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Outside Magazine June 2003

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Force Majeure (Cont.)

IF IT'S NOT THE DRUG SNOOPS, then it's a journalist asking Lance whether he'll participate in the Tour—given Franco-American political tensions—or some crestfallen fan postulating on the Web about what went down with Kristin. In his eyes, there's always somebody stirring up trouble. His biggest threat on the roads of France this July will be 1997 Tour champ Jan Ullrich, the German who's back from sitting out the 2002 race after testing positive for Ecstasy—a bizarre drug suspension even for cycling. None of it should hamper Armstrong; the more competition, the better. He still likes to think of himself as the underdog from Plano. That's where he thrives: with the odds stacked against him.

"The longer you try to continue a streak, it's mathematically and historically less and less likely," Armstrong says. "I don't think it's any freakish accident that nobody's won more than five. The numbers, the variables, the bad luck—you would think they would start to catch up to you."

The biggest variable in his life right now is his marital status. Though Lance gives no public indication of tears in the exquisitely controlled scrim of his personal life, his separation from Kristin in February has been hard to handle—for both of them. "It wasn't a big ugly slam, how we got to where we are," she told me in April, dispelling reports that they'd had a row. "We had a serious conversation. You've got a couple that's been together four and a half years, and we've had six homes, three languages, three countries, one cancer comeback, three children, four Tour de France wins, and one rise to celebrity. You're not supposed to cram such a huge amount of events into such a small period of time."

Where they are, it seems, is on the verge of patching things up. In late March, after Lance had already decamped to train in Spain, they met in Nice. "We spent time alone," she said. "We really haven't had that. When we were together, it was great." At press time, the plan was for her, the kids, the nanny, and the pets to head to Girona and stay through the Tour. "We're going to take the month of August and play," she said. "Spend some time alone. Have some fun. I think it's going to be OK."

But none of this has come to pass the last time I see him. It's a pre-war evening in January, day three of five at a television commercial shoot for Subaru in Northern California. Director Zack Snyder has had Armstrong doing laps all afternoon on a road overlooking the Pacific, on Marin County's Mount Tamalpais.

As dusk sets in, Snyder needs to set up one last shot, a little dialogue in front of a Subaru Forester in the sepia light. A helicopter sits poised nearby to zip Armstrong back to San Francisco. Per his contract, a full day is exactly six hours, and knowing that the sun would set at 5:11 p.m., he arrived right around 11. Now it's 5:13 and Stapleton is looking at his Rolex.

Snyder asks Lance to repeat the Subaru tag line—"Driven by what's inside"—and look happier.

"Happier. OK." He does it again.

"Yeah, that's it. Smile," Snyder says.

Lance does a dozen happier takes—bam, bam, bam—and then Snyder calls it a wrap. Lance and Stapleton bolt for the chopper and I follow. Within a minute we're up, fast-forwarding over the hills, the Marin Headlands, the bay. We head toward the Golden Gate Bridge.

"Oh, you wouldn't want to go under it, now would you?" Lance goads the pilot.

We dive. "Uh, guys, we're going under," Lance reports as we tuck under the span. "That's just wrong. Hey, did you hear that Coit Tower is tipping over? You know what they call that? Coitus interruptus."

We rotor down over Pier 23, where a camera crew is scurrying around a shiny new SUV for a different car commercial.

"Oh, they're going to hate me for this," says the pilot, swooping onto the deck and killing their audio in the last moments of light. "Too bad."

"Looks like they're shooting a Lincoln commercial," Stapleton says.

But Armstrong can't hear him. The moment we touch down, he's out the side hatch and bounding over to the black Mercedes Series 5 sedan that's here for him. As the driver comes around to open his door, he reaches out and shakes the man's hand, doing his best impression of a regular guy, and says, "Hey, I'm Lance."

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