It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (7 page)

pain, but about inflicting it, too, and in my attacking nature they saw the beginnings of something predatory. “You ever hear about how when you stab somebody, it’s really personal?”

Chris said once. “Well, a bike race is that kind of personal. Don’t kid yourself. It’s a knife fight.”

Och and Chris felt that if I ever gained control of my temperament, I’d be a rider to reckon with. In the meantime they handled me very carefully, intuiting that if they started yelling at me, I

would most likely turn off, or rebel. They decided the lessons should sink in slowly.

There are some things you learn better through experience, and Och and Chris let me figure it out on my own. At first, I never evaluated my races. I’d think, “I was the strongest rider out

there; those guys couldn’t keep up with me.” But when I lost several races, I was forced to think again, and one day it finally occurred to me: “Wait a minute. If I’m the strongest guy, why didn’t

I win?”

Slowly, steadily, Och and Chris passed along their knowledge of the character of various courses, and the way a race evolves tactically. “There are moments when you can use your

energy to your benefit, and there are moments when you use it to no avail. That’s a waste,” Och said.

I began to listen to the other riders, and let them rein me in. I roomed with two veterans, Sean Yates and Steve Bauer, who had a lot of influence over me. I fed off them, picked up a lot of

knowledge just sitting around the dinner table. They helped to keep my feet on the ground. I was Mr. Energy, bouncing off the walls, saying things like, “Let’s go out there and kick butt!”

They would roll their eyes.

Och not only tamed me; more important, he educated me. I was uncomfortable living in Europe seven months out the year; I missed my Shiner Bock beer and Mexican food, I missed the hot,

dry Texas fields, and I missed my apartment in Austin, where I had a longhorn skull over the fireplace mantel covered in red, white, and blue leather, with a Lone Star on his forehead. I

whined about the cars, the hotels, the food. “Why are we staying at this dump?” I’d say. I was learning a cycling tradition: the discomfort of the sport extends to the accommodations. Some of

the hotels we stayed in made Motel 6 look pretty nice–there were crumbs on the bare floors and hairs in the bed-sheets. To me, the meat was mysterious, the pasta was soggy, and the coffee

tasted like brown water. But eventually I became acclimated, and thanks to my teammates, my discomfort got to be funny. We’d pull up in front of our next hotel, and they’d just wait for me

to start complaining.

When I look back at the raw young rider and person I was, I feel impatience with him, but I also feel some sympathy. Underneath the tough talk and the combativeness and the bitching, I was

afraid. I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of the train schedules and the airports and the roads. I was afraid of the phones, because I didn’t know how to dial them. I was afraid of the

menus, because I couldn’t read them.

Once, at a dinner for some Japanese business executives hosted by Och, I particularly distinguished myself. Och asked that each of the riders introduce himself, stating his name and

country. I stood up. “Hello, I’m Lance from Texas,” I boomed. The whole party broke up. They were laughing at me again.

But inevitably, living in Europe began to polish me. I rented an apartment in Lake Como, Italy, and was charmed by that misty, dusty town tucked in the Italian Alps. Och was a wine lover,

and I benefited from his taste, learning to recognize fine food and fine wine. I discovered I had a knack for languages. I was beginning to speak bits of Spanish, Italian, and French, and I could

even limp around in Dutch if I had to. I window-shopped through Milan, where I learned what a really handsome suit looked like. One afternoon I walked into the Duomo, and in that instant all

of my ideas about art changed forever. I was overwhelmed by the color and proportion of it, by the gray stillness in the archways, the warm parchment glow of the candles and the soaring

stained glass, the eloquence of the sculptures.

As the summer approached, I was growing up. On the bike, things began to come together and my riding steadied. “It’s all happening,” Och said. And it was. An American race sponsor, Thrift

Drugs, put up a $1 million bonus for anyone who could win the Triple Crown of Cycling, a sweep of three prestigious races in the U.S. I fixated on it. Each race was different: to get the

bonus you’d have to win a tough one-day race in Pittsburgh, then a six-day stage race in West Virginia, and finally the U.S. Pro Championships, which was a one-day road race covering 156

miles through Philadelphia. It was a long shot, the promoters knew. Only a complete rider could win it: you’d have to be a sprinter, a climber, and a stage racer rolled into one, and most

important, you’d have to be thoroughly consistent–something I hadn’t yet been.

All the riders talked about winning the bonus, and in the next breath we’d talk about how impossible it was. But one night when I was on the phone with my mother she asked me, “What

are the odds of winning that thing?”

I said, “Good.”

By June I had won the first two legs, and the press was going crazy and the promoters were reeling. All that remained was the U.S. Pro Championships in Philly–but I would have 119 other

cyclists trying to stop me. The anticipation was huge; an estimated half a million people would line the route.

The day before the race I called my mother and asked her to fly up to Philadelphia. On such short notice, she’d have to pay almost $1,000 round-trip, but she decided it was like buying a

lottery ticket–if she didn’t come, and I won, she’d always regret not being there.

I was resolved to ride a smart race, no irrational headfirst charges. Think the race through, I told myself.

For most of the day, that’s what I did. Then, with about 20 miles left, I went. I attacked on the most notoriously steep part of the course–Manayunk–and as I did, I was almost in a rage. I don’t

know what happened–all I know is that I leaped out of the seat and hammered down on the pedals, and as I did so I screamed for five full seconds. I opened up a huge gap on the field.

By the second-to-last lap, I had enough of a lead to blow my mother a kiss. I crossed the finish line with the biggest winning margin in race history. I dismounted in a swarm of reporters, but I

broke away from them and went straight to my mom, and we put our faces in each other’s shoulder and cried.

That was the start of a dreamlike summer season. Next, I won a surprise victory in a stage of the Tour de France with another late charge: at the end of a 114-mile ride from Chalons-sur-Marne

to Verdun, I nearly crashed into the race barriers as I sprinted away from the pack over the last 50 yards to the finish. A Tour stage was considered an extremely valuable victory in its own

right, and at 21,1 was the youngest man ever to win one.

But to show you just how experienced you have to be to compete in the Tour, I had to pull out of the race a couple of days later, incapable of continuing. I abandoned after the 12th stage, in

97th place and shivering. The Alps got me; they were “too long and too cold,” I told reporters afterward. I fell so far behind that when I got to the finish line, the team car had already left for

the hotel. I had to walk back to our rooms, pushing my bike up a gravel trail. “As if the stage wasn’t enough, we have to climb this thing,” I told the press. I wasn’t physically mature enough

yet to ride the arduous mountain stages.

I still struggled with impatience at times. I would ride smart for a while, and then backslide. I just couldn’t seem to get it through my head that in order to win I had to ride more slowly at

first. It took some time to reconcile myself to the notion that being patient was different from being weak, and that racing strategically didn’t mean giving less than all I had.

With only a week to go before the World Championships, I made a typical blunder in the championship of Zurich and used myself up before the critical part of the race. Again, I didn’t

even finish in the Top 20. Och could have lost his temper with me; instead he stayed over in Zurich for the next two days and went riding with me. He was certain I could win at the Worlds

in Oslo–but only if I rode intelligently. As we trained together he chatted to me about self-control.

“The only thing you have to do is wait,” he said. “Just wait. Two or three laps is soon enough. Anything earlier and you’ll waste your chance to win. But after that, you can attack as many

times as you want.”

There were no ordinary cyclists in the World Championships. I would be facing big riders, at their peak, and the favorite was Miguel Indurain, who had just come off of his third victory in

the Tour de France. If I wanted to win I’d have to overcome some long historical odds; no

21-year-old had ever won a world title in cycling.

In the last few days leading up to the race, I called my mother again, and asked her to come over and stay with me. I didn’t want to go through it alone, and she had always been a source of

confidence for me. Also, I wanted her to see me race in that company. She took some vacation time from Ericsson and flew over to join me, and stayed with me in my hotel room.

She took care of me, the way she used to. She did my laundry in the sink, saw that I had what I wanted to eat, answered the phone, and made sure I got my rest. I didn’t have to talk cycling

with her, or explain how I felt–she just understood. The closer we got to that day, the quieter I grew. I shut down, planning the race in my mind. She just read by a small lamp while I stared at

the ceiling or napped.

Finally race day arrived–but when I awoke, it was raining. I opened my eyes and saw drops on the windowpanes. The hated, dreaded rain, the source of so much anguish and embarrassment in

San Sebastian.

It rained torrentially, all day long. But there was one person who suffered in the rain more than I did that day: my mother. She sat in a grandstand in the rain for seven hours, and never once got

up. There was a big screen mounted in front of the grandstand so the crowd could watch us out on the 18.4-kilometer course, and she sat there, drenched, watching riders crash all over the

course.

When it rains in Europe the roads become covered with a slick sort of residue, made of dust and petrol. Guys were thrown off their bikes right and lef1″, their wheels sliding out from under

them. I crashed, too, twice. But each time I recovered quickly, got back on the bike, and rejoined the race, still in contention.

Through it all, I waited, and waited. I held back, just as Och had told me to. With 14 laps to go, I was in the lead group–and right there was Indurain, the bravura rider from Spain. Finally, on

the second-to-last climb, I attacked. I charged up the hill and reached the peak with my wheel in front of the pack. I hurtled down the descent, and then soared right into another climb, a steep

ascent called the Ekeberg, with the other riders right on my back. I said to myself, “I’ve got to go right now, with everything I’ve ever gone with,” and I rose from the seat and attacked again,

and this time I opened up a gap.

On the other side of the Ekeberg was another long, dangerous descent, this one of four kilometers, and in the rain anything could happen; the wheels could disappear out from under

you as the entire road became a slick. But I took the turns hard and tight, and at the bottom, I glanced over my shoulder to see who was still with me.

No one.

I panicked. You made the same old mistake, I thought, desperately, you went too early. I must

have forgotten what lap it was. Surely there was still a lap to go, because a lead like this was too good to be true.

I glanced down and checked my computer. It was the last lap.

I was going to win.

Over the last 700 meters, I started celebrating. I pumped my fists and my arms in the air, I blew kisses, and I bowed to the crowd. As I crossed the finish line, I practically high-kicked like a

Rockette. Finally, I braked and dismounted, and in the crowds of people, the first thing I did was look for my mother. I found her, and we stood there in the rain, hugging. I said, “We did it!

We did it.” We both began to cry.

At some point in all of the post-race confusion and celebration and ceremony, a royal escort arrived to inform me that King Harald of Norway wanted to greet me. I nodded and said, “Come

on, Mom. Let’s go meet the king.”

She said, “Well, okay.”

We began to move through the security checkpoints. Finally, we approached a door, behind which the king was waiting to give me a private audience. A security guard stopped us. “She’ll

have to stop here,” the royal escort told us. “The king will greet you alone.”

“I don’t check my mother at the door,” I said.

I grabbed her arm and turned around to leave. “Come on, let’s go,” I said. I had no intention of going anywhere without her.

The escort relented. “All right. Please, come with me.” And we met the king, who was a very nice man. Our audience was very short, and polite, and then we went back to celebrating.

It seemed like the end of something for my mother and me, a finish line. The tough part of the fight was over; there would be no more naysayers telling us we wouldn’t amount to anything, no

more concerns about bills or scrabbling for equipment and plane tickets. Maybe it was the end of the long, hard climb of childhood.

ALTHOUGH I WAS A WORLD CHAMPION, I STILL HAD plenty of learning to do, and the next three years were a process of testing and refinement. I had other successes, but life from

now on would be a matter of incremental improvements, of seeking the tiniest margin that might separate me from the other elite riders.

There was a science to winning. The spectator rarely sees the technical side of cycling, but behind the gorgeous rainbow blur of the peloton is the more boring reality that road racing is a