Every Second Counts (31 page)

In my ear Johan said calmly, “Ullrich is dropped.”

Behind me, Ullrich
lagged,
pain on his face. He churned upward, but he couldn’t match the acceleration. “Ten seconds,” Johan said. I felt a small bloom of excitement.

I lunged at the pedals, scaling the mountain, thinking about putting empty road between myself and Ullrich. I hugged the side of the route, cutting every corner. I skimmed past spectators, barely noticing them . . .

A flash of yellow caught my eye. A small kid was holding a yellow Tour souvenir bag, whipping it back and forth.

Uh-oh, I’m going to catch that thing,
I thought.

Suddenly, the bag was tangled on the handle of my brake. I felt the bike jerk violently beneath me—

It flipped over sideways.

It was as though I had been garroted. I went straight down, and landed on my right hip, hard.
I’ve crashed?
Now?
I thought, incredulously.
How could I have crashed?

My next thought was,
Well
, the Tour’s over. It’s too much, too many things gone wrong.

But another thought intruded.

Get up.

It was the same thought that had prodded me during all those long months I’d spent in a hospital bed.
After surgery.
Get up.
After chemo.
Get up.
It had whispered to me, and nudged me, and poked me, and now here it was again.
Get . . . up.

I got up. Johan said later it looked as though I’d bounced back to my feet almost instantaneously, like a pop-up toy. I hauled my bike upright and worked furiously at the chain, which had come off—shaking it, threading it back onto the ring. As I did so, I began to scream, a guttural, primal roar. I screamed in fury, and in devastation. I screamed every cuss word I knew. I screamed because I thought I had lost the race.

I got the chain on, and I hopped on the bike and started to push off, and now there was a Postal mechanic behind me, shoving me up the road, and I could hear him screaming, too, with effort, and with anger.

Chechu had waited for me. Now he sped up and motioned frantically for me to follow him. I leaped up and hammered at the pedals. But the gear slipped, and my foot popped out of the pedal. The bike swung crazily, and I landed, chest first, on the top-tube of the bike. Later, I would discover that the rear chainstay was broken. Somehow I stayed upright and clipped my foot back in.

Ahead, Tyler Hamilton was angry, too. Tour etiquette dictated that the leaders wait for me to catch up, just as I had waited for Ullrich when he went off the road in that frightening crash two years previous. The Tour was supposed to be won by the strongest rider, not the luckiest, and the consensus in the peloton was that no one should profit from a freak accident.

Afterward, Ullrich would be credited with sportsmanship for waiting. But in retrospect I’m not so sure he did wait. In replays, he seems to me to be riding race tempo. He didn’t attack, but he didn’t wait, either—not until
Tyler
accelerated in front and waved at them to slow down, and yelled, “Hold up!”

The lead group slowed. Meanwhile, Johan pulled up alongside me, to see if I was all right. I had a gash on my elbow. Johan rolled down his window and started to say something. I swung my head toward him and threw him a look of pure fire. Johan closed his mouth, and closed the window without saying a word. He had seen all he needed to. “I knew then it was over,” he said later.

The bike ran up the road beneath me. After just a few minutes of furious effort, I rejoined the lead group.

No sooner had I gotten there than Mayo glanced back at me—and attacked again. I immediately jumped out of the saddle, charged up to his wheel, and slingshotted past him.

I was livid. I drove my legs into the pedals, adrenaline and fear and frustration in every stroke.

In a matter of moments, I was alone. I had bolted away from the group so suddenly that nobody could follow. Once again, Ullrich receded behind me.

“He’s dropped,” Johan reported. “You have ten seconds.”

I accelerated, almost snarling. I rode fueled by residual fright and rage from the crash.
And by pent-up resentment from weeks of crashes and ordeals, and doubts.

“Twenty seconds,” Johan said, more excitedly.

I found a rhythm and began to dance on the pedals, as if I were running up a staircase. “Thirty seconds . . .”

I was thirsty again. I had dropped my bottle in the crash, and now I was beginning to tire. But Johan pulled up behind me and started yelling, so excited that I could barely understand him.

“Come on, come on! This is it! You’re winning the Tour! Here’s your chance!”

I had given everything, and now I was wasted. The last few kilometers were one long grimace of pain. But finally the finish line was approaching, and adrenaline and anger carried me. I thought about the doubts in the peloton, all the whispers that I was too old, or too rich, or too distracted, or too American to win the Tour de France a fifth time. I thought,
This
is my neighborhood, and nobody else is winning this race.

As I crossed the line, I just slumped over my bike, my shoulders sagging, too exhausted and relieved even to lift my arms. I was bleeding and limping and drained, but I had won the stage by 40 seconds over Ullrich.

I now led the Tour by
1:07
. A one-minute lead, after two weeks of suffering and self-doubt, felt like an hour. It was more than we could have expected under the circumstances. I took the podium and slipped on the yellow jersey, and as I stood there, arms upraised, I could see George crossing the finish line. My fatigue lifted, and I lit up and pointed straight at him, jabbing at the air in triumph.

Finally, I left the podium. I went to drug testing, and then the press conference, so it was some time before I finally saw Johan. I threw myself at him, and he grabbed me in a huge bear hug and shook me up and down, babbling, “Yes, yes, yes, yes!”

“This is my neighborhood,” I said.

We climbed into a car together and started the drive down the mountain to our hotel. The rest of the Postals had gone ahead of us on the team bus. Suddenly I wanted to see my teammates, urgently. The only reason I had stood on the podium in the yellow jersey was because they had surrounded and protected me, and now I didn’t want to ride solo, I wanted to ride with them. “Let’s catch them,” I said to Johan.

He sped down the road until we could see the bus ahead. We radioed the driver, and he pulled over to wait. When we reached the side of the road, I leaped out of Johan’s car, ran to the bus, and clambered up the stairs. I jumped aboard and stood in the aisle, screaming in exultation.

“How do you like me now?!
How do you fucking like me now??!!”

The guys erupted. They charged out of their seats, whooping, and for the next ten minutes it was pandemonium in the aisle, all of us hugging, crying, and pounding one another on the back.

The Tour wasn’t over, but now I believed absolutely that I would win it. For the first time, I didn’t feel weak or hunted. I felt like the real leader of the Tour de France. Most important, I felt I could look my teammates in the eye.

For the next three days, Ullrich and I rode in a sort of limbo, eyeing each other. There was no ground in those stages over which to make up any significant time, so we simply maintained a steady tempo and rode toward
Nantes
, and what we both knew would be the deciding stage, the time trial. We had nothing to do but pedal and think, and the tension grew. Every second would literally count.

We awoke in
Nantes
to a driving rainstorm. Nevertheless, Johan and I got up at
6:30
A.M.
and drove out to examine the course. I slowly cruised up and down the road on my bike in the rain, studying the corners, train tracks, even the manholes. Just a paint mark could be dangerously slick on a wet road. The last ten kilometers were especially treacherous, I noticed—a series of roundabouts and corners that offered potential disaster. When we got back to the hotel, we heard that Ullrich had slept in, and had looked at a video of the course rather than get wet.

The team bus was quiet that morning, as the rain pelted the windows. My friend Robin Williams broke the quiet here and there with his usual hilarity, and I tried to laugh through my clenched jaw.

Eventually, all the other riders were out on the course. Reports from my teammates came back: riders were crashing every few minutes. Three of Ullrich’s teammates had already gone down. I should take no chances.

Johan gave me some last tactical instructions, which amounted to a caution: I wasn’t the one who needed to take risks. Ullrich was chasing me, not the other way around.

With that thought, I headed out onto the course—and started slowly. I lost six seconds to Ullrich in the first kilometer and a half.

I could feel my wheels slipping in the rain.

I stayed calm. I suspected that Ullrich had started fast to try to press me early, and maybe even demoralize me. I concentrated on my own tempo, and found a rhythm.

By the next time check, I was only two seconds back.

Ullrich kept pushing despite the fact that there was standing water all over the course. Water sprayed from our wheels on every corner.

Most of my teammates had ridden safely in, and now they were back on the bus, nervously watching the race on TV. They covered their faces with their hands as I sped over the slippery pavement. They peeked through their fingers.

I went up by ten seconds.

Ahead, Ullrich jackhammered at the pedals. He entered the most treacherous part of the course, the last ten kilometers. He swept into a roundabout.

A moment later, Johan’s deadpan voice came into my ear. “Lance, Ullrich has crashed.”

Ullrich had hurtled into the roundabout, and as he leaned into the curve, his bike skidded out from under him. It was as though the road had simply disappeared beneath him. He slid for a few long, terrible moments across the water-soaked asphalt, then slammed into some hay bales.

Ullrich struggled to his feet and got back on his bike, but the race was over. I was the winner of the Tour, if I could stay upright. “Lance, take it easy. Please, no risks,” Johan said. “You can practically walk to the finish now and you’ll still win the Tour.”

From then on, my ride was a beautiful tour of
Nantes
. I practically sat up and enjoyed the view. But I still took care around those corners.

With three kilometers to go, Johan pulled the car up next to me and flashed a thumbs-up sign. I lifted a hand back in salute—the “hook ’em, ’horns” sign for
Texas
.

As I neared the finish line, all of the strain of the past three weeks fell away. I felt something almost sunny on my face and realized it was my own smile. I streaked across the line, and beat a fist in the air, and tried to absorb the moment: I was about to become a five-time winner of the Tour de France.

But records are hard to feel. They’re measures, or markers, that we use to set limits. To say that someone has won five
Tours
is a cool abstraction, because the number doesn’t begin to suggest all of the events and emotions that those races really
entailed,
the setbacks and the stages victories, or the anguish and the elation. Perhaps the only people who could fully understand what the phrase “five Tour de France victories” meant were my teammates, and the other four men who had done it, and they all had their own personal associations with the number five. I only knew what it meant to me: it represented the number of times I had gotten back up.

As I came down from the podium, I met Bernard Hinault. He just gripped my hand and said simply, “Welcome to the club.”

The next day, the ride to
Paris
was a traveling ceremony. I glided along, sipped champagne, and thought about the meaning of the race: about getting up again, finding another way out of your problems, with your head or with your will. I felt a swell in my chest as we entered
Paris
. As we passed the Hôtel de Crillon, I saw that it was flying the
Texas
flag for me, as it had done for the past five years.

But the real moment of victory came that night in a private banquet room with just the team. I rose and toasted them. “This year was so hard for me, personally and professionally,” I said. “I wasn’t the best at times, and I know it. I scared all of us, and I promise never to let it happen again. But you guys carried me. It killed me to come down to the dinner table and look you guys in the face, after letting you down like that. After Luz Ardiden, I could finally look in your eyes with pride. I really needed you, and you were there, and now I’m here because of you. Thank you for sticking by me. I owe this jersey to you. This celebration, this night is in your honor. Thank you.”

That marked the end of the 100th Tour de France for me. But like I say, things keep happening.

Kik and the kids and I returned to Girona together. We put the kids in bed, plugged in the baby monitor, and went to the café downstairs, just under our window. We ordered cold beers, Spanish ham, and bread, and we sat there in silence. We would continue to put effort, care, and deep thought into our relationship.