Every Second Counts (27 page)

Bernard Hinault had a catastrophic crash en route to his fifth title in 1985, when he was knocked down by a teammate during a sprint stage. He crossed the finish line bleeding from his nose, and went on to barely win over teammate Greg LeMond. The next year, it was LeMond who prevented him from winning his sixth.

You just have to accept that some day you’re going to fail or fall off your bike. The one thing you can’t prepare for in the Tour is a crash. So be it. I’ll just lie there, and then get up and go to the beach, and say, “I’m okay. Bring me some sunscreen, and some margaritas.”

There is always the possibility that my career could end as the result of a crash, or some kind of injury, or a freak accident. I suppose there is the remote but scary chance that a hostile crazy on the roadside could decide to attack, as Eddy Merckx learned. It’s one of the charms of the Tour that it’s an open-air event with free admission. You don’t need to go through a turnstile to watch the race; you can just wait by the side of the road and it will pass by. The crowd has always been a presence and sometimes an active part of the race; spectators push riders up the hills, clap them on the back, applaud them, hand them food and drinks. It’s part of the atmosphere that fans leap out and scream, whether they are irate, or silly, or over-served. I ignore them, because it happens hundreds of times each Tour. I try not to think about whether someone could come for me with something more than an angry expression.

Once in a
mountain time
trial in Chamrousse, all of a sudden some guy came out of nowhere and started chasing me, holding a magazine and a pen. He said, “Can I have an autograph, can I have an autograph?”

I looked over at him and said, sarcastically, “I’ll tell you what. Just let me finish what I’m doing here, and I’ll come back and get you later.”

George heard that story that night and he fell out laughing. “I can’t believe you said you’d come back and get him later,” he said.

I prefer to believe in the basic benevolence of fans. I’m more concerned about the possibility of a crash. All cyclists were reminded of just how dangerous the sport can be when Andreï Kivilev was killed. Andreï died in the early spring of 2003 after suffering a fractured skull in a crash in Stage 2 of the annual Paris-Nice race. He was a wonderful, attacking rider who always rode at the front when a mountain loomed. I loved to race with him because when he was in the race, and when the road went uphill, you knew he would lay it all out. Man, was he an attacker. And the best in him seemed to come out in the toughest races, as his fourth-place finish in the 2001 Tour had shown us.

Andreï left behind a wife and a six-month-old baby. I will remember him, always, as a gentleman, a friend, and a competitor who brought forth the best qualities in his opponents.

I hope to finish my career healthy and whole, and to be intelligent enough and self-aware enough to walk away when it’s my time to stop. I might even stop a lot sooner than people expect—maybe one morning I’ll just wake up and decide not to do anything more strenuous than coaching my kids in T-ball.

I don’t want to stretch out my career if it means going out on my face, which is not a pleasant thought. I don’t want to linger on too long, until I’m hanging on at the back of the peloton. That’s not for me; I can’t ride the race in the back. When you’re not at the front, but just hanging on, that’s when it hurts most of all, down deep where muscle meets bone, and it’s a different, more hopeless kind of pain. The leader of the race feels pain, but because he has a good chance of winning, it doesn’t feel so bad. When you’re at the back, there’s not much recompense for the hurting. There’s just the honor of finishing.

I often wonder what I would do if somebody put a big chunk of time into me, passed me on a mountainside the way I’ve done to other riders. The first chance they get to stick it to me, oh, man. I want to get out before that happens. Hopefully I’ll know it, and the people around me will know it, and I’ll just go ahead and quit.

I’m not obsessed with winning a fixed number of
Tours
, because the only record that ever mattered to me is this: there had never been even one Tour victory by a cancer survivor. After the physical, mental, and emotional rigors of chemo, if I’d lost even 2 percent of my capacities, I’d be noncompetitive. I don’t think anyone, including myself, expected such a spectacular recovery. What I didn’t reckon on was that cancer would provide such a focus, a reprioritization. Winning the Tour became my way of saying to cancer, “You haven’t beaten me, and you can’t beat me.”

The determining factor in the length of my career won’t be a record. My career will play out year to year, and what will keep me in the saddle is not a number, but happiness. The way I ride has always been based on a simple fact: I love riding my bike. It’s just too hard to do it otherwise. How long will I continue to love it at the world-class level? That needs to be checked regularly. I can’t answer that or guarantee it.

In sport you’re always on record for what you’ve done, for what you’ve said, the way you’ve acted. Everything is measured, either by a clock or by a camera. It’s all on record, or on video; the data is there for all to see. But there is no measurement that can tell me how happy I am, on or off the bike. All I know is that for every minute that I improve physically, there are days when I may become 45 seconds less motivated, as I understand more about what achievement can and cannot do for me as a person, and what it costs.

So it’s not my job to speculate on what my place in cycling history will be, and whether I’m remembered or forgotten, because—not to be disrespectful about it—
who
holds the record for most Tour victories won’t be my problem in ten years.

I just hope I’ll be content when I stop. Why should what you do between the ages of 20 and 30 be the apex of an entire life? In
Texas
you see it all the time: people who are still dining out on their finest moment on a high school state championship team. But the athlete is just one segment of a person; in my case there are also the cancer advocate and a father who takes his children to preschool.

I think one of the real traps of being a prominent athlete is that you get used to a big spike in adrenaline and attention, and that can cause a lot of problems later. You wake up one morning and find you need a big jolt. But not much surprises me anymore about celebrity, and the main thing I know about it is that it’s not good for you. When I’m done cycling, I’ll disappear. I’ve got no contract that says I have to appear on TV screens and talk to the press. I look forward to thinking more, and to listening more. I don’t have much interest in interviews and speaking engagements; they are, to me, complicated affairs, and life is too short to be complicated.

One reason I love Girona is that on the street where I live, I’m just another neighbor. There’s a small café that I can see from my window, with deep wicker chairs on the sidewalk, and I love to sink into one and drink coffee and read the paper.

What I’d like to do when I’m retired is take the kids to
Europe
for three months, and live in Girona and go to all the races, as a spectator, so that I can show them how beautiful the world is from a bike. I’d like to show them why
Spain
is a paradise. In
Spain
, you learn about design as revelation: plazas lead to inner plazas, walls within walls open into surprising spaces, where hidden fountains run and ferns hang from the ancient brick. Streets cascade down to broader plazas and
ramblas,
overlooking crescent beaches and ports choked with the masts of sailing yachts, and you can hear the chimes from the ropes of the rigging.

On a bicycle, you never know what’s around the next bend, when a view may open up, or the
Alps
may shear off to the sea. Even when I’m 50, I’ll probably still be riding in all weather. I’ll put on every piece of clothing I own and ride for the pleasure of the bike, sightseeing.

A bicycle is the long-sought means of transportation for all of us who have runaway hearts. Our first bike is a matter of curb-jumping, puddle-splashing liberation; it’s freedom from supervision, from carpools and curfews. It’s a merciful release from reliance on parents, one’s own way to the movies or a friend’s house. More plainly, it’s the first chance we have to choose our own direction.

It’s the first wheeled machine we ever steer solely by ourselves, and perhaps for that reason we have intense affection, and strangely specific memories, of the bikes we’ve owned. I myself have had hundreds of them by now, but they stay with me, like old friends. The physical familiarity you gain with a bike is something you don’t feel for any other vehicle, no matter how sweet the ride. There are times when I swear a bike is merely an extension of my arms and legs. All these years later, I still have a faint sensation of my first bike, a Schwinn, how the rubber handgrips molded to my palms, and how the soles of my sneakers grabbed the teeth of the pedals.

Even in the midst of a hard day on a bike, beneath every pain and stress is the sense of relief and pleasure that I’m able to ride again. I ride to prove that in a scientific and highly mechanized era, the human body is still a marvel. In cycling there is no outer skin of metal to protect you from the elements. You have only your flimsy clothing, and this makes it a sport that is as sensuous as it is severe. The cyclist experiences great beauty, sublime views, and the swooping exhilaration of a mountain descent, but there’s a penalty on the body for cycling, too, a physical toll in exchange for the beauty of the trip that reminds riders that they’re human.

A bicycle, no matter how elaborate the technology or how advanced the composite that it’s made of, remains driven by the body. There is something fundamental about a bike: a frame with a crank, a chain and two wheels, powered by nothing more than my own legs. On a bike, you are under your own power, directed by your own hand. Your motor is yourself.

For now, I still crave the race. I understand that we’re only given a couple of shots, and that this may be my only chance to win it . . . again.

A
n athlete has
to somehow figure out how to enrich the people around him, and not just himself. Otherwise he’s purposeless.

I’m still sorting out what I can and can’t do for other people. I can be a good-luck charm, a hopeful example, a companion in suffering, an advisor, and a good listener. I can try to win the Tour de France over and over again, and in doing so, pound cancer into the ground. I can tell people the one thing I know for sure about the disease, which is that they aren’t alone: the illness is so big, so widespread, and so common, that it affects nearly everybody—friends, family, people in the workplace or at your school. Mainly, I can just try to be helpful.

But sometimes, I’m not so helpful. There are occasions when I simply don’t know what to say to someone experiencing the ravages of the disease. In September of 2002, I went to the White House to promote cancer research and make a plea for more resources and funding. Before the presentation, someone in the White House press office arranged for me to meet privately with a
Hodgkin’s Disease
patient named Paul de la Garza, a journalist from the
St. Petersburg Times
who was undergoing chemo. After he was diagnosed, a friend had given him a copy of
It’s Not
About
the Bike
, and he had followed the Tour. When he heard that I would be visiting the White House to promote cancer research, he arranged for a meeting through a contact. He wrote later of our meeting: “Who better, I thought, to give me a moral boost or a morale boost than the world’s most remarkable cancer survivor?”

But I’m not remarkable; I’m like anybody else, and if you catch me at the wrong time I’m not good for much. As I was introduced to de la Garza, we were ushered into a small anteroom near the Blue Room to talk, but the White House was on a very strict schedule and the protocol was very clear. There wasn’t a lot of time, and I was nervous over the prospect of meeting with the president. I tried to listen as I was given some things to sign, posters and magazines.

De la Garza began to ask me some very specific questions about his cancer, what to do, what not to do. I fumbled for replies. I didn’t have the $64,000 answer for every cancer question, but I gave him my standard one, which I believe to my core: find the best doctors you can, and trust the hell out of them.

“How do I survive this?” he asked.

I answered, honestly, “Listen to your doctors. Get the very best treatment.”

But that advice, as he put it later in an article he wrote about the experience, was “not exactly an epiphany.”

His left arm was hurting, his veins were burning, and other parts of his body were rebelling against the treatment. But the main part of him that was rebelling was his mind. He had seven chemo treatments left, and he was getting weaker with each one. I knew exactly what he was experiencing—the nausea, and the taste of tin in the roof of his mouth. I could still smell the stuff myself. He was demoralized, and he had come to meet me hoping for something more.