Driven cyclist

Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the miraculous life of Lance Armstrong, who has just embarked on his last Tour de France

Pau, France

Until 1981 no American even so much as rode in the Tour de France. Since then an invading fleet has crossed the Atlantic to dominate what was once a European sport, and a race whose very name is its country’s proud standard. First of the Yanks was Greg LeMond, who won the Tour in 1986, then Bobby Julich, and more recently Tyler Hamilton. After his Olympic triumph last year he is now in disgrace, charged with the faintly ghoulish offence of ‘blood-doping’, transfusing someone else’s blood, although nothing can erase his heroism in the great centennial Tour of two years ago, riding for three weeks in agony from a cracked collarbone.

But Lance Armstrong is in special case among cyclists, or sportsmen, or heroes. If asked to name the greatest sporting achievement of his lifetime, Richard Williams of the Guardian has said that he would have no hestitation in choosing Armstrong’s consecutive victories in the last six Tours, which surpassed any previous feats. In this year’s race which began in the Vendée two weeks ago, has been traversing the great Alpine passes this past week, is now in the Pyrenees and finishes in the Champs Elysées on Sunday 24 July — he has no one’s record to beat but his own. For any man to have done this would be almost incredible. For a man who, before winning his first Tour, had fought back from advanced cancer, undergoing everything from chemotherapy to brain surgery, it is some way beyond belief. Who is this extraordinary creature?

His origins are anything but extraordinary. He was born when his mother was 17, never knew his father, and grew up not quite dirtpoor in Austin, the pleasant state capital of Texas. Lance was a precociously gifted athlete, a champion swimmer at 12, then a triathlete, before deciding that, in the title of his later memoir, ‘It’s all about the bike’. In 1993 he became road World Champion at the age of 20, the second American after LeMond, and in his first Tour that year he announced his arrival with éclat by winning a stage, from Châlonssur-Marne to Verdun. He didn’t complete the next three Tours he rode in, but by 1996 he was improving with every race, winning the FlècheWallonie — its first American winner — and the Tour DuPont in the United States.

And yet there were hints that something was wrong. ‘Usually, when I won a race, I pumped my fists like pistons as I crossed the finish line. But on that day I was too exhausted to celebrate on the bike. My eyes were bloodshot and my face was flushed.’ He was all the same in high spirits when he held his 25th birthday party that September. He was stepping out with ‘a beautiful co-ed’, he had signed a $2.5 million contract with Cofidis, the leading French team, life was good.

So good that he didn’t pay full attention ‘when my right testicle became slightly swollen that winter’. He assumed it was ‘something I had done to myself on the bike, or that my system was compensating for some physiological male thing’. In October he learnt the truth when he was diagnosed with fourth-stage testicular cancer — oh, and then the bad news. Lesions began to appear on his brain, and his doctors gave him a 40 per cent chance of survival. He underwent advanced chemotherapy and surgery for several months, when harrowing photographs show Armstrong emaciated by chemo treatment, his skull shaved and marked by a dozen blobs for surgical entry.

This was the toughest race of his life, and he won. He was discharged in 1997 and desperate to get back on his bike, but Cofidis, in what may rank as the single worst decision in the history of sport, told him that he couldn’t ride for them again. He waited at length for offers from other teams, and finally signed with a new and not immediately promising team, United States Postal Service, encouraged by Johan Bruyneel, a good rider in his time but a man whose greatest service by far to the sport has been to have faith in Armstrong and tell him to get back in the saddle.

After the story so far not even the schmalziest screenwriter would have dared dream up the sequel. In 1999, riding with the ‘Posties’, Armstrong won the Tour de France. And the next year, and every year since. With last year’s six-timer, he overtook Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain, and he now has only his own record to beat.

Some Americans might have wondered why a US Postal Service which loses several billion dollars a year and often seems to have the greatest difficulty getting a letter from Brooklyn Heights to the Upper West Side was sponsoring a bike team in the first place. However that may have been, the ‘Posties’ are now history, and have been replaced by a new team, Discovery Channel. Its sponsors made a condition that Armstrong would ride one more Tour, and although he played hard to get over the winter he finally announced that he would be riding in this race, and that it would be his last. He played down his chances before this final Tour, but to judge from the way he crushed Jan Ullrich, ostensibly his nearest rival, in the opening stage at Noirmoutier-en-l’Ile a fortnight ago and then led his Discovery men to victory in the team time trial, he will very likely depart in the maillot jaune he has made his own.

In September Armstrong will be 33, and only two men as old have won the Tour in the past 60 years. After a turbulent passage in his personal life and the break-up of his first marriage, he is now happily ensconced with the singer Sheryl Crow (she of ‘the sexiest mouth in rock’). He divides his year between America and his base at Gerona in Spain, and wants to spend as much time as he can with his children. He cannot possibly need the money, and yet he is inflicting on himself one more 2,250-mile ordeal, with those terrifying climbs up to 8,000 feet.

But then if there is one thing we know by now about Armstrong, it’s that he is a driven personality. He is one of those sportsmen who are easier to admire than to love, and for years he was deeply unpopular here. Belying their reputation for hard-hearted cynicism, the French prefer gallant losers like Raymond Poulidor (if no longer Jacques Chirac), and they found the Texan cold, not at all sympa, and altogether too successful.

Sensing this, he has gone to some lengths to make himself better liked. As the Iraq war began, shortly before the centennial Tour, he eschewed triumphalism. ‘I’m no fan of war,’ he said, and he indirectly rebuked his friend and fellow-Texan, President George W. Bush: ‘It’s wrong to go to the front without the support of Europe and the United Nations.’ Ten days ago he said, ‘I’m a guy who’s always defending this country and its people at a time when there’s not a lot of people in America defending France.’ And it has worked. French fans are almost beginning to take him to their hearts, and the Tour press photographers even awarded him their unofficial Prix Orange for the sunniest and most helpful rider; he had previously been a regular recipient of their Prix Citron for unco-operative surliness.

Altogether it’s a great storyline, with twists in the plot and a happy ending. And yet there is a less happy subplot. Doping is sport’s dirty open secret. In the early years the riders dosed themselves with alcohol, before they discovered cocaine, and then amphetamines, whose use was winked at until an English rider, the likeable, doomed Tom Simpson, collapsed and died on Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour, stuffed to the gills with ‘la bomba’, as Italian cyclists called the drug. Real attempts have been made by cycling to clean up its act in the near 40 years since, but that period has also seen the arrival of steroids and then EPO (erythropoietin). They are synthetic versions of natural metabolic products, and are much used by doctors, not least in cancer treatment. Used supervised, they have miraculous properties; used unsupervised, they are literally fatal, and there has been a shocking incidence of young cyclists dying from otherwise inexplicable nocturnal heart attacks. The year before Armstrong’s first Tour triumph was the ‘Tour de Farce’, when the Festina team car was stopped and found to be a veritable mobile pharmacy, with enough dope and needles for half the Tour riders.

Any cycling champion is thus bound to come under a passing cloud of suspicion, fairly or unfairly, but in Armstrong’s case there is more to it. For years he has been pursued (some say hounded) by David Walsh, the Irish journalist who writes for the Sunday Times. Walsh and a French collaborator have published LA Confidentiel, which claims to expose Armstrong as a doper. The book has so far only come out here in France, and here, as well as in England, Armstrong has conducted a vigorous and continuing attack in the libel courts.

Although Walsh is an admirable sports writer and an honest man, some would add that on this subject he is also a man obsessed and that his case is largely based on circumstantial evidence. Against that there are the simple facts endlessly reiterated by Armstrong: he insists he has never used performance-enhancing drugs, he has never once failed a dope test, and he is ‘the most tested athlete on earth’. To which one might add in turn that if he wanted to silence the likes of Walsh completely, there are better ways to do it than to associate, as he has, with Dr Michele Ferrari, the deeply sinister Italian ‘sports doctor’ whose licence has now been suspended for malpractice.

On whatever exact note Armstrong’s Tour career ends, it has been like nothing else in the history of sport, and that may not be the end of the story. Deep in the heart of Texas there is talk that Lance has ambitions to follow George Bush to the governor’s mansion. It sounds a wild idea, but if California can elect its present governor, anything can happen. And then, who knows what the last étape of this amazing journey will be: ambassador to Paris — or a yellow jersey in the White House?