~terry
Thu, Jul 11, 2002 (09:43)
#5
From an amazing New Yorker piece.
July 11, 2002 | home
THE LONG RIDE
by MICHAEL SPECTER
How did Lance Armstrong manage the greatest comeback in sports history?
Issue of 2002-07-15
Posted 2002-07-08
A couple of weeks ago, on a sweltering Saturday afternoon, I found myself in the passenger seat of a small Volkswagen, careering so rapidly around the hairpin turns of the French Alps that I could smell the tires burning. Johan Bruyneel, the suave, unflappable director of the United States Postal Service Pro Cycling Team, was behind the wheel. Driving at ninety kilometres an hour occupied half his attention. The rest was devoted to fiddling with a small television mounted in the dashboard, examining a set of complicated topographical maps, and talking into one of two radio transmitters in the car. The first connected Bruyneel to the team's support vehicle, laden with extra bicycles, water bottles, power bars, and other tools and equipment. The second fed into the earpieces of the eight U.S. Postal Service cyclists who were racing along the switchbacks ahead of us. The entire team could hear every word that Bruyneel said, but most of the time he was talking to just one man: Lance Armstrong.
We had been on the road for about three hours and Armstrong was a kilometre in front of us, pedalling so fast that it was hard to keep up. It was the sixth day of the Dauphin� Lib�r�, a weeklong race that is run in daily stages. Armstrong doesn't enter races like the Dauphin� to win (though often enough he does); he enters to test his legs in preparation for a greater goal�the Tour de France. Since 1998, when he returned to cycling after almost losing his life to testicular cancer, Armstrong has focussed exclusively on dominating the thirty-five-hundred-kilometre, nearly month-long Tour, which, in the world of cycling, matters more than all other races combined. This week, he begins a quest to become the fourth person in the hundred-year-history of the Tour�the world's most gruelling test of human endurance�to win four times in a row. (In 1995, the Spanish cyclist Miguel Indurain became the first to win five consecutively�a record that is clearly on Armstrong's mind.)
The cyclists had covered a hundred and eight kilometres, much of it over mountain passes still capped with snow, despite temperatures edging into the nineties. Now the peloton�the term is French for "platoon," and it describes the pack of riders who make up the main group in every race�was about to start one of the most agonizing climbs in Europe, the pass between Mont Blanc and Lake Geneva, which is known as the Col de Joux Plane. In cycling, climbs are rated according to how long and steep they are: the easiest is category four, the hardest category one. The seventeen-hundred-metre Joux Plane has a special rating, known as hors categorie, or beyond category; for nearly twelve kilometres, it rises so sharply that it seems a man could get to the top only by helicopter.
"We start the Joux Plane with a lot of respect for this mountain," Bruyneel said quietly into his radio. "It is long, it is hard. Take it easy. If people are breaking away, let them go. Do you hear me, Lance?"
"Yes, Johan," Armstrong replied flatly. "I remember the mountain."
With only a few days remaining in the 2000 Tour de France, Armstrong had what most observers agreed was an insurmountable lead when he headed toward this pass. He was riding with his two main rivals of that year: Marco Pantani, the best-known Italian cyclist, and Jan Ullrich, the twenty-eight-year-old German who won the Tour in 1997, and who in the world of cycling plays the role of Joe Frazier to Armstrong's Ali. As they started to climb, Armstrong seemed invincible. Halfway up, though, he slumped over his handlebars, looking as if he had suffered a stroke, and Ullrich blew right by him.
"I bonked," Armstrong said later, using a cyclist's term for running out of fuel. A professional cyclist consumes so much energy�up to ten thousand calories during a two-hundred-kilometre mountain stage�that, unless some of it is replaced, his body will run through all the glycogen (the principal short-term supply of carbohydrates the body uses for power) stored in his muscles. Armstrong hadn't eaten properly that morning; then he found himself cut off from his domestiques�the teammates who, among other things, are responsible for bringing him supplies of food and water during the race. "That was the hardest day of my life on a bike," Armstrong said later. He was lucky to finish the day's stage, and even luckier to hold on and win the race.
"This isn't just a stage in a race for Lance," Bruyneel said now, as Armstrong approached the bottom of the slope. "He needs to defeat this mountain to feel ready for the Tour." This time, Bruyneel made sure that the domestiques ferried water, carbohydrate drinks, and extra power bars to Armstrong throughout the day. They periodically drifted back to our car and performed a kind of high-speed docking maneuver so that Bruyneel could thrust water bottles, five or six at a time, into their outstretched arms.
Last year, Armstrong won the Tour, for the third time in a row, by covering 3,462 kilometres at an average speed of more than forty kilometres an hour�the third-fastest time in the history of the event. In all, during those three weeks in July, Armstrong spent eighty-six hours, seventeen minutes, and twenty-eight seconds on the bike. "Lance almost killed himself training for the last Tour," Bruyneel told me. "This year, he is in even better shape. But the press still wants to talk about drugs."
It is, of course, hard to write about cycling and not discuss performance-enhancing drugs, because at times so many of the leading competitors seem to have used them. Strict testing measures have been in force since 1998, when the Tour was nearly cancelled after an assistant for the Festina team was caught with hundreds of vials of erythropoietin, or EPO, a hormone that can increase the oxygen supply to the blood. But the changes have brought only limited success: just this May, Stefano Garzelli and Gilberto Simoni, two of Europe's leading cyclists, were forced to withdraw from the Giro d'Italia, Italy's most important race.
Because Armstrong is the best cyclist in the world, there is an assumption among some of those who follow the sport that he, too, must use drugs. Armstrong has never failed a drug test, however, and he may well be the most frequently examined athlete in the history of sports. Whenever he wins a day's stage, or finishes as one of the top cyclists in a longer race, he is required to provide a urine sample. Like other professionals, Armstrong is also tested randomly throughout the year. (The World Anti-Doping Agency, which regularly tests athletes, has even appeared at his home, in Austin, Texas, at dawn, to demand a urine sample.) Nobody questions Armstrong's excellence. And yet doubts remain: is he really so gifted that, like Secretariat, he easily dominates even his most talented competitors?
"It's terribly unfair," Bruyneel told me as we drove through the mountains. "He is already winning, and is extremely fit. Still, people always ask that one question: How can he do this without drugs? I understand why people ask, because our sport has been tainted. But Lance has a different trick, and I have watched him do it now for four years: he just works harder than anyone else alive."
~terry
Thu, Jul 11, 2002 (09:45)
#6
Lance Armstrong's heart is almost a third larger than that of an average
man. During those rare moments when he is at rest, it beats about
thirty-two times a minute�slowly enough so that a doctor who knew nothing
about him would call a hospital as soon as he heard it. (When Armstrong is
exerting himself, his heart rate can edge up above two hundred beats a
minute.) Physically, he was a prodigy. Born in 1971, Armstrong was raised
by his mother in Plano, a drab suburb of Dallas that he quickly came to
despise. He never knew his father, and refers to him as "the DNA donor."
He has written that "the main thing you need to know about my childhood is
that I never had a real father, but I never sat around wishing for one,
either. . . . I've never had a single conversation with my mother about
him."
He was a willful child and didn't like to listen to advice. "I have loved
him every minute of his life, but, God, there were times when it was a
struggle," his mother, Linda, told me. She is a demure woman with the kind
of big blond hair once favored by wives of astronauts. "He has always
wanted to test the boundaries," she said. Armstrong admits that he was
never an easy child. In his autobiography, "It's Not About the Bike,"
which was written with the journalist Sally Jenkins, he said, "When I was
a boy I invented a game called fireball, which entailed soaking a tennis
ball in kerosene, lighting it on fire, and playing catch with it."
Armstrong was an outstanding young swimmer, and as an adolescent he began
to enter triathlons. By 1987, when he was sixteen, he was also winning
bicycle races. That year, he was invited to the Cooper Institute, in
Dallas, which was one of the first centers to recognize the relationship
between fitness and aerobic conditioning. Everyone uses oxygen to break
down food into the components that provide energy; the more oxygen you are
able to use, the more energy you will produce, and the faster you can run,
ride, or swim. Armstrong was given a test called the VO2 Max, which is
commonly used to assess an athlete's aerobic ability: it measures the
maximum amount of oxygen the lungs can consume during exercise. His levels
were the highest ever recorded at the clinic. (Currently, they are about
eighty-five millilitres per kilogram of body weight; a healthy man might
have a VO2 Max of forty.)
Chris Carmichael, who became his coach when Armstrong was still a
teen-ager, 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, 'O.K., 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 Pe�a, 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 Pe�a "work" for Armstrong; they are not attempting
to win the race themselves but, rather, focussing 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 front of his leader. Riding
directly behind another man�which is called drafting�can save a skilled
cyclist as much as forty per cent 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 kilometres 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
ninety-eight watts�which would never tire a well-trained professional. On
his own, however, the cyclist expended an average of two hundred and
seventy-five 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 two hundred and fifty kilometres 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
travelling 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 Pe�a told me late
one day between stages of the Dauphin�.
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 Pe�a 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 kilometres 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 four or five per cent; this season,
Shaquille O'Neal, the most powerful player in the N.B.A., boasted that his
body-fat level was sixteen per cent.)
The Tour de France has been described as the equivalent of running twenty
marathons in twenty days. During the nineteen-eighties and nineties, 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.
Every ounce of fat, bone, and muscle on Armstrong's body is regularly
inventoried, analyzed, and accounted for. I asked him if he felt it was
necessary to endure the daily prodding and poking required to provide all
this information, and to adhere so rigidly to his training schedules.
"Depends whether you want to win," he replied. "I do. The Tour is a
two-thousand-mile race, and people sometimes win by one minute. Or less.
One minute in nearly a month of suffering isn't that much. So the people
who win are the ones willing to suffer the most." Suffering is to cyclists
what poll data are to politicians; they rely on it to tell them how well
they are doing their job. Like many of his competitors in the peloton,
Armstrong seems to love pain, and even to crave it.
"Cycling is so hard, the suffering is so intense, that it's absolutely
cleansing," he wrote in his autobiography. "The pain is so deep and strong
that a curtain descends over your brain. . . . Once, someone asked me what
pleasure I took in riding for so long. 'Pleasure?' I said. 'I don't
understand the question.' I didn't do it for pleasure. I did it for pain."
Armstrong mentioned suffering (favorably) in each of my conversations with
him. Even his weekend in Texas, which was ostensibly time off from the
grinding spring training schedule, seemed designed to drive him to the
brink of exhaustion; there were dozens of meetings with donors, cancer
survivors, and friends. On Sunday, he led the foundation's annual ride
with his friend Robin Williams, a surprisingly fit and aggressive cyclist.
Williams and Armstrong rode at a fairly rapid pace for about two hours, at
which point a car suddenly pulled up alongside them on the highway.
Armstrong hopped off his bike, climbed in, and was driven to the airport
to catch a plane for New York and then Paris. During his forty-eight-hour
drop-in, the Lance Armstrong Foundation raised nearly three million
dollars.
In Austin, Lance (other than Dubya, he is the only one-name Texan) has a
more devoted following than Bush, Lyle Lovett, and the Texas Longhorns
football team combined. One night during my weekend in Austin, I drove
over to Chuy's, an informal Tex-Mex place that is one of Armstrong's
favorite local restaurants. (It was famous locally even before a
hardworking bartender carded President Bush's nineteen-year-old daughter
Jenna.) Armstrong has a weakness for Chuy's burritos. I asked my waiter
what he thought of Armstrong. "When he walks in here, you can feel the
buzz coming right off him," he said. "When Lance shows up, people are
delirious. They love the guy. His life is like an Alamo-level myth, and
everybody loves a myth, particularly in Texas."
Armstrong tries to resist being described as a hero of any kind. "I want
my kids to grow up and be normal," he told me, backstage at the concert,
as he tentatively ate exactly two Dorito chips. He and his wife, Kristin,
have three children: a son, Luke, who is two, and twin girls, Isabelle and
Grace, born last year. "I want them to think their father worked hard for
what he got, not that it was the result of some kind of magic," Armstrong
said.
Three types of riders succeed in long stage races like the Tour de France:
those who excel at climbing but are only adequate in time trials, in which
a cyclist races alone against the clock; those who can win time trials but
struggle in the mountains; and cyclists who are moderately good at both.
Now there appears to be a fourth group: Armstrong. He has become the best
climber in the world, although he wasn't much of one in his early years.
And there is no cyclist better at time trials. He lost nearly twenty
pounds when he was sick, but he is no less powerful and is therefore
faster. Still, many people have wondered how, so soon after a nearly fatal
illness, he managed to take such complete control of the sport.
"After the cancer, Lance got a second chance," Carmichael explained to me.
"It was that simple. You get a second chance at something that you took
for granted before and all of a sudden you see everything you could have
lost. When he came back, he just went into a different zone. He works as
if he is possessed. It's a little bit nutty, in fact, what he puts himself
through so that he can win the Tour de France each year." As a young man,
Carmichael was an Olympic cyclist himself, but he almost died in a
freakish skiing accident, in 1986. He returned to competition, but
something was gone. While he was trying to figure out what to do next, he
took a job coaching the United States national team. He has now been
training people for fifteen years. He works with many �lite athletes in
addition to Armstrong�runners, hockey players, even one Indy driver�and
also with thousands who just want to ride faster every Sunday with their
local club. He has a company, Carmichael Training Systems, based in
Colorado Springs, that employs more than seventy-five coaches; his
clients, including Armstrong, log on to the company Web site to find their
latest training instructions.
Carmichael believes that rigorous training is what ultimately turns a
talented athlete into a star. "Who hits more practice balls every day than
any other golfer?" Carmichael asked. "Guess what? It's Tiger Woods. Well,
Lance trains more than his competitors. He was the first to go out and
actually ride the important Tour stages in advance. He doesn't just wake
up in July and say, 'God, I hope I am ready for this race.' He knows he is
ready, because he has whipped himself all year long."
Armstrong describes his bike as his office. "It's my job," he told me. "I
love it, and I wouldn't ride if I didn't. But it's incredibly hard work,
full of sacrifices. And you have to be able to go out there every single
day." In the morning, he rises, eats, and gets on his bike; sometimes,
before a particularly long day, he waits to eat again (in order to store
up carbohydrates) before taking off. "We schedule his daily workouts to
leave late in the morning, so that he can ride for six hours," Carmichael
said. "He returns home about five or six o'clock, in time for a quick
dinner�a protein-carb smoothie, a little pasta. Then it is time for bed."
During the cycling season, Armstrong calculates each watt he has burned on
his bike and then uses a digital scale to weigh every morsel of food that
passes his lips. This way, he knows exactly how many calories he needs to
get through the day. When he is racing, his meals are gargantuan. (It took
three men to lug the team's rations�boxes full of cereal, bread, yogurt,
eggs, fruit, honey, chocolate spread, jam, peanut butter, and other
snacks�into the hotel breakfast room during the Dauphin�.) On days when a
race begins at noon or later, Armstrong will eat two heaping plates of
pasta and perhaps a power bar three hours before the race, after having
had a full breakfast.
When I visited Carmichael in Colorado Springs, he showed me Armstrong's
training schedule for a few weeks this spring. On April 28th, a Sunday,
Armstrong competed in the Amstel Gold, a one-day annual World Cup race in
Holland. He finished fourth, covering the
two-hundred-and-fifty-four-kilometre course (which included thirty-three
climbs) in six hours, forty-nine minutes, and seventeen seconds. His
average speed was 37.32 k.p.h., the same as that of the winner, who beat
him by about three feet. Carmichael scheduled a rest day and urged
Armstrong to stay off his bicycle. "He almost never listens when I tell
him to do that," Carmichael said. "But I tell him anyway." Tuesday was an
easy day: a two-hour ride, maintaining an approximate heart rate of a
hundred and thirty-five beats a minute. The next day was more typical:
five hours over rolling terrain, with a heart rate of about a hundred and
fifty-five beats a minute and an average effort of three hundred and
twenty watts. Friday was a slow ride for two hours. Then, on Saturday,
Armstrong rode for four hours with two climbs, each lasting about half an
hour, during which he kept a heart rate of a hundred and seventy-five
beats a minute with a power expenditure of about four hundred watts. After
that, Carmichael had him draft at a fast rate behind a motorcycle for two
hours without a break. In addition, Armstrong always stretches for about
an hour a day, and during the off-season he spends hours in the gym,
improving his core strength. "Nobody else puts himself through this,"
Carmichael said. "Nobody would dare."
I have been riding a bicycle since I was a boy, and over the years, as the
technology improved, I kept trading up, from heavy steel to aluminum, and
then to titanium. Only once have I travelled more than a hundred miles in
a day; I have never entered a race (or wanted to), and I don't ride
particularly fast. Yet, like a lot of middle-aged cycling enthusiasts, I
now have a bicycle that is far better than I am and I have become a
fetishistic devotee of the sport. I have never quite permitted myself to
attend bicycle camp or to take lessons from a bicycle mechanic (though I
have considered both). But I have never seen Campagnolo gears, an
aerodynamically advanced set of wheels, or a complicated cycle computer
that I didn't want to buy. My apartment is littered with catalogues
advertising "carbon titanium supercycles," and bicycling magazines with
stories about obscure pro races.
Every month or two, Carmichael tests Armstrong's capacity to generate
power�or watts�and, when I told him that I rode a lot, he suggested that
if he tested me in the same way I might have a better sense of what these
measures really meant.
Our plan was to cruise up into the mountains not far from Carmichael's
office, in a converted grain barn in downtown Colorado Springs. The wind
was strong enough so that he asked if I wanted to reconsider. The answer
was yes, of course, but that's not what I said. We rode for about five
miles through the thin air six thousand feet above sea level. Carmichael
chatted the whole time�about pedal motion, femur length (the longer the
better, since length improves leverage), gearing choices, and the finer
details of carbon-fibre technology. I gasped and answered only when I had
to. We rode into North Cheyenne Ca�on until, finally, it looked as if we
had ridden as far as he could ask me to go. Carmichael got off his bike.
"Now the test begins," he said. He pointed at the mountain slope�it wasn't
as steep as some of the slopes in France, but it looked unconquerable
nonetheless�and said, "I want you to ride as fast as you can up that road
for ten minutes and then come back."
I was seriously winded within two minutes. My legs were burning within
five. I remember watching four men and women climbing a steep rock face
and rappelling down. They waved at me, but I was far too light-headed to
risk lifting an arm from the handlebars. Finally, I couldn't take it
anymore. (I managed to continue for eight minutes and thirty-two seconds.
Na�vely, I had asked Carmichael what I should do when I reached the top.
"You won't be seeing the top," he had said.) I turned the bike around and
met up with Carmichael, and we coasted most of the way back to the office.
Then we looked at my data: I had generated an average of two hundred watts
on the test, and had climbed exactly one mile. Carmichael told me that a
decent pro cyclist would have put out at least four hundred watts, and
that the stragglers at the end of the peloton (known as the gruppetto)
would clock in at perhaps three hundred and fifty. Armstrong�in top Tour
shape�would have come close to five hundred.
I stared at the graph of my performance, which Carmichael and his
colleagues had printed out for me. I had managed to generate four hundred
and seventy watts for just ten seconds. That's about average for Armstrong
over the course of a four-hour ride.
After that humbling experience, I went across town to see Edmund Burke, a
former physiologist for the U.S. Olympic cycling team, who has written
several books on training for cyclists (including one with Carmichael). "I
think the genius of Chris is that he understands how much small gains
matter," Burke said. "In fact, small gains are all you will ever see.
People will say, 'You have shown only half a per cent of improvement.'
Well, half a per cent is huge. I am not talking marketing or sales here. I
am talking about �lite athletic performance."
Carmichael takes nothing for granted and relies heavily on technology. (He
noted with approval, for instance, that Greg LeMond won the Tour by just
eight seconds, on the last day of the race, in 1989. He was the first
cyclist in the Tour to use aerodynamically tapered handlebars for the
final time trial. "It made all the difference," Carmichael said.
"Technology might not win you the Tour. But why wouldn't you want to have
the best chances possible?") Every few months, Armstrong trains in a wind
tunnel, which allows Carmichael to measure his aerodynamic efficiency
under a variety of conditions. He will push his seat back a centimetre or
his stem up a few millimetres. (Each adjustment is a trade-off between
power and speed; when you sit farther back, you can use more of your leg
muscles, but you also expose more of your body to the resistance of the
air.)
Carmichael takes the same radical approach to the physical limits of
endurance. It had long been assumed, for example, that aerobic power
doesn't vary greatly in adults. Carmichael refutes this emphatically.
"Look at Lance," he said to me in his office one day. Over the past eight
years, through specific programs aimed at building endurance and speed,
Armstrong has increased this critical value�his aerobic power�by sixteen
per cent. That means he saves almost four minutes in a sixty-kilometre
time trial.
In fact, Armstrong is superior to other athletes in two respects: he can
rely on his aerobic powers longer, and his anaerobic abilities are
unusually high as well. When muscles begin to work beyond their aerobic
ability, they produce lactic acid, which eventually accumulates and causes
a burning sensation well known to anyone who has ever run too far or too
fast. Somehow, though, Armstrong produces less lactic acid than others do,
and metabolizes it more effectively. "For whatever physiological
reason�and science can't really explain it, because we don't know that
much about what is occurring�the effect is clear," Carmichael said. "Lance
goes on when others are done."
At the end of last year's Tour, the French sports newspaper L'�quipe ran
an article with the headline "SHOULD WE BELIEVE IN ARMSTRONG?," suggesting
it was time to consider the possibility that, since Armstrong has never
been found guilty of doping, he may indeed be innocent.
After I watched Armstrong train and spent time with his coaches, the only
way I could be convinced that he uses illegal drugs would be to see him
inject them. After all, the doubts about him have always been a function
of his excellence. Greg LeMond, America's first Tour de France champion
(he has also won three times), put it well, if somewhat uncharitably,
after Armstrong won the 2001 Tour: "If Lance is clean, it is the greatest
comeback in the history of sport. If he isn't, it would be the greatest
fraud." It is impossible to prove a negative, and so Armstrong can do
nothing to dispel the doubts. But his frustration is clear; in 2000, he
made a television ad for Nike in which he said, "Everybody wants to know
what I'm on. What am I on? I'm on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day.
What are you on?"
If the French don't approve of Armstrong, it is not only�or even
principally�because they suspect him of using drugs. They don't believe
that he suffers enough. French intellectuals love the agony displayed on
the roads each July in the same way that American writers love to wail
over the fate of the Red Sox. Thirty years ago, before much was known
about sports nutrition, riders would finish the race�if they could�having
lost twenty pounds, their eyes vacant even in victory. Armstrong
represents a new kind of athlete. He has been at the forefront of a
technological renaissance that has made European cycling purists
uncomfortable. Referring to the gulf that now exists between the race and
the racers, the French philosopher Robert Redeker has written, "The
athletic type represented by Lance Armstrong, unlike Fausto Coppi or Jean
Robic"�two cycling heroes from a generation ago�"is coming closer to Lara
Croft, the virtually fabricated cyber-heroine. Cycling is becoming a video
game; the onetime 'prisoners of the road' have become virtual human beings
. . . Robocop on wheels, someone no fan can relate to or identify with."
"It's so funny to hear people talk that way about Lance," Craig Nichols,
Armstrong's oncologist, told me. "The fact is that no cyclist can have
seen more pain than he has. The hard work and the inconvenience of the
Tour just can't scare him, because he has been through so much worse."
Despite Bruyneel's warning not to push himself on the treacherous slope of
the Col de Joux Plane, Armstrong was spinning the pedals a hundred times a
minute, faster than any other competitor. (This cadence is a technique
that he, Carmichael, and Bruyneel have been working on for years.) With
just two days to go, Armstrong was in the lead of the Dauphin� Lib�r�, and
there was little doubt that he would go on to win the race. ("There are
not so many guys left," Bruyneel said to me with a smile and a shrug. "If
he feels good, you have to let him go.") It would have been
understandable�maybe even smart�for Armstrong to take it slow just a few
weeks before the Tour. Yet clearly he wasn't going to be satisfied unless
he also took this stage.
"Good job, Lance!" Bruyneel cheered into the radio. "Go! Go! Go!"
Armstrong picked up speed; he was dropping his opponents one by one.
"Moreau is done, Lance, he is over!" Bruyneel shouted into the radio as
Armstrong whizzed by Christophe Moreau, the lead rider for Cr�dit
Agricole. "Go if you can. But, remember, the mountain is not your friend."
"Kivilev is dropped, Kivilev is dropped!" Bruyneel screamed, as Armstrong
began to pedal faster. "Lance, get on Menchov's wheel. He is a great train
to the top." Denis Menchov, of the Ibanesto.com team, is a fine climber.
Bruyneel had hoped that Armstrong would glide in behind him and conserve
energy on the way up. Instead, Armstrong blew past Menchov, and then
overtook the last two men between him and the summit. He wove through the
fans gathered at the top of the mountain.
Armstrong shifted into a higher gear to descend, and suddenly he was in
trouble. His radio stopped working, his leg began to cramp, and Kivilev
and Moreau were gaining on him. 'Twenty-seven seconds," Bruyneel said. He
was screaming. "Lance, they are gaining!" We could see the little ski
resort of Morzine in the near distance. Chalets were built everywhere into
the steep slopes of the mountain. The thickening wall of fans suggested
that we must be near the end, but we were driving so fast that it was hard
to tell.
Incredibly, Bruyneel drove right up beside Armstrong. He was in pain and
was massaging his thigh while pedalling as fast as he could. "Six
seconds!" Bruyneel shouted out the window at full speed. "Move!"
Armstrong barrelled across the finish line, six seconds before his rivals.
He got off his bike and hobbled directly into a tent that had been set up
for drug testing. When he emerged, he came over to say hello. I
congratulated him on winning the stage. "It's always fun to win," he said,
smiling broadly. "But, man, I am in such agony."