Chris Carmichael, who became his coach when Armstrong was still a teenager, told me that even then Armstrong was among the most remarkable athletes he had ever seen. Not only has his cardiovascular strength always been exceptional; his body seems specially constructed for cycling. His thigh bones are unusually long, for example, which permits him to apply just the right amount of torque to the pedals.
Although Armstrong was talented, he wasn’t very disciplined. He acted as if he had nothing to learn. “I had never met him when I took over as his coach,” Carmichael told me. “I called him up and we talked on the phone. He was kind of rude. Not kind of rude. He was completely rude. He was, like, ‘So you are the new coach—what are you going to teach me?’ He just thought he was King Shit. I would tell him to wait till the end of a race before making a break. He just couldn’t do that. He would get out in front and set the pace. He would burn up the field, and when other riders came alive he would be done, spent.” Still, Armstrong did well in one-day races, in which bursts of energy count as much as patience or tactical precision. In 1991, after several years of increasingly impressive performances, he became the U.S. amateur champion, and the next year he turned pro. In 1993, he became the youngest man ever to win a stage in the Tour de France; he won the World Road Championships the same year.
In 1996, Armstrong signed a contract with the French cycling team Cofidis, for a salary of more than two million dollars over two years. He had a beautiful new home in Austin, and a Porsche that he liked to drive fast. Then, in September, he became unusually weak and felt soreness in one of his testicles. Since soreness is a part of any cyclist’s life, he didn’t give it much thought. One night later that month, however, several days after his twenty-fifth birthday, he felt something metallic in his throat while he was talking on the phone. He put his friend on hold, and ran into the bathroom. “I coughed into the sink,” he later wrote. “It splattered with blood. I coughed again, and spit up another stream of red. I couldn’t believe the mass of blood and clotted matter had come from my own body.”
Within a week, Armstrong had surgery to remove the cancerous testicle. By then, the disease had spread to his lungs, abdomen, and brain. He needed brain surgery and the most aggressive type of chemotherapy. “At that point, he had a minority chance of living another year,” Craig Nichols, who was Armstrong’s principal oncologist, told me. “We cure at most a third of the people in situations like that.” A professor at Oregon Health Sciences University who specializes in testicular cancer, Nichols has remained a friend and is an adviser to the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which supports cancer research. Nichols described Armstrong as the “most willful person I have ever met.” And, he said, “he wasn’t willing to die.” Armstrong underwent four rounds of chemotherapy so powerful that the chemicals destroyed his musculature and caused permanent kidney damage; in the final treatments, the chemicals left burns on his skin from the inside out. Cofidis, convinced that Armstrong’s career (and perhaps his life) was over, told his agent while he was still in the hospital that it wanted to reconsider the terms of his contract. That may have turned out to be the worst bet in the history of sports.
Armstrong did recover, but his first attempts to return to competition ended in exhaustion and depression. “In an odd way, having cancer was easier than recovery—at least in chemo I was doing something, instead of just waiting for it to come back,” he wrote. In 1998, he decided to make a more serious effort to return to racing. Again, he couldn’t stick with it. “The comeback was still amazingly risky,” Carmichael told me. “There wasn’t a doctor on this earth who could say that Lance Armstrong’s lungs weren’t fucked up, the cancer wasn’t going to come back. Nobody said, ‘You will be successful and, by the way, you will win the Tour.’ He was afraid, so he just quit. I was shocked. He beats cancer. Goes to hell and back. Goes to Europe. Trains his ass off. Trained harder than ever. In the Ruta del Sol”—a five-day race held each year in Spain—“he was fourteenth. He had never done better, even before cancer, and all indications were that he was on the verge of the greatest comeback in sports, and he said, ‘Hey, I’m quitting.’ My coaching side just wanted to scream.”
Carmichael and Bill Stapleton, Armstrong’s close friend and agent, helped persuade him that this wasn’t the way to end his career. “We said, ‘You will look back on this and be disappointed—you are going out as a quitter,’” Carmichael told me. Armstrong agreed to prepare for one last race, in the United States. He, Carmichael, and a friend went to Boone, a small town in North Carolina where Armstrong liked to train. “Early April,” Carmichael recalled. “The first day was nice. Then the weather turned ugly. I would follow behind in the car as they trained. One day, we were to finish at the top of Beech Mountain. It was a long ride, a hundred-plus miles, then the ride to the top. Something happened on that mountain. He just dropped his partner and he went for it. He was racing. It was weird. I was following behind him in the car. This cold rain was now a wet snow. And I rolled down the window and I was honking the horn and yelling, ‘Go, Lance, go!’ He was attacking and cranking away as though we were in the Tour. Nobody was around. No human being. Not even a cow. He got up to the top of that mountain and I said, ‘OK, I’ll load the bike on the car and we can go home.’ He said, ‘Give me my rain jacket—I’m riding back.’ Another thirty miles. That was all he said. It was like throwing on a light switch.”
Armstrong now says that cancer was the best thing that ever happened to him. Before becoming ill, he didn’t care about strategy or tactics or teamwork—and nobody (no matter what his abilities) becomes a great cyclist without mastering those aspects of the sport. Despite Armstrong’s brilliant early start in the 1993 Tour, for example, he didn’t even finish the race; he dropped out when the teams entered the most difficult mountain phase, in the Alps. (He also failed to finish in 1994 and 1996.)
As Carmichael pointed out to me, Armstrong had always been gifted, but “genetically he is not alone. He is near the top but not at the top. I have seen people better than Lance that never go anywhere. Before Lance had cancer, we argued all the time. He never trained right. He just relied on his gift. He would do what you asked for two weeks, then flake off and do his own thing for a month or two. And then a big race would be coming up and he would call me up, all tense, telling me, ‘God, I have got to start training, and you guys better start sending me some programs.’ I would say, ‘Lance, you don’t just start preparing things four weeks before a race. This is a long process.’”
Cycling is, above all, a team sport, and the tactics involved are as complicated as those of baseball or basketball. “Ever try to explain the infield-fly rule to somebody?” Armstrong asked me when we were in Texas, where he lives when he is not racing or training in Europe. “You have to watch it to get it. As soon as you pay some attention to the tactics, cycling makes a lot of sense.”
Riding through the French mountains with Bruyneel, a genial thirty-seven-year-old who has been with U.S. Postal since 1999, soon after Armstrong joined the team, I saw what he meant. (Armstrong’s athletic advisers complement each other: Carmichael is the physical strategist, and Bruyneel the tactician.) “It looks like Victor is good today, so let’s save him a bit longer for the Colombiere,” Bruyneel radioed to Armstrong about halfway through the day’s ride. “Sounds like a good idea,” Armstrong replied. In other words, Victor Hugo Peña, a promising young Colombian climber on the team, seemed strong enough to lead Armstrong over one of the big peaks that the racers would encounter before the Col de Joux Plane. Riders like Hugo Peña “work” for Armstrong; they are not attempting to win the race themselves but, rather, focusing on preventing another team from defeating Armstrong. Their job is to patrol the peloton. If a competing star tries to escape from the pack in a breakaway, they must be ready to chase him down, in order to tire him out and make him less of a threat later in the race.
Until it is time to sprint, climb, or attempt a breakaway, there is usually at least one team rider positioned in f
ront of his leader. Riding directly behind another man—which is called drafting—can save a skilled cyclist as much as 40 percent of his energy. Asker Jeukendrup, a physiologist who directs the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Birmingham, has carried out extensive studies of the energy expended by cyclists when they race. Several years ago, Jeukendrup attached power meters to the bicycles of several Tour participants during critical stages. A power meter records a rider’s heart rate, his pedal cadence, his speed, and, most important, the watts that he generates with every turn of the wheels. (Watts provide the most accurate measurement of the intensity of exercise; heart rates vary and so does speed. The amount of work needed to climb a hill remains the same no matter how fast you ride.)
Jeukendrup recorded the effort expended by a cyclist riding for six hours at forty kilometers an hour in the middle of the peloton, shielded from the wind. He compared this figure with the power needed to propel that same man riding alone. In the pack, the cyclist used an average of 98 watts—which would never tire a well-trained professional. On his own, however, the cyclist expended an average of 275 watts—nearly three times the power—to maintain the same speed. It is easy to see what this means: In any race, the guy out front is often suffering in his attempt to lead the peloton, while somebody like Armstrong, safely tucked into a cocoon of teammates, can cruise just a few yards behind the leader and be “pulled” at essentially the same speed, conserving energy for later.
The peloton can cover up to 250 kilometers a day without stopping, like a rolling army; there is a “feed zone” about halfway through each stage, where cyclists slow down enough to be draped with a cloth pouch, called a musette, which is filled with fruit, power bars, and other high-carbohydrate snacks. The team members take turns “working,” or pulling, at the front to give each other a rest. (Even competitors, when they ride together, take turns out front, sharing the advantages of drafting.) In some ways, cycling retains an odd chivalry that is more readily associated with the trenches of the First World War. During last year’s Tour, for instance, at a crucial moment in the Pyrenees, Jan Ullrich veered off the road and into a ditch; Armstrong waited for him to get back on his bike and catch up. Ullrich almost certainly would have done the same for him. When a leader needs to urinate, the whole pack slows down. It is an unspoken but very clear element of the etiquette of professional cycling that nobody is permitted to benefit by breaking away while an opponent urinates (or, worse yet, when part of the peloton is caught at a train crossing). Anyone who did would be unlikely to finish the race. After all, it takes little to knock a man off a bicycle, particularly at high speeds; this is called flicking, from the German ficken—which means “to fuck.”
Apart from the Olympics and World Cup soccer, the Tour is the most popular sporting event in Europe. In France, July is a carnival, complete with thousands of cars, buses, motorcycles, and helicopters following the Tour, and daily television coverage. This year, at least fifteen million people—a quarter of the country’s population—are expected to line the highways to watch the cyclists whiz by in a blurred instant. Every morning, kids mass outside the team buses, begging for autographs. If a spectator is lucky, someone in the peloton will toss a used water bottle his way; it is the cycling world’s version of a foul ball.
The Tour de France is exactly what its name suggests: a tour of France. The race takes place over the course of three weeks, with a day or two of rest, and the course is altered slightly each year, so that it passes through different villages. Each day, there is a new stage; when all the stages have been completed, the man with the fastest cumulative time wins. (This year’s Tour will be the shortest in its history; some people believe this is an attempt to reduce Armstrong’s advantage.) As a commercial and logistical endeavor, the Tour could be compared to a presidential campaign or the Super Bowl. Its budget is in the tens of millions of dollars, and the winner receives close to four hundred thousand dollars. The money comes from location fees, paid by towns that host a stage, and from advertising revenues and broadcast licenses. The Tour is treated as if it were its own sovereign state within France: It has a police force and a traveling bank (the only one in the country open on Bastille Day). The entourage includes riders, mechanics, masseurs, managers, doctors, cooks, journalists, and race officials. Each team starts the race with nine riders (though it is common for as many as half to drop out), who usually work to further the goals of their leader, like Armstrong or Ullrich—who injured his knee earlier this year and will not compete.
Since individual excellence can get one only so far in a race of this magnitude, it is also crucial to have the right team, to provide organization, finances, and experience. U.S. Postal has all that; it is, in its way, pro cycling’s Yankees—with climbing specialists, sprinters, and a powerful bench. This is why so many cyclists agree to work as domestiques, putting their success second to Armstrong’s. “You work for a teammate who is older and more experienced,” Victor Hugo Peña told me late one day between stages of the Dauphiné.
I was curious why a talented cyclist would agree to play such a role. “It is an apprenticeship—you have to learn the business,” Hugo Peña said. “If you get respect, work well, and are good, you move up.” Armstrong himself worked as a domestique when he was starting out. He told me that he finds the system reassuring. Bruyneel, who was a successful professional, and won two stages in the Tour, agreed. “What does a man gain from riding for himself and coming in fiftieth?” he said. “If you see your job as helping your team win, you will get more out of that than simply riding and losing. It’s fun to be part of a winning team.” And it is also profitable; even a journeyman cyclist can make a hundred thousand dollars a year. (This is nothing like what the winners make, of course; between his salary and the endorsements, Armstrong earned about fifteen million dollars last year.) Still, there comes a point when a talented cyclist no longer wants to occupy a supporting role and tries to establish himself as a potential leader. For several years, Armstrong’s deputy on the U.S. Postal team was his friend Tyler Hamilton. This year, with Armstrong’s encouragement, Hamilton began riding for a Danish competitor, CSC Tiscali, and, as one of its leaders, he placed second in the Giro d’Italia.
The physical demands on competitive cyclists are immense. One day, they will have to ride two hundred kilometers through the mountains; the next day there might be a long, flat sprint lasting seven hours. Because cyclists have such a low percentage of body fat, they are more susceptible to infections than other people. (At the beginning of the Tour, Armstrong’s body fat is around 4 or 5 percent; this season, Shaquille O’Neal, the most powerful player in the NBA, boasted that his body-fat level was 16 percent.)
The Tour de France has been described as the equivalent of running twenty marathons in twenty days. During the 1980s and ’90s, Wim H. M. Saris, a professor of nutrition at the University of Maastricht, conducted a study of human endurance by following participants in the Tour. “It is without any doubt the most demanding athletic event,” he told me. “For one day, two days—sure, you may find something that expends more energy. But for three weeks? Never.”
Looking at a wide range of physical activities, Saris and his colleagues measured the metabolic demands made on people engaged in each of them. “On average, the cyclists expend sixty-five hundred calories a day for three weeks, with peak days of ten thousand calories,” he said. “If you are sedentary, you are burning perhaps twenty-five hundred calories a day. Active people might burn as many as thirty-five hundred.” Saris compared the metabolic rates of professional cyclists while they were riding with those of a variety of animal species, and he created a kind of energy index—dividing daily expenditure of energy by resting metabolic rate. This figure turned out to range from one to seven. An active male rates about two on Saris’s index and an average professional cyclist four and a half. Almost no species can survive with a number that is greater than five. For example, the effort made by birds foraging for food sometimes kills them,
and they scored a little more than five. In fact, only four species are known to have higher rates on Saris’s energy index than the professional cyclists in his study: a small Australian possum, a macaroni penguin, a large seabird called a gannet, and one species of marsupial mouse.
This spring, Armstrong, who doesn’t relax much to begin with, was spending up to thirty-five hours a week on his bicycle. When I met him, in April, he had just flown to Austin from Europe, where he had been racing, for a forty-eight-hour “drop-in,” in order to raise money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. This required him to take the Concorde from Paris to New York, change planes, and, once he’d landed in Austin, drive to an afternoon photo shoot. Then he signed books, cycling jerseys, and posters for cancer survivors and sponsors of the foundation. After that, he went to a fund-raising dinner. A few hours later, the foundation’s annual charity weekend, the Ride for the Roses, would officially begin, with an outdoor rock concert at the Austin Auditorium Shores arena. But Armstrong was feeling restless; he hadn’t been on his bicycle for nearly a day. So he changed, and went for a thirty-five-mile spin. At eight-thirty that evening, he was standing backstage at the benefit concert, which featured Cake and the Stone Temple Pilots. I met up with him there; Armstrong, who is surprisingly slight, wore jeans, sandals, and a Nike golf cap. He didn’t seem a bit tired.
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