Every Second Counts (7 page)

But Pantani misinterpreted me. He thought I said, “
Vitesse
,” meaning, “hurry up.” It was a matter of interpretation: “
vitesse
” was an insult, as if I was telling him he was riding too slowly, and to get out of my way. He thought I was antagonizing him.

We pedaled side by side toward the finish line, in the fierce wind. I had a choice: I could sprint to try to beat him to the line, or I could choose not to contest the stage, since my overall lead was safe. I didn’t contest. A pedal-stroke from the finish, I let up.

All that mattered was that I had widened my lead over my real competition, Jan Ullrich, by another 31 seconds.

But in giving the stage to Pantani, I was doing something that didn’t come natural to me. Indurain could give it and people could accept it. But when I did it on the Ventoux, it infuriated Pantani. He felt I’d patronized him.

“When Armstrong told me to speed up I think he was trying to provoke me,” he said afterward. “If he thinks it’s over, he’s wrong.”

I was offended in turn—and I answered back. “Unfortunately, he’s showing his true colors,” I snapped. I also publicly called him Elefantino, a nickname he hated. It referred to the way his prominent ears stuck out from under his bandanna.

That set off a feud that lasted for a week. The next day Pantani bolted to the front and won a mountain stage without my help, and afterward made it plain that he hadn’t appreciated my sense of etiquette. “It’s much more satisfying to finish alone,” he said, pointedly. “There’s a different taste of victory when you leave everyone behind.
A taste of triumph.”

Now I regretted Mont Ventoux, and it ate at me. My friend Eddy Merckx, the great Belgian five-time Tour winner, scolded me. “That was a big mistake,” he said. “The strongest rider must always win Ventoux. You
never
make a gift of Ventoux. Who knows if you’ll ever have another chance to win it?” I felt I was the strongest rider, but I’d let sentiment get in the way. If I was ever in a position to give Pantani a gift again, I thought,
he ain’t getting it
.

Over the next few days I was angry and distracted. Anger, however, is not sustaining; you can’t ride on it for long, and in this case, it cost me my good judgment. First, I gave in to sentiment, and then I let a quarrel distract me, and neither served me especially well.

We arrived at the final mountain stage, the last dangerous part of the Tour. It was a comparatively short but difficult ride of 122 miles, to the top of a mountain called Joux-Plane. It was the kind that could lull you; because it wasn’t an especially long stage, it was tempting to think the ride wouldn’t be as difficult. Wrong. Shorter stages are
faster,
and therefore sometimes harder.

Pantani went out hard, specifically to bait me—and lured me into one of the worst mistakes of my career. “I wanted to explode the Tour without worrying about the consequences,” he admitted later.

The attack put our U.S. Postal Team under pressure, and Johan and I talked back and forth on our radios, discussing strategy. How much should we let Pantani get away? I badly wanted to beat him to the finish this time. The action was intense, and my resentment was very high. For 50 miles Pantani stayed ahead, with me chasing.

But we were riding strong, and I felt good on the bike. So good that I passed my last chance to eat, and spun through a feed zone without a second thought. It was a feeble mistake, an unthinkable one for a professional, but I made it. We were so focused on tactics and on Pantani that I forgot to do the simplest thing. It never occurred to me what the consequences of not eating could be.

Finally, I caught him on the approach to Joux-Plane. There, he began to fall back with stomach pains, and eventually lost 13 minutes. But he had done what he had set out to do: ruin my day.

We hit the foot of Joux-Plane, and I went up hard, drafting behind Kevin Livingston as we climbed. Other riders dropped off, unable to match our pace. It was just us. Then Kevin, worn out, fell back too.

All of a sudden I was alone. And all of a sudden I didn’t feel very good. It started with
a telltale
tiredness in my legs, and then a hollowness in my stomach. I had no water, no food, no protein bars, nothing—and no way to get anything, either.

I could feel the power draining from my body.

Virenque and Ullrich caught up to me . . . and then simply passed me.

At first I tried to stay with them, and push through the pain, but my speed slowed, and then slowed some more.

Soon, it was as if I was sliding backwards down the hill.

Ullrich and Virenque turned around, surprised. I could tell they were thinking,
What’s
he doing? Is he faking?
Initially, I’d ridden away so easily from them, but now I was in trouble and it was written all over my face.

There were ten kilometers to go, six miles. But it felt like sixty. Johan came on the radio—he could tell exactly what was happening from my slow pace. Johan, as a former cyclist, knew what could happen if a rider broke. His worst fear wasn’t that I would lose the lead. It was that I might collapse, or quit altogether, lose the entire race right then and there.

Johan kept his voice casual on the radio, even though he must have felt the pressure. Not only was I bonking, but riding in the car with him as a VIP guest was the prime minister of
Belgium
. “Don’t worry, you have a big lead,” he said mildly. “You can afford to give some of it back.”

The smart play, Johan advised, was to back down my pace and allow myself to work slowly up the hill, limiting the loss. The worst thing I could do was push harder, because that could mean going to zero, totally empty. And that was when people failed physically and fell over sideways.

Every revolution of the pedals sapped me more, and put my body at a greater deficit. It was a question of fuel, of calories or the lack thereof.

That kind of depletion could make strange things happen. As the body broke down, so did the mind.

You went cross-eyed, or the snow turned black. You hallucinated. You tried to talk through your ears. Or you got off your bike. You coasted to the side of the road and stopped, because you simply could not pedal.

If you got off the bike, you were done, out of the race. And I was not that far from completely stopping.

I’d seen riders lose as much as ten or even 15 minutes in that situation, with a long, hard climb ahead and nothing left. I’d seen them drool. I’d seen them disintegrate, and never be quite the same riders again. Now it was happening to me. Steadily, I deteriorated. It was my darkest day in a race.

I began to lose any sense of where I was, or what I was doing. One of my few rational thoughts was,
A
lead of seven and a half minutes is a long time; don’t lose all of it
.

Johan kept talking steadily into my ear, saying the same thing. “Just relax, ride your pace, don’t push it. You can lose a minute, two
minutes,
three minutes, four minutes, and you are okay.
Just don’t stop
.”

Up at the finish line, Bill Stapleton and a group of friends who’d come over to see me race sat in a VIP luxury trailer. They sipped wine and snacked while they followed the action on TV. At first no one noticed that I seemed to be slowing. But then I fell off the front and began to fade. Ullrich and the others began to put real time on me. Suddenly the noise in the trailer went from happy chatter to confusion. Somebody said, “Oh my God, what’s going on?” And then there was silence, just absolute silence.

On the bike, I couldn’t think straight anymore. I was so dehydrated that my body temperature went funny. I got the chills. My limbs felt hollow, empty.
Empty, empty, empty.
A Sunday cyclist on a casual ride could have passed me.

Standing in the crowd on the mountainside watching me labor upward was Bart Knaggs. By this time, there wasn’t much that Bart and I hadn’t been through together, along with our other great friend, College. As I say, you define yourself partly in relation to other people, and Bart and College had been there for some of my defining moments. They’d sat with me when a doctor gave me a probable death sentence and informed me that even if I lived, I’d crawl out of the hospital. They’d been at my bedside again after brain surgery. Bart and his wife, Barbara, who had twin baby daughters, had been close confidants when Kik and I went through the in-vitro fertilization that made Luke.

Bart, College, and I had ridden together across miles and miles of
Texas
hill country, laughing and trash-talking, or just talking. I liked to taunt them on the bike, ride even with them for a while, and then light them up. But when we weren’t horsing around, we helped each other, too. One day we took an exceptionally long ride to Wimberly and back, over miles of rolling highway. Finally, Bart had enough and pulled off, and took a shortcut home, but College tried to stay with me. He did okay until we got to Dripping Springs, when he hit the wall. His body started salting up, and he got weak. I gave him a Coke, which revived him a little, but that didn’t last, so I started screaming at him to get on my wheel, and pulled him for a while. But when we were only about five miles from home, he could barely pedal anymore. He screamed back, “I can’t do it,” and I screamed, “Yes, you can.” Then I started laughing, and I said, “Oh, if you could see yourself now.” He was pale, white, and slumped over his handlebars. As we hit the last big hills coming into
Austin
, I put my hand on his back, and pushed him up the slope toward home.

Not long after that, I got the cancer. I kept trying to ride, though, and Bart and College would go with me. Now they were the ones who could leave me in the dust, because I was so weak. One afternoon, when I was bald and thin and yellow from my third chemo cycle, I wanted to ride. I should have been in bed, resting, but I insisted, so Bart and College went with me. We only went three or four miles when we came to a hill. I started failing. “I can’t go on,” I said. “I gotta go back.”

College reached out and put a hand on my back and pushed me up that hill. I almost cried with the humiliation of it, but I was glad for the help. Those were the things we did for each other. What goes around comes around: we all need a push sometimes. If you’re the one pushing others up the hill, there may come a day when you need a push, too. Maybe when you help someone, you’re that much closer to the top yourself.

Now here was another defining moment. On Joux-Plane, Bart, who knew me better than anyone, stared at my ashen face and my eyes, which now were red-rimmed and badly bloodshot. He saw how the bike swung unsteadily underneath me, and he knew exactly what had happened.

He couldn’t push me up the hill. So he did the next best thing.

He started to run alongside me, screaming encouragement. “Go, go, go, go,
go
!” he screamed. “You can do this! Don’t you
stop!
”

I didn’t acknowledge him. I just stared straight ahead. Bart kept running, uphill, and screaming, “Come on,
just
get to the top!” Finally, the pitch of the mountainside got the best of him, and he couldn’t keep up.

I never really knew he was there. I don’t remember even seeing him. All I remember, vaguely, is the sound of his voice. It seemed as if it was lost in static, but it was there. I thought it was coming through my radio.

Now Johan’s voice crackled in my ear. Apparently I had gone long minutes without responding to him. I don’t know if my radio reception had failed in the mountains, or if I had simply been unconscious on the bike.

“Lance, talk to me,” Johan said, crackling through the radio. “Where are you? Why aren’t you responding?”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“You have to talk to me,” Johan said.

“
It’s
okay, it’s okay,” I babbled. “I talked to Bart.”

“What?”

“I talked to Bart,” I said, woozily.

I was delirious.

I don’t know exactly what kept me on the bike, riding, in that state. What makes a guy ride until he’s out of his head? I guess because he can. On some level, the cancer still played a part: the illness nearly killed me, and when I returned to cycling, I knew what I’d been through was more difficult than any race. I could always draw from that knowledge, and it felt like power. I was never
really
empty. I had gone through all that, just to quit? No. Uh-uh.

But Bart kept me there, too. If there was any question in my mind of stopping, Bart’s voice interfered. I could not have finished the stage alone—and didn’t.

Whatever I was as a cyclist was the result of a million partnerships, and entanglements, and any cyclist who genuinely believed he had done it all by himself was destined to be a lonely and losing one. The fact is
,
life has enough lonely times in store for all of us.

If I had any doubts on that score, they were settled by what happened next. About halfway up Joux-Plane, I got some added, unexpected assistance from two riders who came up behind me, Roberto Conti and Guido Trentin. They were good, strong, respected riders who I was fairly friendly with. They saw immediately what state I was in. What happened next was a classic case of cycling sportsmanship, and one I will never forget: they stayed with me, and helped me to the top. Without being asked, they moved in front, shielding me from the wind, allowing me to draft on them, and sparing me untold amounts of work. It was a gesture typical in the Tour; we were competitors, but we shared a mutual compassion for extreme physical suffering. Without Conti and Trentin, who knows how much time I’d have lost before I got to the top?