Lance Armstrong met Elton John this January in Atlanta at a private Super Bowl party.
After winning the Tour de France last year, Armstrong had suddenly found himself on the celebrity “A” list, invited to gatherings like the one at which John was performing. When the cyclist was introduced to the singer, John found out he and Armstrong both had homes in Nice.
“Oh, you must come over for dinner,” John told Armstrong.
A few months later, as Armstrong put on his best British accent to narrate the singer’s invitation, the incomprehension that such things were happening to a kid from Texas still was fresh in his voice.
“I’m like, `Elton John’s for dinner … right,”‘ Armstrong said.
He recounted the anecdote while sitting in the living room of his cliffside villa, his back to windows with a panoramic view of the French Riviera, infant son Luke gurgling in his lap. On the terrace next to the front door was a plaque with the villa’s name, “Carpe Diem,” carved into it. Armstrong was not sure if he and his wife, Kristin, would keep the name, which means, “Seize the Day” in Latin.
There could not be a better way for him to describe how he came to be sitting so pretty.
Armstrong seized the world’s attention over 23 days last July by winning the most demanding endurance event in sports less than three years after finishing chemotherapy for testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and brain. Within days of riding to triumph on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, he was on the fast track to wealth and fame and Elton John’s guest list.
“I can’t get wrapped up in that sort of stuff,” Armstrong said. “I know it will go away.”
The time has come for him to shed the cocoon of luxury and seize the days again. He has left the rarefied air of the Mediterranean Cote d’Azur for 23 days of dust and mud and broiling heat and pelting rain and cramped hotel rooms and 2,254 miles of frequently bad roads.
The 2000 Tour de France starts Saturday with a 10.2-mile time trial prologue at Futuroscope, an Epcot-like theme park in western France. Armstrong, 28, surprising winner of the prologue a year ago, will begin this race with both the leader’s yellow jersey and a bull’s-eye on his back.
“I like what the Tour de France has done for me as a person, as an athlete, as a cancer survivor and for my family,” Armstrong said. “It has made life very comfortable, and I’m thankful for that.
“The funny thing is, I didn’t have a love affair with the Tour. It is something I always did in the past because the team kind of made me do it. It is one thing to do it as a participant, but to be in the race, to be leading, to have the yellow jersey is a great feeling. That feeling is my motivation going forward.”
There are other motivations as well. One is to erase doubts that his victory last year somehow owed more to the absence of the three previous champions–Bjarne Riis of Denmark, Jan Ullrich of Germany and Marco Pantani of Italy–than his own command of the race.
Riis has retired. Pantani still is assailed by the psychological fallout of having been booted from the 1999 Tour of Italy for suspicion of doping.
But Ullrich, fifth in the recent Tour of Switzerland, appears back to championship form after two years battling his weight. Bobby Julich of the U.S., third in 1998, is a contender again after his 1999 Tour ended with a broken hip when he crashed in the eighth stage time trial, the day Armstrong put on the yellow jersey for good.
Alex Zulle of Switzerland, last year’s runner-up, is unlikely to lose several minutes again after a crash that split the field in two on just the third day in the 1999 race. Zulle has taken heart from what he saw in the recent Dauphine Libere race, when he felt Armstrong weakened during the climb of Mont Ventoux, which the Tour de France also will climb.
Everyone will be gunning for Armstrong and his U.S. Postal Service team.
“For us the only successful Tour is to have Lance win again,” said teammate Frankie Andreu of Dearborn, Mich., riding in his ninth straight Tour. “Lance is very fit, he is very motivated, and he knows the job at hand.”
Armstrong pretty much feels the same way, even if he tempers it.
“Of course if I don’t win, I’ll be disappointed,” he said. “Having said that, I know it’s hard to win one and very hard to repeat. You’re a marked man, and it’s hard for a team to carry that responsibility for three weeks.
“I would hate to have bad luck. The race is too long. If I was Zulle last year, I don’t know if I would have hung around. I would have just laid there, then gone to the beach and said, `Bring the sun screen, bring the margaritas, I’m OK.’
“If I can be a factor in the race, be a protagonist, do my best and still get beat by a superior Ullrich or Zulle, that’s sport. I like my chances, though.”
Why not? His performance at the Dauphine Libere, a seven-stage race in mid-June, showed both Armstrong and the team to be stronger than a year ago. Teammates like Tyler Hamilton, whom Armstrong helped win the Dauphine while settling for third himself (beating the fourth-place Zulle by one minute), are even more dedicated to get their leader a second straight Tour victory.
“I will never forget the present Lance gave me,” Hamilton said after the Dauphine ended. “You can be sure I am going to give everything for him in the Tour.”
That sort of noblesse oblige Armstrong showed Hamilton now is expected from a rider of Armstrong’s stature. It is something he learned from Spain’s Miguel Indurain, winner of a record five straight Tours from 1991 through 1995. It is why Armstrong backed off last year on Alpe D’Huez, where he might have been just lording over the others by winning consecutive brutal mountain stages.
“It’s not good to win every day,” Armstrong said. “There are 180 guys in the field, and a lot want just one stage win.
“The king of [understanding] that was Indurain. He would lock up the overall and then take guys with him to stage victories. He was the king, and the king would give away presents. There is value in that.”
Such a value system is one of the many things that make stage race cycling so different from other sports. It is why the most famous stage race, the Tour de France, remains foreign and untranslatable to most American sports fans, even if the U.S. has had as many Tour winners as any other country since Greg LeMond won his first of three titles in 1986. Even elite athletes in other sports cannot comprehend the difficulty of climbing 10 percent grades on the stark slopes of Mont Ventoux, “the Giant of Provence,” whose windswept summit 6,260 feet above sea level will be the stage 12 finish on July 13.
“The Tour is mystical,” Armstrong said. “Cold, rain, wind, sun, flats, mountains-all the elements, all the variables, including crashes.
“And it’s three weeks long. Think about what you were doing three weeks ago. It feels like last year.”
For Armstrong, last year was the miracle, the comeback-from-cancer story that put him on Letterman and made him a bell ringer on the New York Stock Exchange and turned him into a marketing machine capable of earning $100,000 for a speech and an estimated $7 million per year in endorsements. Although Armstrong says he is able to go shopping in Nice without being recognized, his wife says that is only because the French are more reluctant than Americans to approach or gawk at a celebrity.
The new demands on his time temporarily put Armstrong behind in his training compared to a year ago. A concussion sustained in a headlong crash while reconnoitering a Tour stage in early May (“the scariest moment I have ever had on a bicycle”) also threatened his preparation for this year’s race and added to Kristin’s persistent fears about the sport.
“I worry more about his safety all the time,” she said. “When the last day comes, no matter what the race, I am so relieved.”
This is, after all, a sport in which riders sweep down gravel- or rain-slicked roads at more than 70 m.p.h. It was on such a Tour descent in 1995 that Armstrong’s teammate on the former Motorola team, Fabio Casartelli of Italy, died after a headlong crash. Casartelli left a wife and infant.
“I like descending, I like cornering, but I don’t want to take unneeded chances,” Armstrong said. “If I get dropped on a climb and have to make up 30 seconds on a descent to win the Tour, I would have to take bigger risks.”
Armstrong found himself frightened to near inert silence at the birth of Luke last Oct. 12. The child was conceived in vitro , with thawed sperm Armstrong had banked before beginning chemotherapy, which can dramatically reduce the sperm count.
“I was terrified something was going to go wrong with the process,” he said. “I was just nervous, way more than Kristin.
“You talk about thawing out anything, then to see a warm, perfectly healthy baby, it’s unbelievable that could be done.”
Lance and Kristin have been completely candid and disarmingly open about the process in the hope their experience can help others in the same situation. Details of every step are recounted in Armstrong’s autobiography, “It’s Not About the Bike,” currently a national best seller. Working on a book and filming TV commercials–at last count, there were seven, for six different companies–complicated Armstrong’s life until February, when he returned to France. There, he and teammates Andreu, Tyler Hamilton and Kevin Livingston, who also have residences in Nice, headed off into the Maritime Alps for training rides of 90 minutes to seven hours, sometimes climbing to places where people were skiing.
“I want to be good by June,” Armstrong said.
Having reached that goal, Armstrong moves into the heart of a season with two peaks–the Tour and the Olympics. He is expected to ride both the individual time trial and the road race in Sydney.
“If I don’t have a successful Tour, I’ll have to have a successful second half of the season,” he said.
Armstrong glanced at the Nasdaq quotes crawling across the TV screen to his left. His cat, Chemo, stood up on the sofa and mewed plaintively.
“You’ve got a rough life, Chemo,” he told the cat. “A rough life on the Cote d’Azur.”
Armstrong, who once made his European base in northern Italy, moved to the Cote d’Azur in 1997. He only began to feel comfortable there when he and Kristin bought their current house in late 1998. The purchase was an admission of the truth that Armstrong spends more time in Europe–February through October–than at his U.S. home in Austin, Texas.
“It took me years to figure out I had to create a life and a lifestyle here,” Armstrong said. “Buying a house was the best thing I could have done. It sounds corny but it gave me a sense of home.”
For all that, Armstrong was ready to move when the French media’s preoccupation with use of performance-enhancing drugs in cycling led some inquiring minds to sift through his trash during the 1999 Tour. That happened after it was revealed he had tested positive for a banned corticosteroid in an analgesic cream he had clearance to use as a treatment for saddle sores. When Armstrong’s anger subsided, he decided not to let one unseemly moment ruin a good thing.
“There will always be suspicion [about doping],” Armstrong said. “It will never be fixed, but it has been overblown.
“I like what I do. We like to be here.”
Armstrong has another year on his $2.5 million-a-year contract with the Postal Service team. He talks about riding through the 2004 Olympics and then realizes he has already spent nine seasons as a pro. He remains a “little bit scared” by his semiannual cancer checkups, knowing one abnormality would mean the immediate end of his cycling career.
“Five more years, that would be tough,” he said.
Especially if Elton already has dinner on the table.
