Time is short for a man who has become an icon of endurance.
Lance Armstrong announced in April that the 2005 Tour de France would be his final race. That means Saturday, when the race begins with an 11.8-mile time trial prologue, is the beginning of the end of Armstrong’s competitive career.
He won the Tour six times for the U.S. Postal Service team and will ride the last for a new sponsor, Discovery Channel, but that isn’t the only thing different about Armstrong this season. For the first time since his initial Tour victory in 1999, he goes into the three-week travail without having won either a race or a race stage the rest of the season.
So much has been written about Armstrong in the past six years, as he survived cancer and became the first to win his sport’s greatest event six times, that it seemed best to let him speak for himself.
Here, in question-and-answer form, is a conversation of this spring, with Armstrong, 34, discussing his state of mind, doping, his memories of the Tour and his legacy:
How have things set up for this Tour de France?
It has not been ideal in terms of racing. I was a little behind on preparation, and I jumped right into Paris-Nice (in March), and I wasn’t ready. I had just made the trip to France, so I kind of bit off more than I could chew there. (He dropped out halfway). Since then, things have been going really well.
(Note: Armstrong said Sunday in a conference call, “I would venture to say I feel better than ever.”)
Had it not been for Discovery Channel taking over the team and wanting you to ride one more Tour, do you think you would have stopped?
Absolutely.
Then how hard was it to motivate yourself to do this one more time?
The reason I continued was, obviously, we had them (Discovery) come in, but I have a team of 24 other riders and a staff of another 25 or 30 that I know well and care deeply about. It’s in their best interests to have a team, and I guess it’s in America’s best interest to have a prominent American-based cycling team.
I wouldn’t want it to seem that I did it just on a whim, just to keep pedaling for no reason. I went out and hammered myself for five hours today, and I loved every second of it. So I will miss that when it goes away. I still love what I do, and I still want to win the Tour.
Do you see a successor in terms of keeping U.S. interest up, at least in the Tour de France?
The only way to keep American interest up is to produce a winner. We don’t know much, us Americans, about the event, but when one of us wins, we know that, we understand that. It’s crazy to even consider, but since 1989, we (Americans) have won eight Tours (the other two by Greg LeMond) so we’re batting pretty good.
I don’t know that we’ll have another Tour winner come along very quickly. That’s the bad news. The good news is we’re absolutely motivated and interested in finding one and producing one–hopefully from within our team.
You’ve got a young guy like Tom Danielson, I think he has tremendous potential. But the Tour is a hard race, man, it’s a special race, and guys who ride well in 99 percent of the other races can’t ride well in that race. It’s too tough. It takes a special guy.
We might be in a position where it’s a foreign rider riding for an American team.
Will that be accepted like an American rider for a foreign team?
It depends whom you’re talking to. If you’re talking to a sponsor looking for global exposure, it works well. If you’re talking to Joe Six-Pack, on the North Side, if the guy (rider) is from Ukraine, he might not understand it, might not follow it the way he would have (for a U.S. rider). We’ll see.
What are your favorite Tours?
One, three and six for a variety of reasons. One, because it was the first. Three, I think was my strongest year, and I’ll never forget that day on Alpe d’Huez. That was my best day ever, in putting two minutes into the next rider, [Jan] Ullrich, who had tried to dominate the race from the beginning. We kind of did the fake-out a little bit (Armstrong pretended to be cracking earlier in the stage). Those are good memories.
Six, man, it might be the biggest one. So many people thought it couldn’t be done. Me included. To do it and to make cycling history and to beat down what a lot of people considered was an impossible thing was huge. There was a lot of superstition. There were people who just said, “Look, if [Eddy] Merckx couldn’t do it, if [Bernard] Hinault couldn’t do it, if Miguel Indurain couldn’t do it, then nobody can do it.”
What about Tour Five, with the crashes?
That Tour, although it was my least favorite, will provide the most dramatic footage because of that crash (in the Pyrenees, where he went on to win the stage) and because of the near-crash a week or two earlier (when he cut downhill across a field to avoid a crash and somehow avoided damage to himself or the bike).
Is it harder to motivate yourself this year?
No.
Why?
I still love the event, and I love the event a lot more than I like the other guys (laughs). And I can’t stand the idea of losing.
You mean the other guys on other teams?
I love the guys on my team. And I don’t mind the guys I race against. But this is high-level sport, and you don’t go on vacations with the guys you race against.
Other than being able to spend more time with your children (Luke, 5, and twins Isabelle and Grace, 3, who live with his ex-wife), what are your future plans?
The No. 1 priority is my kids. That has become more and more challenging as they get older and change more and more. This year, I went away for a month and came back, and they were totally different.
The cancer community will begin to take up a lot more of my time. And Discovery. I will do programming with Discovery throughout all their networks.
As you watch the drug scandal unfold in baseball, do you have to resist saying, “I told you so?”
Our sport has been really rocked through it all, primarily because we have been aggressive. We’ve done things nobody else has done. We were the first sport to control for EPO; we implemented that test when people didn’t even know if the test worked.
We have done a lot more than anybody else; therefore, we’ve caught more people; therefore, you put yourself under a lot of pressure, because it never looks good when somebody is positive. But I’m proud of the guys; I’m proud of the sport; I’m proud of the governing body, and I don’t believe what anybody says when they say that this is a dirty rotten sport, the dirtiest sport. That’s just not true. Clean guys can win, and I’m here to prove it.
I feel bad for baseball, although I’m really not a baseball fan at all. The guys (accused players) don’t have any proof (of their innocence). Nobody has showed up at Barry Bonds’ doorstep on, say, Oct. 28, completely unannounced, for a control. To me, if I’m a fan, and (unannounced testing) is a real possibility, and that happens, I believe the guy. As a guy who just had his fourth surprise control of the season, man it’s hard. It’s hard to cheat.
You have aggressively gone after people who have accused you of doping. Is that a strategy you think is the best way to attack the questions?
Yeah. It’s never fun, and nobody wants to tie up their time with that stuff, but to me it’s about justice. It’s not fair to make false accusations.
What is your legacy in the sport?
I hope we–and I say we, because I didn’t do this alone–are seen as a group, and maybe me as a rider, who came along and revolutionized technology, revolutionized training, revolutionized the team approach, the tactical approach. We have thumbed through and just looked at every facet of cycling, especially grand tour cycling, three-week tours, and tried to change everything and make it perfect. That’s really the key to our success.
What about your legacy in larger sense?
That is something I hope to start now. Obviously, I’m the guy who came back from a life-threatening illness and did something nobody ever thought should be done, and I’m talking about just living.
If you asked me who my hero is, gave me list of five athletes, and Eddy Merckx was one or Michael Jordan was one; but on the other hand, you had somebody on the list like Bono, who has taken his work as a musician and parlayed it into something that is just massive. . . . That is heroic.
———-
phersh@tribune.com
