Lance Armstrong - The growing pains of a world champion

You Are Here:

Home >> "I'm Not the Next Greg LeMond. I'm the First Lance Armstrong."

Today's Question
How do you make primitive snowshoes? answer

What should you do if you get lost driving in a snow storm? answer

Today's Question
What is the greenest ski and snowboard on the market? answer

Can I really damage a coral reef with sunscreen while snorkeling? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside magazine, July 1994

Page:

"I'm Not the Next Greg LeMond. I'm the First Lance Armstrong."
The growing pains of a man-child and world champion

By Todd Balf

It's a Monday afternoon, and Lance Armstrong is waiting in line at Ruta Maya, a pastel-washed corner café in Austin's warehouse district. His eyes are laser-locked on the pastry case. "Think I'll get a little snack to tide me over until dinner," he says nonchalantly, like a regular guy and not your usual fat-content-calculating professional bike racer. "You see those?" He fairly wells up as he surveys a buttery pile of scones. "I used to eat those every morning." Then he fixes on a new item—oily, chocolaty, sugar-glazed, moist, and warm, the size of a softball. "Um, excuse me, what's that?" The waiter identifies a cappuccino muffin. Uncharacteristically, Armstrong wavers. A year ago he wouldn't have thought twice. But now, a week away from the Tour of Mexico, the first major race of the season, he agonizes.

The merits of immediate gratification are obvious. Then again, the stakes have escalated. In Mexico Armstrong will don the rainbow-striped jersey as the sport's reigning world champion. A jersey he'll then wear all year. A jersey that he knows is a target for every other rider in the peloton. Maybe he hears the disembodied voice of Eddy Merckx, the legendary five-time Tour de France champion who told him not two weeks earlier that he was within reach of a Tour de France victory...if he shed a few pounds. So Armstrong says no. No pastry. No muffin. No nothing. Just a double latte with a slag-heap of sugar. Hey, a guy's gotta live.

It isn't easy being a young man from Plano, Texas, on the cusp of a sprawlingly great adult career. A year ago, as a 21-year-old rookie, Armstrong became one of the youngest stage winners in the history of the Tour de France. He also snagged cycling's largest purse, a gaudy $1 million, for sweeping a new three-race series called the Thrift Drug Triple Crown, which includes the prestigious CoreStates U.S. Pro National Championships in Philadelphia. He capped off the highlight package last August with a victory in the sport's most important one-day race, the World Championships, beating the likes of Miguel Indurain, Spain's three-time defending Tour de France champion. And he did it all with unabashed Texas style. Motorola teammate Phil Anderson, who was similarly hell-bent when he started competing professionally in Europe in 1980, says the first time he knew Armstrong was special was at the Trophee Laigueglia, the 110-mile race on the Italian Riviera, where he broke away to claim the first big European event of the 1993 season. "He was riding with all these stars up front, guys he should've been intimidated by," says Anderson. "But he didn't care who the hell they were. He just wanted to kick their asses."

By season's end, Armstrong's bullish results had helped Motorola earn a top-five world ranking, a first for a U.S. team. His performance in the Tour de France was perhaps the single most important factor in keeping his team—the only American road-cycling squad that participates in the Tour—from dissolving. In the spring Motorola had announced that it would terminate its annual $3 million sponsorship at the end of the 1993 season, but days after Armstrong got his stage win and had his All-American mug plastered across newspapers worldwide, the electronics giant reversed its decision and hitched on for another year.

"My life has changed forever," the ascendant Armstrong proclaimed, with almost Churchillian gravity, at a press conference following the Worlds. But back home things hadn't changed much at all. There was no feature spread in Sports Illustrated, as he'd imagined. Nothing on ESPN's "SportsCenter." The only people who seemed to grasp the significance of what Armstrong had done were the European journalists, 15 of whom descended on Austin the following December in the hope of seeing a real-life cowpoke with a lariat and maybe a herd of Black Angus. Staffers from the French sports daily L'Equipe, digging for a "Le Cowboy" cover line, even went to the trouble of purchasing a Dallas Cowboys helmet, jersey, pants, and shoulder pads. Armstrong, however, wasn't feeling playful. "The helmet was, like, a really cheesy one, like somebody had hand-painted it," he says. "And they expected me to dress up in it to take pictures. No way."

Surprisingly, Armstrong's big year was met in the stateside cycling world not with abundant praise, but with a kind of dweebish referendum on whether he was a worthy role model. His outspokenness and sound-bite savvy annoyed many older riders. ("I'm not the next Greg LeMond—I'm the first Lance Armstrong," he was heard to say more than once in his sturdy drawl.) His showy victory celebrations, some thought, crossed the line from triumphant joy to trashy gloating. In other sports Armstrong would have been hailed for such self-assuredness and swagger, but in the understated ranks of cycling, he noted, his popular image veered toward "an arrogant little punk who doesn't appreciate the things that have happened to him." He even caught grief from safety activists, who chastised him for riding in the Worlds without a helmet. Among the ticked-off was nine-year-old Bobby Lea of Queen Anne's, Maryland, who called for Armstrong's censure in a letter published in the racing journal VeloNews: "Maybe Motorola should rethink its sponsorship policy and only sponsor riders who are truly committed to wearing their helmets," the grade-schooler fumed. "How am I supposed to tell my friends to wear their helmets when the world champion does not?"

Armstrong felt overwhelmed. One day he was a free-spirited prospect; the next he was the second coming of LeMond, a cycling savior and potential helmet-wearing, politically correct champion for English-speaking cycling fandom. At 21 he'd had a career year, and now, on the verge of a new season, he needed to work toward an encore. But what would suffice? "It's all happened so fast," says Armstrong. "People have to realize I'm not a 30-year-old ambassador for the sport, but a 22-year-old trying to take it all in and be cool about it."

Page:

Todd Balf, a dyed-in-the-wool New Englander, is a frequent contributor to Outside.

•	Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift!

•	Give the gift of Outside Magazine!

•	Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more.