Every Second Counts (5 page)

I knew I was dividing my energies too many different ways one afternoon, when I found myself on a golf course, trying to play nine holes and relax. As I was lining up a putt, I held a cell phone to my ear, trying to handle a business matter involving new cycling tires. “Hold on,” I said. I put the phone down in the grass, hastily missed the putt, and then resumed the conversation.

On another day, I found myself sprinting through the
Orlando
airport, pouring sweat, with my bike in a cardboard box, as I tried to make a flight to
New York
for a business meeting. I was thinking maybe I could get in a couple of hours riding in
Central Park
. In the end I had to ditch the bike at the airport, because I was so late for the flight. I dropped into my seat drenched, after arguing my way past a stewardess.
This has to stop
, I thought.

In its own way, too much success could deaden you, I realized. I preferred the immediacy of simply trying to stay well, be a good parent, and ride a bike. I didn’t want to get too distracted by opportunities and obligations.

I went to my friend Lee Walker, and we had a talk about tradeoffs, how to juggle commitments without cheating myself or the people around me. Lee helped me understand that a schedule was not a trivial thing.

“Schedule,” Lee likes to say, “
is
how we make our intentions manifest in the world.”

I knew Lee Walker the way everybody around town knew Lee. He was one of the town’s more indelible characters, a former president of Dell Computer who had walked away from it all and now ambled around in a pair of worn jeans, old sneakers, and a wide-brimmed hat, giving away money and good advice. Lee had spent every day in a suit and tie until he awoke one morning with a searing pain in his back, from spinal meningitis. While he was ill, he realized he hated his life, and half-hoped the illness would kill him.

After he got well, he started a second life. He left Dell, sold his big house in
West Austin
, got a new job teaching at the
University
of
Texas
. He lived near campus in a pretty old house with a wild
garden,
and a cottage-office out back with a huge blackboard and bookshelves to the ceiling. He was a benefactor to a lot of causes and young people in
Austin
, including me.

When I first knew Lee, pre-cancer, we talked mostly about money. It was my primary topic; I wanted to learn at the knee of a fortune-making wizard. I’d print out my portfolio so he could look it over and advise me. “What are you holding that shit stock for?” he’d ask. We’d talk about what I was selling, why I was buying,
real
down-and-dirty stuff. Happiness to me was making money and acquiring stuff.

But whatever I imagined happiness to be, pretty soon I wore it out, took it for granted, or threw it away. A portfolio, a Porsche, these things were important to me. So was my hair. Then I lost them, including the hair. Sold the car, dropped a good deal of money, and barely hung on to my life. Happiness became waking up.

After that, everything changed between me and Lee. We never talked about money anymore, except in a theoretical sense, as we’d both come to understand it: wealth couldn’t equal health. We talked about our pitched-back experiences, and about the basic riddle of survivorship: how do you hold on to the lessons of mortal illness and yet still resume your ordinary life, with all of its mundane duties? Lee liked to quote the poet Mary Oliver. “What will you do with your wild and precious self?”

Now, as a Tour champion and a cancer activist, I had too many confusing new choices and roles. Lee persuaded me that the important issue was not money, but time. I began to ask, what did I really want? I wanted to make money, sure, but I didn’t want to be exhausted by it, or worried about brand strategies. I didn’t want to see my face on a cardboard cutout at a convenience store, and I didn’t want to make a movie with Tweety Bird. “I don’t think you want to maximize your wealth; I think you want to maximize your name,” Lee said. I settled on a few meaningful endorsements and tried to remember that my pressures were a privilege, and that they came with a rare dose of public goodwill. On balance, I just hoped to stick to what I cared about and believed in, without letting it slip personally or professionally.

Meanwhile, everyone in cycling watched and wondered what the wealth, endorsements, and publicity maelstrom would do to me. Miguel Indurain, the great Spanish cyclist, said, “Every rider who wins has the same problem. It changes life forever.”
USA Today
printed a story about my endorsements, and called me Lance Inc. The French newspaper
L’Equipe
reprinted it, with a commentary in italics, suggesting I’d spent too much time making money and not enough training.

Most of my opponents in the cycling world regarded the ’99 Tour as a fluke—a sensational fluke, but a fluke. The cycling world had refused to believe in me in the first place, and now they suggested that a second victory was implausible. But they did me a favor when they wrote me off, because they gave me my new motive. That, alone, made me want to win another one.

As the skepticism grew, the 2000 Tour became a hugely important race to me, perhaps more important even than
’99
. Anything less than another Tour title was, to me, a failure. “Watch,” I told my friends. “I’m going to win it again. And you know why? Because none of them think I can.”

I began
looking
for reasons to be aggravated on the bike; I catalogued each expression of skepticism, every disbelieving remark or expression of uncertainty by an opponent, and used them to challenge myself. I kept a list. It was an old competitive habit that went back to my childhood in
Plano
, when I’d never had as much money as the other kids, or played the right sport. (They didn’t force you to play football in
Texas
, but they sure wanted you to.) I didn’t have the right conventional parents, either. I’d always been underestimated, and I knew how to put it to good use. I thrived on long odds.

“I’m just a regular guy,” I said that winter. “And I’ll show you what a regular guy can do.”

T
he first thing
I did in trying to defend the Tour de France, though, was nearly kill myself.

The world is full of people who are trying to purchase self-confidence, or manufacture it, or who simply posture it. But you can’t fake confidence, you have to earn it, and if you ask me, the only way to do that is work. You have to do the work, and that’s how the 2000 campaign started, with backbreaking work.

In early May, the U.S. Postal team went into the Alps and Pyrenees for a series of labor-intensive training camps, the idea being that if I rehearsed the pain, punished my body enough and did enough work, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so bad during the Tour itself. We traced the routes we’d ride in the Tour, scouting the stages.

The 87th annual edition of the race would cover 2,274 miles and 23 days, counterclockwise around
France
. It was an admittedly illogical undertaking, but then, the Tour evolved from a bizarre stunt in the first place: in the early dawn of the Industrial Age, a French newspaper offered a cash prize to any fool who could beat other fools in an attempt to circle the country on a bicycle. From the outset the event was plagued by cheating, accidents, and absurdities. Since then, however, it has grown into a full-fledged sport, and a beloved national ceremony.

Bike racing is a peculiar sport by American standards, with a strange ethic and an intricate code, and there are as many unwritten rules as there are written ones. It’s actually a high-speed chess match on bikes, and reconnoitering the route was important.

The various members of the U.S. Postal team had different roles along the way. Some of them, like my close friend Kevin Livingston, were strong climbers and it would be their job to help me through the mountains, riding in front to shield me from the wind, and pace me up the climbs, while others, such as my great friend George Hincapie, would help me sprint through the flats. Most of my teammates, like Hincapie, Tyler Hamilton, and Viacheslav Ekimov of
Russia
, were extremely accomplished riders and very capable of winning big races in their own right, and it was a testament to their dedication that they rode so hard on my behalf. Then there were younger and less accomplished riders who were called “domestiques,” whose jobs would be to do everything from ride interference to ferry food and water and equipment to me if I needed it.

Our tactician, or
directeur sportif
, was Johan Bruyneel, a dashing former cyclist from
Belgium
with a reputation for giant-killing: he’d once won a famous Tour stage by beating Indurain. He is an unexcitable man with steady gray eyes and a cleft chin, and as our director he has enormous patience, a talent for devising race plans, and meticulous attention to details. It was Johan who insisted that we hold those camps and familiarize ourselves with the routes.

We rode for hours on end through the raw European spring. In early May, the weather in the jagged
Pyrenees
alternated between icy and sun-scorched, and it was on the backside of one of those desolate peaks that I nearly lost the Tour before it started.

We had just climbed a mountain called the Col du Soulour, in order to practice a high-speed descent that might be important. As we went up, the mountain sun baked us. I took my helmet off my sweat-soaked head and hooked it over the handlebars. At the top, I paused while one of our mechanics made some adjustments on my handlebars. Then I pushed off, crouched over the bars, and dived down the mountain—with my helmet still dangling from the handlebars. It was an elementary mistake.

The descent was narrow and winding, with a steep drop into a valley below to my right, and a brick retaining wall to my left. I concentrated on cornering, without losing speed. I rounded corner after corner, enjoying the rhythm . . .

. . .
my
front tire hit a rock.

It blew.

The handlebars swung crazily, like somebody had wrenched them out of my hands. When a front tire blows while you’re going 40 miles an hour, you can’t steer. What seconds before had been a high-performance rubber tire generating a secure centrifugal force was now shredded on top of a flat carbon rim. The bike shuddered wildly, and my front wheel veered toward the brick wall. I thought,
If
I just get it straight, maybe I can slow down enough . . .

The wall came too fast. There was a ditch just in front of it, and my front wheel plunged into it. I catapulted off the bike—and hit the wall head-first. It was as though the daylight suddenly exploded, and the sky cracked in half.

I lay in the ditch, stunned and bleeding. Johan had been driving in a car behind me, and now he came around the corner to see me lying in a pool of blood. I had a deep cut in my jaw, my head was swelling and I was barely conscious. I’d taken the entire impact on my head. Weirdly, I didn’t have a scratch on me anywhere else. I didn’t even tear my racing jersey.

I heard people running. Then I heard some voices—Johan, and strangers. Two French-Canadian doctors had just happened to be picnicking in the grass near the brick wall, and they’d watched, aghast, as I piled into the wall and fell in a heap.

I tried to sit up. “
Non
, non
,” one of them said, and pressed me back down. The other leaped up and ran to their car for some ice, which they put on my head. I was conscious and awake but I couldn’t see out of the ditch. I remember overhearing Johan, speaking with the doctors.

“You know,” one of them said, “when we saw him, and heard the impact, we expected to walk over and find a dead man.”

I passed out, I think. At some point, an ambulance came and took me down from the mountains to a hospital in
Lourdes
. It was the first time I’d needed hospitalization since the cancer, and as the doors swung open, I inhaled the scent of medicines and disinfectant, and felt the old, scared, fluttery sensation in my chest.

I took some stitches in my head and my jaw, and they kept me overnight for observation. I didn’t sleep. I kept feeling that plastic mattress-cover underneath the sheets, which I managed to soak with perspiration.

The next morning I flew home to Nice. Kik met me at the airport. My head was about three times larger than it should have been, and I had two black and puffed-out eyes, along with scrapes and cuts all over my face. Kik gasped.

“You look like the Elephant Man,” she said.

For weeks I sat on the sofa at home, unable to train or race, waiting for my head to regain its normal shape. I had plenty of time to think, and it left me with the conviction that I didn’t need to make any more foolish mistakes or take unnecessary chances. I liked descending, and I liked cornering, but now I decided that if I lost 30 seconds, that was okay. I could make it up.

Finally, carefully, I resumed training. The crash had prevented me from making perhaps the most important reconnaissance, of a climb called Hautacam. It was a famed ski station at the top of a mist-shrouded mountain near
Lourdes
, and it would be the first mountain stage, as well as one of the most difficult.