No. 6 in Armstrong’s grasp
BESANCON, France — Lance Armstrong is wide awake. No one doubts that now.
After four consecutive dominating victories, Armstrong scrambled through a problem-plagued three weeks last year to win his record-tying fifth Tour de France 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, the one where he was truly untouchable.
Armstrong won stages at will and in every possible fashion this year. He swept both individual time trials, showed his usual prowess in the mountains and launched unexpected, explosive finishing sprints that broke the backs of the few riders anywhere close to him.
Three of his chief adversaries — Tyler Hamilton, Roberto Heras and Iban Mayo — dropped out of the race for various reasons, and a fourth, Jan Ullrich, looked asleep at the wheel.
Armstrong received the ultimate wakeup call nearly eight 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.
Only the formality of Sunday’s party lap stands between Armstrong and history. When he lifts his sixth trophy with the broad expanse of the Avenue des Champs-Elysees rising to the Arc de Triomphe behind him, it will be a tribute to acquired vigilance. The Texan still monitors the road and his rivals the way he once tracked his immune system markers.
“My previous experience with illness helped last year, because I was down and everybody thought I was out,” Armstrong said Saturday after his smooth, powerful victory in the Stage 19 individual time trial. “I still went to bed every night and said, ‘I’m going to be better tomorrow. I just know it.’
“Not that last year being so close made me a different person last winter or this season. It was just an overall commitment. I had to question whether or not I still loved the job and the sport, and I think we’ve seen in the last few weeks that I absolutely do.”
Armstrong’s long-time personal coach, Chris Carmichael, said the relish Armstrong brought to the race didn’t surprise him.
“It was apparent to me very early in his preparations that this was going to be a no-holds-barred, absolutely flat-out effort—that he was going to win this race and suck the marrow from the bone,” Carmichael said.
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?
His achievement is founded on hard and frequently tedious work.
“This is not a final exam you cram for,” Armstrong said a few days ago.
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.
Armstrong also was the right athlete at the right moment, a hungry and newly lean young man who understood the irreversibility of lost time.
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 summarizing 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.
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.
“After cancer, he had to make a decision, and he chose to come back on the bike,” said Ochowicz, who remains an important part of Armstrong’s brain trust. “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.
“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,” Armstrong said last spring. “Every day, just tee it up and live life to the fullest.”
With each successive victory, he has refined his training and his leadership skills. Armstrong is middle-aged in cycling terms, and conserving energy has become paramount. The kudos he heaps on his ensemble cast for shielding him from the wind and helping haul him over hills have multiplied accordingly.
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. Armstrong’s U.S. Postal Service team has no trouble 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.
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.
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,” the impish Pennsylvanian said. “For us, he’s a cyclist, one of us.”