage had gone looking for Duffy.

“Hey, Duffy—
don’t
worry about that jersey,” he said, “because we’re going to get our own.”

I listened as Duffy told me the story. I put my cup down.

“The Tour is over,” I said. And I walked out of the bus.

It helped to know their plans. Now I had plans of my own. At the start line, I saw Tyler Hamilton. “Be ready,” I said.
“’Cause I’m going.”

It was my last chance. After Luz Ardiden, there would be just one more critical stage, a time trial to
Nantes
, and Ullrich had already beaten me once in a time trial. I didn’t want to go to
Nantes
with only a 15-second lead. I needed to gain some time in this final mountaintop stage.

It was perhaps the longest, hardest climbing day of the Tour. When we passed over the massive Tourmalet, Ullrich briefly got away, with a shock attack. I decided not to waste energy going after him, but preferred to let him work. Gradually, I reeled him in again as his tempo slowed. We fell back into a group with Mayo and Vinokourov and swung down into another descent.

Finally, after five hours on the bikes, we reached the foot of Luz Ardiden—and the pace quickened, and a kind of sparring match on bikes began.

Iban Mayo attacked. I leaped up and countered the attack, and passed him.

Now I was in front. I darted up the road. Where was Ullrich? I wondered. I hoped he was paying for the Tourmalet.