Every Second Counts (24 page)

I felt peaceful now, just glad to know the boy was well, and that I was, too. I put my arm around him, and left it there. I messed with him, patted his back, and pulled his ears, so I could feel a connection. Finally, I thanked them for coming and went inside to join the team for dinner. But I did so with a surer grasp of what’s right and real in the world, and with a sense that there was always a larger community that I belonged to, from which I would always get help in a tough time.

The next day, I kept my mouth firmly shut. I was self-conscious about my bragging before the time trial and determined not to say another word unless I could live up to it. “I’m not going to say anything anymore,” I told George. But George said, “Why not? We like to hear that kind of talk.”

George made me realize something: the last thing a team needs is self-doubt. Nobody wants to work alongside someone who is unsure of himself, because it’s a waste of everyone’s efforts. My teammates had put in all those thankless hours on the bike because they believed it was for a winning cause, they had trained with me in the
Alps
and given up their personal lives because it was a bargain we’d all struck together. That mutual belief gave us
momentum,
it propelled us down the road and up the mountainsides.

They didn’t want to hear, in the middle of the race, that I was suddenly iffy about the job.

By the time we reached the foot of the jagged, rocky
Pyrenees
, I felt surer of myself again. “We’re going to attack, and get the time back,” I said.

Stage 11 would take us to a village called La Mongie, halfway up the famed Tourmalet, and I knew what was ahead and exactly how difficult it was. I knew something else, too, which was reassuring: I wouldn’t have to do it alone. We were going to come charging up that mountain together, all of us, and when we did, the other riders would drop away. “They’ll crack,” I promised the team.

The day took us over three monstrous climbs. The first was the
Col
d’Aubisque, a steep and treacherous 11 miles to over 3,900 feet of altitude. As we approached the
Col
d’Aubisque, I got on the radio. “Time to ride,” I said.

Teamwork on a climb is especially vital: drafting behind a teammate could save me as much as 40 percent of my effort, so that I would be fresh for the final sprint to the finish line. The idea was to use teammates one by one, until they tired. Each served as a kind of booster rocket to get me to the finish line.

Laurent Jalabert sped up the Aubisque in a breakaway that made the roadside fans delirious—but then Postal came down the road chasing him, not far behind. We looked like a huge flying blue wedge, with Ekimov and Hincapie out front.

But as we hit the foot of the climb, Floyd Landis gained a full understanding of why the Tour is the hardest event in the world. His front wheel started the climb—and he just parked. It was like his bike just stopped and decided to go in reverse. He was stunned by the severity of the climb; he simply couldn’t keep up with the rest of us. He dropped away. The rider who had swashbuckled through crowds of riders now wove unsteadily up the mountainside by himself, with a stricken look on his face.

We rode on without him. We reached the bottom of the Tourmalet, with George still riding in front. Normally, George wasn’t a climber, but we needed him to do some work today, especially with Floyd struggling. The problem was, Tourmalet was one of his most feared climbs, and I knew it.

I said, “George, just pull for the first four or five K, just whatever you can do.” George looked at me skeptically. He wasn’t sure he could survive it, much less help anybody else. “You can do it, man,” I said.

I hung on to his wheel and he pulled until he thought his heart was going to explode. He pulled, and pulled, and began to really suffer. It was an hour-long climb. About 20 minutes into it George was still working at the front, and you could practically see his heart pounding through his open jersey. For once, his mouth hung open and he struggled to breathe. He was just trying to concentrate.

I decided to take his mind off his pain by teasing him a little. I got on the radio, and I said, “Hey, Johan, George just asked me if you could check on when the climb starts.”

“This is not the time,” George said.

Finally, George dropped away. I started to say something, but I took one look at him, and closed my mouth. He was done—but he’d made an unforgettable effort.

Next, Chechu and Roberto took over—and over the next few minutes they blew the Tour apart. They set such a fast pace that within minutes it crippled most of the field.

We went higher and higher, over roads with no guardrails, and the sun scorched us. There were no more than ten riders who could stay with our pace. The rest had fallen back. We passed Jalabert.

Chechu wore his hat turned backwards to soak up the sweat. I was so hot that I pulled mine off and tossed it into the crowd.

Now Chechu faded, finally spent. Roberto took over. He hammered at the road so hard that he reduced the group to three: himself, me, and the only rider who would be my competition in the coming week, Joseba Beloki of
Spain
.

I rode just behind Roberto, staring at the back of his curly-haired head as he swayed on his bike. I glanced over my shoulder. The rest of the peloton was strung down the mountain in a scene of pure colorful destruction.

But Roberto’s pace was so strong that it even hurt me. Outwardly, I looked fine. I didn’t want anyone to see I was in pain, not the directors who might be watching television in their cars, and especially not Beloki, so I tried to stay smooth and settled and straight-faced.

Meanwhile, I said to Roberto just ahead of me, “
Tranquilo
,
tranquilo
,” meaning, “take it easy, take it easy.”

Roberto slowed down a little, to my relief. But I did such a good job of hiding my distress that Johan, watching me on a screen from inside the team car, thought I was fine. He saw a chance to open some real time on the field and didn’t understand why we had slowed down, so he got on the radio and said, “Roberto,
venga
,
venga
.”
“Faster, faster.”

So Roberto started to go faster. I said again, “Roberto,
tranquilo
.” He slowed down again.

Johan came on the radio again, saying, “
Venga
,
venga
,
venga
,
venga
!”

Finally I got on the radio, and I said, “Goddammit, Johan, tell him to slow down!” Johan relayed the message, and Roberto settled into a pace I could keep more comfortably.

Beloki still doggedly rode on my wheel. I knew he was thinking he could steal the stage win from us. I let him slide between me and Roberto, and for a few minutes we pinned him there.

I could tell from Beloki’s face that he was hurting worse than I was. His mouth hung open and his eyes were half-closed.

Suddenly, with about 200 meters to go, I slingshotted past Beloki.
I leaped out of my seat and charged hard for the finish line. He couldn’t respond.

I took seven seconds from Beloki in the space of less than 50 yards to the finish, and became the leader of the Tour. We had regained the yellow jersey. Everyone else had broken but me, thanks to the team. It was as if they had opened the door, and then stood aside for me, and let me walk through it.

At the finish line I found Johan. “What were you doing?” I said. “I was telling Roberto to slow down and you were telling him to speed up.”

He said, “You were hurting?”

“I was fucking
dying
.”

“Man, on TV you looked like you weren’t even trying.”

“No shit?”

At the end of the day, Floyd climbed onto the team bus. He was physically shattered by the severity of the stage. He dropped onto a couch.

“You know, I’m really sorry,” he said.

“You had the reverse lights on,” I told him.

Someone made a high-pitched sound like a tractor backing up.
“Beep, beep, beep, beep!”

The bus erupted into raucous laughter.

We weren’t disappointed in Floyd. We’d all been in his shoes before—and while we
laughed,
we winced for him too, because the first mountain stage in the Tour was a rite of passage for every rider. Floyd had to learn that it was okay to be in pain, to suffer, and to be defeated by a climb.

He was also learning that the Tour would use up every last bit of him; there could be no other concern in his life, except getting back on the bike. It consumed everything. There was no extra energy for any kind of stress. All you hoped to do was fight each specific pain or challenge as it arose, and to hold off the daily exhaustion that made even sitting down an effort.

It was no easy thing to be a rookie in the Tour, but it was particularly grueling to be riding on a team in first place, because it meant riding at the front every day. If Floyd was flattered and surprised to be on our Tour squad in his first year with us, he was scared and self-conscious, too, because he knew we had to choose carefully and take guys who could do the job. He didn’t want to hold us back.

I reassured Floyd that he was doing a fine job. His role was to sacrifice himself for the rest of us, and he had done that. Only older, more experienced men could expect to ride strongly in every single stage.

Floyd was amazed. He couldn’t believe nine guys, all of us so stressed and tired, could be so forgiving of one another’s performances. But that was exactly what made us a strong team. We urged one another on, and teased one another. Sometimes we exceeded expectations, sometimes we fell short, but we always tried to find out if we had more to give. For a rider to discover new capacities he didn’t know he had—that was the whole point of the Tour.

Later that night, highlights of the stage came on TV. I ran to George’s room and we watched it together. Here came The Blue Train, as the commentators called us, whirling up the road, with George in front. We both watched in awe how strong our team was. It was a spectacle.

“Man, look at that,” I said. “I love the way that looks.”

T
he team wasn’t
just the riders. It was the mechanics, masseurs, chefs,
soigneurs,
and doctors. But the most important man on the team may have been our chiropractor.

The Tour hurt in a dozen different ways. We were all sore.
Sore necks, sore knees, sore hamstrings.
Guys got tendinitis all the time. They crashed, or they rode in a fixed position for hours on end, and they got it. They woke up one morning and it was in an elbow or a knee.

They got road rash. Let me explain road rash. It’s what happens when you fall off a bike and you skid on asphalt at 40 miles per hour. We’re not talking a scraped knee here. We’re talking about rolling down the crude rocky asphalt of northern
France
, and skinning both sides of your entire body, and the front and back, too. It leaves you with scabby, nasty patches where the skin’s been scraped off—sometimes to the bone. (A), it hurts; (B), it hurts for days or weeks; (C), you can’t sleep. Just rolling over in bed, the mere touch of a sheet could make you wake up and groan in the middle of the night, “
Aaaahh.
” If you crashed and got a bad case of road rash, it could mess you up for the rest of the Tour.

The guy who put us all back together was our chiropractor, Jeff Spencer. Jeff had been with us since my first Tour victory in ’99. His contract was just for ten days, but three days into the race, I called a Postal executive over and said, “Let me tell you something. See that guy over there? That guy’s not going anywhere. We need him.”

Jeff is part doctor, part guru, part medicine man. He had all kinds of strange gizmos and rituals and cures, a remedy for every condition. He did things we had no explanation for—but they seemed to work. His methods ranged from basic stretching and massage to high-tech lasers, strange wraps, tinctures, and bandages. If you got road rash, he put a silvery wrap on the injury, and shot you with a laser. George swore Jeff’s lasers made road rash heal twice as fast.

Sometimes he did things to parts of your body that didn’t hurt. Let’s say your foot hurt. He’d shoot the laser at your neck, and talk to you about “nerve connections,” while you half-listened. But the next day, your foot would be better.

But Jeff had something that was better than any laser, wrap, or electric massager. He had The Tape. It was a special hot-pink athletic tape that came from
Japan
and seemed to have special powers.

George got a problem with his lower back. Jeff turned him around and started putting hot-pink tape on it. George thought, “How can that help?” But the next day the pain had disappeared—it was
gone
.

We swore by Jeff’s pink tape. He would tape the hell out of anything. You had a tweaky knee? He taped it. A guy would start to get tendinitis and he’d say, “Don’t worry. No problem. We’ll tape it.” We all had pink tape on our legs.

Every morning before the stage, he’d tape us all up, different parts of our bodies. He’d do George’s back, Chechu’s knees. Sometimes we’d be so wrapped up in hot-pink tape that we’d look like dolls, a bunch of broken dolls.