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Outside Magazine June 2003

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Force Majeure (Cont.)


	Armstrong on a road ride in Spain, March 2003 (Anton Corbijn)

RIDING A BIKE IS EASY, but because the machine is so efficient, you have to go long and hard and often to reach your potential. So you sit on a wedge of leather and push the pedals for half a day at a time, constantly notching the chain up or down to calibrate that burning in your thighs, knowing that if you don't taste the pain now, it will be incapacitating during a race. It's normal for your hands, feet, and crotch to fall asleep. Cycling numbs the mind, too, and everything is reduced to a visceral level. You become a zombie.

On the subject of suffering and endurance, Armstrong's authority is absolute. He was born in 1971 to Linda Mooneyham, who was just 17 when she had him, and his father split before he was two. He grew up with a stepdad he didn't like and watched his mother struggle to make rent; Linda divorced Terry Armstrong when Lance was 14. His mother was never satisfied with the state of things, and strived to upgrade their lives. "When I used to baby-sit," she told me, "I'd be in this nice home, and I'd say, 'One of these days I'm going to have that.' I wanted something more. I had every excuse to fail, but I was obsessed."

She led by example, working her way up from secretary to global account manager at the wireless telephone giant Ericsson. Her son assimilated her drive. In his autobiography, he says that "everybody told us we wouldn't amount to anything." The message was ground into him at Plano East High School in the north Dallas suburbs, where he didn't fit the middle-class mold. He wasn't good at football, couldn't afford Polo shirts, and didn't belong to a country club. Life sucked.

So he channeled his rising anger into swimming and cycling, and soon began winning junior triathlons. He was particularly fast on the

He celebrates October 2 as his birthday. "I've never been scared for my life like that since," he says. "When I go in for blood work, I see the blood coming out, and I wonder if it's cancerous blood or healthy blood."

bike and discovered that his endurance level was higher than that of most of the adults he raced against. His mounting victories got him noticed by the U.S. Cycling Federation, and in 1990 he was tapped to join the national team. Even there he found reason to take umbrage: Chris Carmichael, a former Olympian who was the coach at the time, placed Lance on the second-tier squad—a minor distinction, really, but not to a young man determined to be somebody.

The best way to cope, he decided, was to torture himself on the bike. He quickly made a reputation for himself as "that brash Texan" by hammering his way to 11th in the amateur World Championships in 1990. (Carmichael told him that if he had paid attention to tactics, he'd have been on the podium.) Armstrong turned pro a year later and continued ticking off the wins—and his competitors—by snatching the pro World Championships in 1993, the Clasica San Sebastian in 1995, and two Tours du Pont (in '95 and '96). He raced in the Tour de France four times before developing cancer, winning a stage in both 1993 and 1995 but finishing the mother of all bike races only once.

The pace, and his stubbornness, is probably why he ignored the symptoms of choriocarcinoma for six months before he was diagnosed. The story is richly told in It's Not About the Bike: The cancer had spread rampantly, and after the neurosurgeons removed two lesions from his brain, the oncologists had to tackle a "snowstorm" of tumors in his lungs. He refused to rule out cycling again, so they used a chemotherapy treatment that wouldn't scorch his lungs. He received such intensive doses of the platinum-based drug cisplatin that, by the fourth round, it began to dissolve his musculature and burn his skin from the inside out.

Now cancer-free, he's still spooked by the ordeal, almost seven years later. He celebrates October 2 as his birthday and sees things all the time that remind him. "I've never been scared for my life like that since," he wrote to me in an e-mail. "When I go in for blood work, I see the blood coming out, and I wonder if it's cancerous blood or healthy blood. It's a bizarre and scary experience."

Before cancer, Armstrong was a talented cyclist with enormous natural ability, but he didn't eat like he should have or train like he could have. He was living large in Austin, with girlfriends, a million-dollar home, and a Porsche.

"The odd thing is that Lance was, by comparison [with his current incarnation], a slacker," Washington Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins told me. Having worked with him closely, ghostwriting his autobiography and Every Second Counts (his next book, due out this fall), Jenkins explained that, above all, cancer made him serious. "A lot of people have cancer and come away with a gauzy outlook, a determination to work less hard, enjoy their family more," she says. "He's peculiar in this regard. He came out of it ready to work hard. He's been given the capacity to be the best cyclist in the world, and he feels obligated to make the most of that."

Bart Knaggs, 36, a partner at Capital Sports & Entertainment, the firm that manages Armstrong, thinks it was a leaner temperament that transformed his best friend. "He had to beat cancer with his brain," says Knaggs in his singsongy twang. "He was instrumental in the way he was treated. That's when he started to trust his own noggin. He went, 'Wow, holy shit! Maybe I am smart.' He moved from a boxer's mentality to a marathoner's mentality."

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