Lance Armstrong - The growing pains of a world champion

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Outside magazine, July 1994

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

By 16, Armstrong was one of the country's top short-course triathletes and a budding superstar. By 17, a senior in high school, he was done. The U.S. Cycling Federation had gotten word that a teenage racer was keeping pace on the bike with the biggest names in triathlon, and Armstrong received an unexpected invitation to train with the Junior National Cycling Team. The local school board said it would bar Armstrong from graduating if he took a six-week leave in the second semester of his senior year, so with his mother's blessing he withdrew from Plano East.

It was the right move. Armstrong made the 1990 junior Worlds squad, competed in Moscow, and graduated later that spring from another school in Dallas. After his impressive performance, the Russian coach called Armstrong the best young American racer he'd seen in years. Just months later, Armstrong signed a contract with the Subaru-Montgomery professional/amateur racing team. And by the summer of 1992 the richer, more talented Motorola squad offered him a spot. As his mother would say, Lance had turned negatives into positives.

So when Armstrong was facing the biggest race of his young professional career—last year's Worlds, held in Oslo, Norway—he gave Mom a call in Plano. She requested some time away from her management job at a telecommunications company, crossed the Atlantic, and took up residence with the Motorola camp. She wasn't there to sightsee. The blond beauty became her son's...well, his mother, washing his clothes, joining him at team dinners, and reading in the dark while he napped. They were back together again, and if the team was a little mystified by the arrangement, nobody said a word.

Lance Armstrong's bungalow apartment near the University of Texas is pleasantly overrun with merging piles of clean and dirty cycling apparel, coming and going training partners, and the growling music of Smashing Pumpkins. The Thrift Drug Triple Crown trophy serves as a repository for pens and spare bike parts. With only a few days until the start of the season, Armstrong moves with a sense of urgency, fast-forwarding through the message machine. He's heard from his mother, a few pals from Austin, and Hennie. Hennie Kuiper, who shares the Motorola coaching responsibilities with Jim Ochowicz from his home in the Netherlands, always calls but really never has much to say. Armstrong shakes his head. If it isn't Kuiper, then it's Ochowicz, keeping tabs, offering steady doses of counsel, reinforcement, mock exasperation, and occasional reprobation. You get the feeling that, from Motorola's perspective, Armstrong is like a gleaming Jaguar that must be parked on the street every night. Someone's got to keep an eye on it.

Sonni, sitting at the kitchen table, fishes a faxed questionnaire from a big mound of paper. "We gotta do this, Lance," she says, explaining that it's for a service that provides personal videos to be used in lieu of business cards. "Not now," he stalls. "I have to think about it." Sonni reads anyway, and Armstrong dutifully responds.

"Favorite book?"

"Howard Stern's autobiography."

"Most expensive purchase?"

"The car."

"Best day in cycling?"

"Go on."

"Worst day in cycling?"

"Easy."

Actually there were two worst days, one at the 1992 Summer Olympics and the other coming a week later, in Armstrong's professional debut. He'd come unglued in the 115-mile road race in Barcelona, an event in which, to much media fanfare, he was picked to win the gold but finished a disappointing 14th. The San Sebastian race, seven days later in northern Spain, was worse. With the professional field hardened from the recently concluded Tour de France, Armstrong fell behind early. As he limped along in a pouring rain—eventually finishing 111th out of 111—the fans booed and hissed, aggrieved by such ineptitude. Armstrong, never having been so disgraced, headed for the airport, figuring he'd return to Texas and think about a new line of work. "I wanted to come home and never race again," he says. From the Madrid airport he called his mother. "She said, 'You'll do better next time,'" says Armstrong. "I said, 'No, Mom, you don't understand. I came in last place!'" Then he called his national team coach, Chris Carmichael.

Ultimately, Carmichael steadied him. He told Armstrong he'd look back on the race as the most important day he'd ever had in cycling. He'd finished when any other rider would probably have quit. He had proved something, especially to his new Motorola team. Of course, Carmichael was winging it. But he convinced the cyclist to stay on the Continent, and a week later Armstrong won a stage in Spain's Tour of Galicia. Two weeks after that, he finished an astounding second in a World Cup race, the Championship of Zurich. Armstrong had achieved better results in two weeks than most of his teammates had all season.

He flashed hot and cold in early 1993 but began to hit his stride in America's biggest stage race, the 11-day Tour DuPont, in May. He claimed a stage, contended with Mexican veteran Raúl Alcalá throughout, and finished second overall. Armstrong stayed in the United States and won three consecutive races, the Thrift Drug Classic in Pittsburgh, the five-day Kmart West Virginia Classic, and the CoreStates.

In that race, which clinched his $1 million Triple Crown bonus, Armstrong attacked on the notoriously steep Manayunk Wall. He dropped the competition, won by the biggest margin in the race's history, and posed for the cameras afterward, one arm holding the oversize check high, the other around the mother whom some mistook for a girlfriend. "We were all there," says former U.S. Pro National Champion Davis Phinney, who has since retired from the Coors Light team. "All the strong riders, all flat-out, going straight up the Wall. We all knew what was going on, but nobody could cover his breakaway. You're always tempted to say, 'I could do that if I wanted.' But the fact is, I really couldn't. For me it was one of those shining moments of illumination—I'd seen the future, and I wasn't a part of it."

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