It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (6 page)

riders. Och was a cycling pioneer: in 1985 he had organized the first predominantly American squad to race overseas, and proven that U.S. riders could compete

in the traditionally European sport. (One of those early riders for Och’s Team 7-Eleven was Chris Carmichael.) A year later, Greg LeMond won the 1986 Tour de France and brought the

event into the American consciousness.

Och was always on the lookout for rising young Americans, and Chris steered me toward him. He introduced us one night in the midst of the Tour Du Pont, the biggest stage race held on

American soil. I went to Och’s hotel for what amounted to a job interview. I didn’t realize it then, but I was meeting my surrogate father.

My first impression was of a gangly, soft-spoken man in his 40s with an easy laugh and a broad, toothy smile. We sat around and chatted about where I came from, and he told me what he was

looking for in a rider: he wanted to find a young American who might follow in LeMond’s footsteps and win the Tour de France. Och’s teams had placed riders fourth on a couple of

different occasions, but had never won it.

Och asked me what my own ambition was. “I want to be the best rider there is,” I said. “I want to go to Europe and be a pro. I don’t want to just be good at it, I want to be the best.” That was

good enough for Och; he handed me a contract and packed me off to Europe.

My first race was the Clasica San Sebastian. They may call it a “classic,” but in reality it’s a horribly punishing single-day race in which riders cover more than a hundred miles, frequently

over bone-rattling terrain, in terrible weather. It is atmospheric and historic, and notoriously brutal. San Sebastian turned out to be a gorgeous seaside town in Basque country, but the day

of my debut was gray, pouring rain, and bit-ingly cold. There is nothing more uncomfortable than riding in the rain, because you can never, ever get warm. Your Lycra jersey is nothing more

than a second skin. Cold rain soaks it, plastering it to your body, so the chill mingles with your sweat and seeps down into your bones. Your muscles seize up and grow heavy with frigid,

sodden exhaustion.

The day of my debut, it rained so hard it hurt. As we started off into the stinging, icy downpour, I quickly faded to the back, and as the day wore on, I slipped farther and farther behind,

shivering and struggling to pedal. Soon, I was in last place. Ahead of me, the field was growing thinner as riders began to give up. Every so often one would pull over to the side of the road and

abandon the race. I was tempted to do the same, to squeeze the brakes, rise up from the bars,

and coast to the side of the road. It would be so easy. But I couldn’t, not in my first pro start. It would be too humiliating. What would my teammates think? I wasn’t a quitter.

Why don’t you just quit?

Son, you never quit.

Fifty riders dropped out, but I kept pedaling. I came in dead last in the field of 111 riders. I crossed the finish line almost half an hour behind the winner, and as I churned up the last hill,

the Spanish crowd began to laugh and hiss at me. “Look at the sorry one in last place,” one jeered.

A few hours later, I sat in the Madrid airport, slumped in a chair. I wanted to quit the entire sport. It was the most sobering race of my life; on my way to San Sebastian, I had actually

thought I had a chance of winning, and now I wondered if I could compete at all. They had laughed at me.

Professional cycling was going to be a lot harder than I’d thought; the pace was faster, the terrain tougher, the competition more fit than I ever imagined. I pulled a sheaf of unused plane

tickets out of my pocket. Among them, I had a return portion to the States. I considered using it. Maybe I should just go home, I thought, and find something else to do, something I was good

at.

I went to a pay phone and called Chris Carmichael. I told him how depressed I was, and that I was considering quitting. Chris just listened, and then he said, “Lance, you are going to learn

more from that experience than any other race in your whole life.” I was right to have stayed in and finished, to prove to my new teammates that I was a tough rider. If they were going to rely

on me, they needed to know I wasn’t a quitter. Now they did.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’ll keep going.”

I hung up, and boarded the plane for the next race. I had just two days off, and then I was scheduled to compete in the Championship of Zurich. I had a lot to prove, to myself and

everyone else–and unless my heart exploded in my chest, I was not going to be last again.

I finished second in Zurich. I attacked from the start and stayed on the attack for practically the entire race. I had little or no idea tactically how to ride in the race–I just put my head down and

bulled through it, and when I stepped onto the medal podium it was more with relief than elation. Okay, I thought to myself, I think I can do this after all.

I called Chris Carmichael. “See?” Chris said. In the space of just a few days I had gone from depressed rookie to legitimate competitor. The turnaround provoked murmurs around the sport:

Who’s this guy and what’s he all about? people wanted to know.

It was a question I still needed to answer for myself.

AN AMERICAN IN CYCLING WAS COMPARABLE TO A French baseball team in the World Series. I was a gate-crasher in a revered and time-honored sport, and I had little or no

concept of its rules, written and unwritten, or its etiquette. Let’s just say that my Texas manners didn’t exactly play well on the continent.

There was a big difference between the discreet jockeying of European cycling, and the swaggering, trash-talking American idea of competition I was reared with. Like most

Americans, I grew up oblivious to cycling; it wasn’t until LeMond’s victory in the ‘86 Tour that I really noticed the sport. There was a way things were done, and attitudes that I didn’t

understand, and even when I did understand them I didn’t feel I had to be a part of them. In fact, I ignored them.

I raced with no respect. Absolutely none. I paraded, mouthed off, shoved my fists in the air. I never backed down. The journalists loved me; I was different, I made good copy, I was colorful.

But I was making enemies.

A road is only so wide. Riders are constantly moving around, fighting for position, and often the smart and diplomatic thing to do is to let a fellow rider in. In a long stage race, you give a little

to make a friend, because you might need one later. Give an inch, make a friend. But I wouldn’t do it. Partly it was my character at the time: I was insecure and defensive, not totally confident

of how strong I was. I was still the kid from Piano with the chip on my shoulder, riding headlong, pedaling out of anger. I didn’t think I could afford to give up inches.

Sometimes I would yell at other riders in the peloton, in frustration: “Pull or get out of the way!” I didn’t understand yet that for various reasons a guy might sit on the back, maybe because his

team leader told him to, or because he was tired and hurting. It wasn’t his job to move out of my way, or to work harder so I could ride at a faster pace. (I don’t get so riled up about those things

anymore, and often I’m the one who sits on the back, hurting.)

I would learn that in the peloton, other riders can totally mess you up, just to keep you from winning. There is a term in cycling, “flicking.” It’s a derivative of the German word ficken,

which means “to fuck.” If you flick somebody in the peloton, it means to screw him, just to get him. There’s a lot of flicking in the peloton.

Guys would flick me just to flick me. They would race to see that I didn’t win, simply because they didn’t like me. They could cut me off. They could isolate me, and make me ride slower, or

they could surge and push the pace, making me work harder than I wanted to, weakening me. Fortunately I was surrounded by some protective teammates, guys like Sean Yates, Steve Bauer,

and Frankie Andreu, who tried to gently explain that I wasn’t doing myself any good, or them either. “Lance, you’ve got to try to control yourself, you’re making enemies,” Frankie would say.

They seemed to understand that I had some maturing to do, and if they were exasperated with me, they kept it to themselves, and patiently steered me in the right direction.

Teammates are critical in cycling–I had eight of them on the Motorola squad, and I needed each and every one. On a severe climb it could save me thirty percent of my energy to ride behind a

colleague, drafting, “sitting on his wheel.” Or, on a windy day, my eight teammates would stay out in front of me, shielding me and saving me up to 50 percent of the work I’d have to do

otherwise. Every team needs guys who are sprinters, guys who are climbers, guys willing to do the dirty work. It was very important to recognize the effort of each person involved–and not to

waste it. “Who’s going to work hard for someone who doesn’t win?” Och asked me, and it was a good question.

You don’t win a road race all on your own. You need your teammates–and you need the goodwill and cooperation of your competitors, too. People had to want to ride for you, and with

you. But in those first months, a couple of my competitors literally wanted to punch me out.

I would insult great European champions. In one of my first races as a pro, the Tour of the Mediterranean, I encountered Moreno Argentin, a very serious, very respected Italian cyclist. He

was one of the dons of the sport, a former World Champion who had won races all over the continent. But I surged right up to the front and challenged him. There were 150 guys bunched

all together, jockeying for position, flicking, coming over on each other, and pushing each other out of the way.

As I drew even with Argentin, he glanced at me, vaguely surprised, and said, “What are you doing here, Bishop?”

For some reason it infuriated me. He didn’t know my name. He thought I was Andy Bishop, another member of the American team. I thought, This guy doesn’t know my name?

“Fuck you, Chiapucci!” I said, calling him by the name of one of his teammates.

Argentin did a double take, incredulous. He was the capo, the boss, and to him I was a faceless young American who had yet to win anything, yet here I was cussing him out. But I’d had a

number of promising results, and in my own mind, he should have known who I was.

“Hey, Chiapucci,” I said. “My name’s Lance Armstrong, and by the end of this race you’ll know it.”

For the rest of the race, my sole aim was to throw Argentin off his pedestal headfirst. But in the end, I faded. It was a five-day stage race, and I couldn’t keep up–I was too inexperienced.

Afterward, Argentin came to our team compound, screaming. He ranted at my teammates about my behavior. That was part of the etiquette too; if a young rider was becoming a problem, it was

up to the older riders to get him in line. Roughly translated, what Argentin was saying was, “You need to teach him some manners.”

A few days later, I entered a race in Italy, this one the Trophee Laigueglia, a one-day classic.

The Trophee was considered an automatic win for Argentin, and I knew it. The favorites in any race in Italy were, of course, the Italians, and especially their leader Argentin. One thing you

didn’t do to a veteran cyclist was disrespect him in his home country, in front of his fans and sponsors. But I went after him again. I challenged him when nobody else would, and this time

the result was different. In the Trophee Laigueglia, I won the duel.

At the end of the race, it was a breakaway of four riders, and at the front were Argentin, Chiapucci, a Venezuelan named Sierra–and me. I hurled myself through the final sprint, and

took the lead. Argentin couldn’t believe he was going to lose to me, the loudmouth American.

He then did something that has always stayed with me. Five yards from the finish line, he braked. He locked up his wheels–intentionally. He took fourth, out of the medals. I won the

race.

There are three places on a podium, and Argentin didn’t want to stand beside me. In an odd way, it made more of an impression on me than any lecture or fistfight could have. What he was

saying was that he didn’t respect me. It was a curiously elegant form of insult, and an effective one.

In the years since then, I’ve grown up and learned to admire things Italian: their exquisite manners, art, food, and articulacy, not to mention their great rider, Moreno Argentin. In fact,

Argentin and I have become good friends. I have a great deal of affection for him, and when we see each other these days, we embrace, Italian style, and laugh.

MY RESULTS CONTINUED TO VEER UP AND DOWN, AS

crazily as I wove through a peloton. I’d attack anytime. I’d just go. Someone would surge, and I’d counter, not out of any sense of real strategy, but as if to say, “Is that all you got?”

I had my share of results because I was a strong kid, and I rode on the tactics and coattails of others, but much of the time I was too aggressive, repeating the same critical mistake I’d made

riding for Chris Carmichael back in Japan: I’d charge to the front and ride all by myself, and then falter. Sometimes I didn’t even finish in the top 20. Afterward one of my teammates would ask,

“What the hell were you doing?”

“I felt good,” I’d say, lamely.

But I was fortunate to ride for two very smart, sensitive coaches: I continued to train with Chris as part of the national team, while Och and his team director, Henny Kuiper, managed my daily

racing for Motorola. They spent a lot of time on the phone comparing notes, and they recognized and agreed on something important: my strength was the sort you couldn’t teach or

train. You can teach someone how to control their strength, but you can’t teach them to be strong.

While my aggression wasn’t winning me friends in the peloton, it might become a valuable asset one day, they suspected. Och and Chris felt that endurance events were not only about suffering