BESANCON, France — Lance Armstrong is fully awake. No one doubts that now.
After four consecutive dominating victories, Armstrong scrambled through a problem-plagued three weeks to win his record-tying fifth Tour de France last year by a mere 61 seconds.
An alarm went off. He heard it and bolted to a new level of readiness.
The 2004 Tour was supposed to be Armstrong’s toughest. It may go into the books as his easiest. Three of his chief adversaries–Tyler Hamilton, Roberto Heras and Iban Mayo–won’t finish the race for various reasons, and a fourth, Jan Ullrich, has looked asleep at the wheel.
Armstrong was aiming to win Saturday’s Stage 19 to sweep the Tour’s two individual time trials after having won at will in the mountains. This Tour then will have to be remembered as the one where he was untouchable.
Armstrong received the ultimate wakeup call seven years ago when he rose one day to find his 25-year-old body riddled with cancer. Having survived that jolt, it could be that he answers the bell faster than most.
If Armstrong lifts his sixth trophy as expected Sunday with the broad expanse of the Champs-Elysees rising to the Arc de Triomphe behind him, it will be a tribute to vigilance. The Texan still monitors the road and his rivals as he once tracked his immune system markers.
“The day I show up and I’m convinced I’m going to be in the front on the climbs is the day that I lose,” Armstrong said after winning his first Tour stage this year on the punishing climb to the Plateau de Beille in the Pyrenees. “Last year, I was perhaps overconfident.
“All great champions are worried about losing their place on top, and that’s what keeps them there.”
How did this happen? How did the pugnacious only child of a single mother raised in a pancake-flat Dallas suburb become an unassailable champion in this formerly cloistered European sport? How has Armstrong twice beaten all comers up the beastly, twisting ascent of Alpe d’Huez, earning a plaque emblazoned with his name on Switchback 21 at the base of the mountain?
Armstrong’s achievement is founded on hard and frequently tedious work. Training, as five-time Tour champion Bernard Hinault points out, is not nearly as much fun as racing, which is why many cyclists do more of the latter than the former.
There was also some chance alignment involved. Armstrong was the right athlete at the right moment, a hungry and newly lean young man who understood the irreversibility of lost time. He had the good fortune to run into a team director, Johan Bruyneel, who was steeped in European cycling ways but not hidebound by them.
Together they have created a successful model for winning the Tour that some resent and some have begun to emulate: concentrating on one leader and one race to the exclusion of all else.
Professional cycling still is troubled by drug scandals, is shaky financially and is tethered to archaic etiquette, but it has entered this century with the most recognizable reigning champion in the world.
Make no mistake–cancer is still central to the plot line of Armstrong’s extraordinary life, even though he officially was declared disease-free two years ago and the paragraph reminding us of his ordeal sinks lower and lower in the retelling.
Remission is a mind-set as well as a physical state. Armstrong never will stop casting a long, searching, analytical look over his shoulder to see who or what might be gaining on him.
“Cancer is a bit of an unfair advantage over the other guys,” he said last spring.
The illness resculpted his body, making him lighter and better at going uphill. But it was what it did to his psyche that transformed him from a great one-day racer to the versatile rider he is now.
Armstrong often says he never would have won the Tour if he hadn’t gotten sick. Jim Ochowicz, his first team director, agrees but adds that Armstrong had to do more than get well to race again. He had to bring his desire to win back in line with his fear of failure.
“When he was first diagnosed with cancer, I walked up to him and he said, `Hey, Jimmy boy, this isn’t going to beat me. I’m going to beat it,”‘ Ochowicz, who remains an important part of Armstrong’s brain trust, recalled this week. “My dad died of cancer, and he was a strong man. The way Lance said it, the way he looked at me, I just knew.
“But after cancer, he had to make a decision, and he chose to come back on the bike. It was a difficult struggle for about 18 months, and he may have had his doubts about it. There were a lot of people there to help him, and once he had that chance . . . “
Armstrong put distance between himself and death in the way he now drops other riders, but he never forgot how it felt to contemplate falling behind. With each victory, he has tried to refine both his own training and his leadership skills.
During his first Tour triumph in 1999, he said Thursday, “I was so nervous every day I was going to lose. I don’t have those feelings anymore. I’ll get nervous, but I have a lot of confidence in myself and confidence in the team that we can control any situation.”
In the last two years Armstrong has become middle-aged in cycling terms, and conserving energy has become paramount for him. The kudos he heaps on his ensemble cast for shielding him from the wind and helping haul him over hills have multiplied accordingly.
“He beat cancer and had to put faith in a team of doctors,” his companion, singer Sheryl Crow, said Friday. “When he had to put his faith in the team to get him through the Tour last year, it was almost parallel to that situation. They rose to the occasion, and I think it changed him.”
Convincing wave after wave of men from different countries and backgrounds to toil in unified and mostly faceless servitude requires some management skill.
Granted, it’s great to be associated with a winner, and Armstrong’s U.S. Postal Service team doesn’t have any problems recruiting talent and replacing departed riders who have their own ambitions. Only one of the eight men who helped Armstrong win his first Tour, his good friend George Hincapie, has stayed for the entire journey since.
Last winter brought the defection of Heras, the Spanish climber hired to be Armstrong’s primary aide in the mountains. His successor, Jose Azevedo of Portugal, is at least equally gifted and apparently without ego, charming Armstrong after Postal’s team time trial victory by asking his teammates to autograph a souvenir newspaper.
Armstrong’s most obvious asset as a boss is that he is never first to leave the office. The second is a willingness to learn. The former street rat now muddles through in two other languages, collects art and pays respectful homage to European culture. The last is a stubborn boyish streak that leavens his stardom and makes him approachable.
Current Postal rider Floyd Landis said Armstrong wields authority without pulling rank.
“For most people, he’s a human-interest story that can’t be matched,” said the impish Pennsylvanian. “For us, he’s a cyclist, one of us.”
He is, and he isn’t. Armstrong has made the bike an extension of a formidable physique and relentless competitiveness that are unmatched in the peloton. The Tour often is won by taking an early lead and riding to maintain it rather than extend it. Armstrong in the late going this year has sprinted whenever he saw daylight, unable and unwilling to hold back.
“For me, the bike was always a simple passion,” he said recently. “Your first chance to really get away.
“I was given a second chance to come back to a sport I found out I love a lot more than I ever knew. I came back and decided I would do it a little differently the second time around, and that’s what I always encourage my fellow cancer survivors to do. Every day, just tee it up and live life to the fullest.”
