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Outside Magazine, July 2005

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Tour de France
Street Fighting Man (cont.)

LIKE A BROADWAY MUSICAL or Catholic mass, every Tour features its preordained dramatic climaxes, moments scripted months before by the unseen hand of the Tour's course designers. The 2004 Tour's moment came at Stage 16, the 9.6-mile uphill time trial at l'Alpe d'Huez. Armstrong had long targeted the stage, a target that took on added value now that the stakes were clear: It would be his third mountain-stage win in a row, and his chance to distance himself from Basso, the only man who still had a reasonable chance of beating him. But as Armstrong gazed up from the bottom of the mountain, it became clear that Basso wouldn't be today's only opponent.

A mountain of people—that's what it looked like along the Alpe d'Huez route. As if the rock and turf had been scooped out and replaced, starting from the bottom, by geologic layers of humanity. The stout-calved Germans, the lanky Dutch, the gimlet-eyed French, the big-bellied Luxembourgers, the tight-shorts-wearing Danes, all combined to form a hot, heaving pile of sun-broiled, stippled flesh, the citizenry of Europe having set aside their cultural and geopolitical differences to commune in the service of a shared belief, the core of which was painted on the black pavement in large, carefully edged white letters: FUCK LANCE.

Also, LANCE SUCKS, EPO LANCE, GO HOME LANCE, and ARMSTRONG PIG, along with a few less gentle sentiments that sought to express the feelings of the million people who had come here to see the stage.

At this moment, Armstrong had larger concerns, namely the death threat he'd received the night before. Armstrong had learned of it from Bill Stapleton, his agent and lawyer at Capital Sports & Entertainment, who'd been told by Tour organizers, who'd notified French authorities. Death threats were nothing new—Armstrong had received one last year, too, in Toulouse. The team had dealt with it the usual way, a slight variation on the Batman method: his bodyguards, linked-arm rings of gendarmes, a speedy helicopter evacuation from the finish. But today was different. This was a time trial, each rider alone against the clock. Everyone on the mountain knew to the minute when Armstrong would depart. Every troll, if they so desired, could get close enough to touch.

So far this year, Armstrong had been lucky. Even so, teammates reminded him to stay in a group. "Never, ever be alone," they told him. "If anybody's going to do anything, it will be then."

Naturally, the death threat was kept secret, or as secret as possible, which wasn't very. Truth was, this was completely expected. "Lance spends a lot of time thinking about security, but the bottom line is that there isn't much that he can do when he's on the bike," said Chris Brewer. Brewer, a testicular-cancer survivor who runs Armstrong's Web site, worked 18 years in the Air Force's Opposition Forces division. His specialty was infiltration, finding holes in secure zones. "If someone wants to get him bad enough, there are many ways they could get him. And Lance knows that."

At the start, in the village of Bourg d'Oisans, Armstrong warmed up on the stationary rollers, looking relaxed, chatting with the gendarmes. His mood tightened when he learned Sheryl Crow might have to give up her seat in the follow car for a security agent. But then, another plan: There would be two extra motorcycles, with more security agents aboard, and another next to Bruyneel in the car. "They were sharpshooters," Armstrong said later. "Badasses."

"We were terrified," Bruyneel said.

On the mountain ahead, the mass of humanity shifted restlessly. Many had been waiting for days, wedging campers and tents along the steep roadside; others opted for the less elegant, sleeping-bag-on-the-pavement approach. All of them had spent a long, hot morning defending their space from the arriving hordes as the mountain swelled and grew. The sun slammed down, alcohol flowed, cigarettes flared. When the race began, the crowd contented itself by lazily torturing Armstrong's teammates, and, by early appearances, they were in rare form. Rubiera reached the top looking as if he might break into tears. CSC's Voigt received special treatment for his role in helping Armstrong chase down Ullrich the previous day (JUDAS, many of the signs read). His later pleas that he was helping his team captain, Basso, were dismissed as immaterial: Whatever his motive, he was helping Armstrong, and so he was guilty.

They didn't all hate Armstrong, of course. In fact, many European fans admired the American; they commonly greeted his passing with polite, if unenthusiastic, applause. Armstrong had made efforts to improve his image, speaking more French and expressing respect for the tradition of the race. But no amount of diplomacy could change the brute fact that he, an outsider, had come to dominate Europe's biggest race at a time when American influence was seen as something less than a good thing. It would be easy to chalk this up to an extension of anti-Bush, anti-American sentiment, but, in fact, the war in Iraq was almost never mentioned. Nor did the relationship seem affected by the latest doping allegations in the pages of L.A. Confidentiel: Les Secrets de Lance Armstrong, a 375-page book cowritten by Irish reporter and longtime Armstrong nemesis David Walsh and French cycling journalist Pierre Ballester.

No, the truth was that Armstrong offended because he would not give European fans what they desired from their sports heroes: pain, vulnerability, suffering, humanity. His recovery from cancer, the inspirational touchstone for many Americans, was regarded by Europeans with mild interest: a feat of medicine and discipline, certainly, but that was, what, eight years ago? Wasn't the treatment fairly brief, a matter of months? It was impressive, yes, but hadn't plenty of other cyclists overcome extraordinarily difficult circumstances? What they wanted was a man wrestling fate, not obliterating it.

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