It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (8 page)

carefully calibrated thing, and often a race is won by a mere fraction of acceleration that was

generated in a performance lab or a wind tunnel or a velodrome long before the race ever started. Cyclists are computer slaves; we hover over precise calculations of cadence, efficiency,

force, and wattage. I was constantly sitting on a stationary bike with electrodes all over my body, looking for different positions on the bike that might gain mere seconds, or a piece of

equipment that might be a little bit more aerodynamic.

Just a few weeks after winning the Worlds, I went into a performance lab at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs with Chris Carmichael. Despite my big year I still had

some critical weaknesses, and I spent several days in the lab, plastered with electrodes while doctors jabbed me with pins for blood tests. The idea was to determine my various thresholds

and breaking points, and thus to figure out how I could increase my efficiency on the bike. They looked at my heart rate, my VO

2 max, and in one day alone, they pricked my thumb 15 times to check my blood.

We wanted to determine what my maximum effort was, and how long I could sustain it. We set out to learn my optimum cadence: what was my most efficient pedal speed, and where were the

weaknesses in my pedaling technique, the dead spots where I was wasting energy? My stroke was a symmetrical sledgehammer, straight up and down, and I was expending too much work

without getting enough speed from it. We went into a velodrome to look at my position on the bike and determine where I was losing power. The idea in cycling is to generate the most speed

with the least amount of work; watts indicate the amount of work you are doing as you pedal. We shifted me lower on the bike, and there was an immediate improvement.

At about the same time, I met the legendary Belgian rider Eddy Merckx, five-time winner of the Tour de France, and one of the most ferociously attacking riders who’s ever lived. I had heard all

the stories about Merckx, what a brave, hard-charging rider he was, and I thought that was the kind of rider I wanted to be. I didn’t just want to win, I wanted to win a certain way. We

became friends. Eddy told me that I could win a Tour de France someday–but that I needed to lose weight. I was built like a linebacker, with a thick neck and slabs of muscle in my chest,

remnants of my career as a swimmer and triath-lete. Eddy explained that it was hard to haul all of that weight up and down mountains over three weeks. I was still racing partly on raw power;

to win a Tour de France, I would have to find a way to lose weight without losing strength. So I quit eating pastry, and laid off Tex-Mex, and understood that I would have to find a new kind of

strength, that inner strength called self-discipline.

By 1995, I still had not completed an entire Tour de France, only portions. My coaches didn’t think I was ready, and they were right; I had neither the body nor the mental toughness yet to

endure the hardship. A young rider has to be carefully walked through the process and developed over years until he is ready to finish the race, and finish it healthy. I was steadily

improving: in ‘94 I was second in Liege-Bastogne-Liege, second in San Sebastian, and second in the Tour Du Pont, and in the first part of ‘95 I won San Sebastian and won the Tour Du Pont.

But now Och felt I needed to move to another level, I needed to finish the Tour de France, not just start it. It was time for me to learn exactly what it took to win the biggest stage race in the

world.

My reputation was as a single-day racer: show me the start line and I would win on adrenaline and anger, chopping off my competitors one by one. I could push myself to a threshold of pain

no one else was willing to match, and I would bite somebody’s head off to win a race.

But the Tour was another thing entirely. If you raced that way in the Tour, you would have to drop out after two days. It required a longer view. The Tour was a matter of mustering the right

resources at the right times, of patiently feeding out your strength at the necessary level, with no wasted motion or energy. It was a matter of continuing to ride and ride, no matter how

uninspired you felt, when there was no rush of adrenaline left to push you.

If there is a defining characteristic of a man as opposed to a boy, maybe it’s patience. In 1995,1 finally gained an understanding of the demanding nature of the Tour and all of its extraordinary

tests and dangers. I finished it, and I finished strong, winning a stage in the closing days. But the knowledge came at too high a price, and I would just as soon not have learned it the way I

did.

Late in the race, our Motorola teammate, Fabio Casartelli, the 1992 Olympic champion, was killed on a high-speed descent. On a descent, you ride single file, and if one rider goes down, it

can cause a terrible chain reaction. Fabio didn’t crash alone; 20 riders went down with him. But he hit a curb with the back of his head and fractured his neck and skull.

I went by too fast to see much. A lot of riders were down, and everybody was crouched around someone lying on the ground, but you see that sort of thing a lot in the Tour. It was only a while

later that I learned via the team radio what had happened: Fabio was dead. When they tell you something like that, you almost don’t believe it.

It was one of the longest days of my life. Fabio was not only the young hope of Italian cycling, he was a new husband and a new father. His baby was just a month old.

We had to keep riding, to finish the stage even though we were distraught and sick with shock. I had known Fabio since I first started racing internationally in ‘91. He lived right outside of

Como where I kept my apartment, and we had competed against each other at the Barcelona Olympics in ‘92, when he won the gold medal. He was a very relaxed, fun-loving man, a little

goofy, a joker. Some of the top Italians were more serious, or macho, but Fabio wasn’t like that. He was all sweetness.

That night we had a Motorola team meeting to discuss whether we should keep riding or not. We were split. Half of us wanted to quit and go home and cry with our families and friends, and

half of us wanted to keep riding in honor of Fabio. Personally, I wanted to stop; I simply didn’t think I had the heart to ride a bike. It was the first time I had encountered death, and genuine

grief, and I didn’t know how to handle it. But then Fabio’s wife came to see us, and she said she wanted us to keep riding, because she felt that was what Fabio would have wanted. So we sat

in the grass behind the hotel, said a few prayers, and decided to stay in.

The next day the peloton rode in honor of Fabio, and gave our team a ceremonial stage victory. It was another long, terrible day– eight hours on the bike, with everybody grieving. The peloton

did not race. Instead we rode in quiet formation. It was virtually a funeral procession, and at last our team rode across the finish line, while, behind us, Fabio’s bike was mounted atop the

support car with a black ribbon.

The following morning we began the race again in earnest, and rode into Bordeaux. Next was a stage into Limoges, and that night, Och came around to our rooms and told the team that Fabio

had had two goals in the Tour: he wanted to finish the race, and he especially wanted to try to win the stage into Limoges. As soon as Och stopped speaking I knew that if Limoges was the

stage Fabio had wanted to win for himself, now I wanted to win it for him, and that I was going to finish the race.

About halfway through the next day’s stage, I found myself grouped with 25 guys at the front. Indurain was in the yellow leader’s jersey, riding at the back. I did what came most naturally to

me: I attacked.

The problem was, I attacked too early, as usual. I went with 25 miles still to go, and on a downhill portion. Two things you never do: attack early, and on a downhill. But I went so fast

on that downhill that I had a 30-second lead in a finger-snap. The other riders were completely taken aback. I could feel them wondering, What’s he thinking?

What was I thinking? I had looked back, and saw guys were riding along, with no particular ambition. It was a hot day, and there was no incentive to pull hard, everyone was just trying to

get closer to the finish line where the tactics would play out. I glanced back, and one guy was taking a sip of water. I glanced back again. Another guy was fixing his hat. So I took off.

Peoooo. I was gone.

When you have 15 other guys back there from 15 different teams, they’ll never get organized. They’ll look at each other and say: You pull. No, you pull! So I went, and I went faster than I’d

ever ridden. It was a tactical punch in the face, and it had nothing to do with strength or ability; everything depended on the initial shock and separation. It was insane, but it worked.

Nobody got within 55 seconds of me again. The team support car kept coming up and giving me reports. Henny Kuiper, our team director, would say, “You’re thirty seconds up.” Then a few

minutes later he’d come alongside again and say, “You’re forty-five seconds up.”

When he came up the third or fourth time, I said, “Henny, don’t come up here anymore. I’m not getting caught.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” he said, and faded behind my wheel.

I didn’t get caught.

I won by a minute, and I didn’t feel a moment’s pain. Instead I felt something spiritual; I know that I rode with a higher purpose that day. Even though I had charged too early, I never suffered

after I broke away. I would like to think that was Fabio’s experience too; he simply broke away and separated from the world. There is no doubt in my mind that there were two riders on that

bike. Fabio was with me.

I felt an emotion at the finish line that I’ve never experienced again. I felt I was winning for Fabio and his family and his baby, and for the mourning country of Italy. As I came across the

line I glanced upward and I pointed to the heavens, to Fabio.

After the Tour, Och had a memorial built for Fabio. He commissioned a sculptor from Como to execute a work in white Carrara marble. The team flew in from all over the world, and we

gathered at the top of the mountain for the placement of the memorial and the dedication ceremony. The memorial had a sundial on it that shone on three dates and times: his birthday,

the day he won the Olympic Games, and the day he died.

I had learned what it means to ride the Tour de France. It’s not about the bike. It’s a metaphor for life, not only the longest race in the world but also the most exalting and heartbreaking and

potentially tragic. It poses every conceivable element to the rider, and more: cold, heat, mountains, plains, ruts, flat tires, high winds, unspeakably bad luck, unthinkable beauty,

yawning senselessness, and above all a great, deep self-questioning. During our lives we’re faced with so many different elements as well, we experience so many setbacks, and fight such a

hand-to-hand battle with failure, head down in the rain, just trying to stay upright and to have a little hope. The Tour is not just a bike race, not at all. It is a test. It tests you physically, it tests

you mentally, and it even tests you morally.

I understood that now. There were no shortcuts, I realized. It took years of racing to build up the mind and body and character, until a rider had logged hundreds of races and thousands of

miles of road. I wouldn’t be able to win a Tour de France until I had enough iron in my legs, and lungs, and brain, and heart. Until I was a man. Fabio had been a man. I was still trying to get

there.

BAD TO WORSE

I THOUGHT I KNEW WHAT FEAR WAS, UNTIL I

heard the words You have cancer. Real fear came with an unmistakable sensation: it was as though all my blood started flowing in the wrong direction. My previous fears, fear of not being

liked, fear of being laughed at, fear of losing my money, suddenly seemed like small cowardices. Everything now stacked up differently: the anxieties of life– a flat tire, losing my career, a traffic

jam–were reprioritized into need versus want, real problem as opposed to minor scare. A bumpy plane ride was just a bumpy plane ride, it wasn’t cancer.

One definition of “human” is as follows: characteristic of people as opposed to God or animals or machines, especially susceptible to weakness, and therefore showing the qualities of man.

Athletes don’t tend to think of themselves in these terms; they’re too busy cultivating the aura of invincibility to admit to being fearful, weak, defenseless, vulnerable, or fallible, and for that

reason neither are they especially kind, considerate, merciful, benign, lenient, or forgiving, to themselves or anyone around them. But as I sat in my house alone that first night, it was

humbling to be so scared. More than that, it was humanizing.

I wasn’t strong enough to break it to my mother that I was sick. Not long after I arrived home from Dr. Reeves’ office, Rick Parker came over because he didn’t think I should be alone. I told

Rick that I simply couldn’t bear to call my mother with the news. “I don’t want to tell her,” I said. Rick offered to do it for me, and I accepted.

There was no gentle way to say it. She had just gotten home from work and was sitting outside in her garden, reading the paper, when the call came. Rick said, “Linda, Lance is going to need

to talk to you about this himself, but I just want to let you know what’s going on. He’s been diagnosed with testicular cancer, and he’s having surgery tomorrow at 7 A.M.”

My mother said, “No. How can this be?”

Rick said, “I’m sorry, but I think you need to come down here tonight.”

My mother began to cry, and Rick tried to comfort her, but he also wanted her to get on a shuttle to Austin as quickly as possible. My mother changed gears. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, I’ll

be right there.” She hung up without even speaking with me, and immediately threw whatever she could think of into a small bag and raced to the airport.

After Rick hung up from talking with my mother, I broke down again. Rick calmly talked me through it. “It’s natural for you to cry,” he said. “It’s even good for you. Lance, this is curable. It’s

a speed bump. We need to get on with whipping this thing.”

Shored up, I went into my study and I began to make calls to the other people I felt I needed to tell immediately. I called my friend and Motorola teammate Kevin Livingston, who was in

Europe racing. Kevin was like a younger brother to me; we were so close that we had plans to get an apartment together in Europe the following season, and I had persuaded him to move to

Austin to train with me. When I reached him in Italy, I still felt spaced out. “I have something to tell you–something bad has happened.”

“What? Did something go wrong with a race?”

“I have cancer.”

I wanted to tell Kevin how I felt and how urgently I wanted to see him, but he was in an apartment with three other members of the U.S. national team, and I didn’t want them to know.

So we had to talk in code.

“You know,” I said.

He replied, “Yeah. I know.”

And that was it, we got off the phone. The very next day, he was on a plane for home.

Next, I reached Bart Knaggs, perhaps my oldest and best friend in Austin, a former cyclist who was working for a start-up computer-technology company. I found him at his office, where he

was working late, like always. “Bart, I have testicular cancer,” I said. Bart stammered, not sure what to say, and then he said, “Lance, they do wonders with cancer now, and I think if you have

to get it, that’s a good one to have.”

I said, “I don’t know. I’m sitting here alone in my house, man, and I’m really scared.”

Bart, typically, entered a search command into his computer, and called up everything there was to know about the disease. He sat there until late, researching testicular cancer, and printed out

what he found until he had a pile a foot high. He called up clinical trials, studies, and treatment options, and downloaded it all. Then he gathered it up and drove over to my house. He had to

go to Orlando early the following morning with his fiancee, Barbara, but he came by to tell me he loved me, and gave me all of the cancer material.

One by one, my friends and family began to arrive. Lisa came, after I paged her; she had been studying in the library and she was glassy-eyed with shock at the news. Next, Bill Stapleton

arrived with his wife, Laura. Bill was a young attorney for a firm in Austin, and I had chosen him to represent me because he exuded loyalty. He was an ambling sort outwardly, but he was a

competitor, too, a former Olympic swimmer from the University of Texas who still had the look of an athlete. When he came in, I fixated on what I was sure was the loss of my career.

“I’m done racing,” I said. “I won’t need an agent anymore.” “Lance, we just need to deal with this one step at a time,” Bill said. “You have no idea what this means, or what’s going to

happen.”

“You don’t understand, Bill. I’m not going to have an agent anymore. I’m not going to have any contracts.”

“Well, I’m not here as an agent, I’m here as your friend. How can I help?”

It was one of those moments when everything shifted. I was obsessing over the fact that I was going to lose my career, when there were more important things to attend to.

“You can pick up my mother at the airport,” I said.

Bill and Laura immediately got up from the sofa and drove to the airport to get my mother. I was just as glad not to meet her flight, because as soon as she saw Bill, she broke down in tears

again. “This is my baby,” she told Bill and Laura. “How could this happen? What are we going to do?” But during the drive to my house, my mother collected herself. She was born without an

ounce of self-pity, and by the time she reached my driveway she was strong again. As soon as she walked in the house, I met her in the center of the living room and gave her a bear hug.

“We’re going to be okay,” my mother said into my ear. “This isn’t going to get us. We’ve had too many things to deal with. This is one thing that won’t happen. Don’t even try this with me.”

We both cried a little then, but not for very long, because there was too much to discuss. I sat down with my friends and my mother, and explained to them what the diagnosis from Dr.

Reeves was. There were some issues to go over and some decisions to be made, and we didn’t have much time, because I was scheduled for surgery at 7 A.M. I pulled out the X ray that I’d

brought home from Dr. Reeves, and showed it to everybody. You could see the tumors, like white golf balls, floating in my lungs.

I was concerned about keeping the illness quiet until I’d had time to tell my sponsors and teammates. While I continued to talk to my mother, Bill called the hospital and asked that my

diagnosis be kept confidential and that I be checked in under an assumed name. Also, we had to tell my sponsors, Nike, Giro, Oakley, and Milton-Bradley, as well as the Cofidis organization,

and it would be necessary to hold a press conference. But first and foremost I had to tell the people who were closest to me, friends like Och, and Chris, and my teammates, and most of

them were scattered overseas and difficult to reach.

Everyone reacted differently to the news; some people stuttered, and some tried to reassure me, but what all of my friends had in common was their urge to come to Austin as quickly as

possible. Och was at home in Wisconsin having dinner when I reached him, and his reaction was, in retrospect, pure him.

“Are you sitting down?” I asked.

“What’s going on?”

“I’ve got cancer.”

“Okay. What does that mean?”

“It means I’ve got testicular cancer and I’m having surgery tomorrow.”

“All right, let me think about this,” Och said, calmly. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Finally, it was time to go to bed. The funny thing was, I slept deeply that night. I went into a state of absolutely perfect rest, as if I was getting ready for a big competition. If I had a tough

race in front of me I always made sure to get the optimum amount of sleep, and this was no different, I suppose. On some unconscious level, I wanted to be in absolutely peak form for

what I would be faced with in the coming days.

The next morning, I reported to the hospital at 5. I drove myself there, with my mother in the passenger seat, and I walked through the entrance in a baggy sweatsuit to begin life as a cancer

patient. First came a series of basic tests, things like MRIs and blood work. I had a faint hope that the doctors would do all their tests and tell me they had been wrong, that my illness wasn’t

that serious. But those words didn’t come.

I had never stayed overnight in a hospital, and I didn’t know about things like registration, so I hadn’t even brought my wallet. I guess I was always too busy throwing away my crutches and

taking out my own stitches. I looked at my mother–and she immediately volunteered to take care of the paperwork. While I was having blood tests done, she filled out the stack of forms the

hospital required.

I was in surgery and recovery for about three hours. It seemed like an eternity to my mother, who sat in my hospital room with Bill Sta-pleton and waited for me to come back. Dr. Reeves

came by and told her that it had gone well, they had removed the tumor with no problem. Then Och arrived. True to his word, he had gotten on an early-morning plane for Austin. While I was

still in surgery, my mom filled Och in on what was happening. She said she was determined that I was going to be okay, as if the sheer force of her will could make things all right.

Finally, they wheeled me back to my room. I was still foggy from the anesthesia, but I was alert enough to talk to Och as he leaned over my bed. “I’m going to beat this thing, whatever it is,” I

said.

The hospital kept me overnight, and my mother stayed with me, sleeping on a small sofa. Neither of us rested well. The aftermath of the surgery was very painful–the incision was long

and deep and in a tender place, and every time my mother heard my sheets rustle, she would jump up and come to my bedside to make sure I was all right. I was hooked up to an IV, and

when I had to go to the bathroom she helped me out of bed and wheeled the pole for me while I limped across the room, and then she helped me back to bed. The hospital bed had a plastic

cover over the mattress, and it made me sweat; I woke up every couple of hours to find the sheets under my back were soaking wet, but she would dry me off.

The next morning, Dr. Youman came in to give me the initial results of the pathology reports and blood work. I was still clinging to my notion that somehow the cancer might not be as bad

as we’d thought, until Dr. Youman began to tick off the numbers. He said it appeared from the biopsy and the blood tests that the cancer was spreading rapidly. It was typical of testicular

cancer to move up the blood line into the lymph glands, and they had discovered some in my abdomen.

In the 24 hours since I’d first been diagnosed, I’d done as much homework as I could. I knew oncologists broke testicular cancer down into three stages: in stage one, the cancer was confined

to the testicles and patients had excellent prognoses; in stage two, the cancer had moved into the abdominal lymph nodes; and in stage three, it had spread to vital organs, such as the lungs.

The tests showed that I was stage three, with three different cancers in my body, the most malignant of which was choriocarcinoma, a very aggressive, blood-borne type that was difficult

to arrest.

My chemo treatments would begin in a week, via a Grosjean catheter implanted in my chest, and they would last for three months. I would require so many blood tests and intravenous drugs

that it was impractical to use standard individual IV needles, so the Grosjean catheter was unavoidable. It was frightening to look at, bulging under my skin, and the opening in my chest

seemed unnatural, almost like a gill-

There was another piece of business to discuss: I would be at least temporarily sterile. My first round of chemotherapy was scheduled for the following week, and Youman advised me to bank

as much sperm as possible before then. It was the first time the subject of sterility had come up, and I was taken aback. Youman explained that some chemotherapy patients recovered their

virility, and some did not; studies showed about a 50-percent return to normalcy after a year. There was a sperm bank two hours away in San Antonio, and Youman recommended I go

there.

That night, before we came home from the hospital, my mother went by the oncology unit and picked up all the supplies for my catheter, and my prescriptions for anti-nausea medications, and

more literature on testicular cancer. If you’ve never been to an oncology unit, let me tell you–it can be unsettling. She saw people wrapped in blankets, with no hair, hooked up every which

way to IVs, looking pale and deathly sick. My mother gazed around the unit as she waited for the supplies. When they came, she piled it all into a large canvas bag that became our traveling

cancer kit, and made her way back to my room. She said, “Son, I just want to let you know that when you go for your treatment, it’s not a pleasant sight. But I want you to keep one thing in

mind. They’re all there for the same reason you are: to get well.”

And then she took me home.

ON SATURDAY MORNING I ROSE EARLY AND WENT INTO the bathroom and looked in the mirror–and I stifled a scream. My catheter had a huge blood clot in it and my chest was