Dear Lance 
Game Over 
Lance Armstrong Has Something to Get Off His Chest
He doesn't use performance-enhancing drugs, he insists, no matter what his critics in the European press and elsewhere say. And yet the accusations keep coming. How much scrutiny can the two-time Tour de France winner stand?
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And Festina was not a rogue team. "It was not just Festina's case," says L'Equipe's Rouet. "It was cycling's case. Now you don't have a rider who can say seriously, 'I don't take drugs in '96, '97, or '98.'" And, as former cycling pro Heintz found in 1999, it didn't stop after the scandal (indeed, the Tour of Italy was temporarily shut down last month after two hundred police officers raided riders' hotel rooms and confiscated large amounts of banned substances). Heintz wrote that "a systematic approach to doping is being carried out in world cycling," with riders pooling portions of prize money to buy EPO on the black market. And it wasn't just EPO but also human growth hormone, pure testosterone, and corticosteroids. Some refer to riders who dope as being "on the program." Former Festina trainer Vayer says that during a Tour, some riders will take an average of thirteen substances, legal and illegal, with six or seven injections a day.
But they don't talk about it. Dopers enjoy a solidarity that is maintained by a code of silence. "There's a great conspiracy in the number of people concealing from the public the extent and influence of doping in sport," says David Walsh, a sportswriter for the London Sunday Times whose weekly column often attacks doping and occasionally mentions Lance. Riders don't see themselves as doing anything wrong; they're doing what has been done for decades—making themselves better cyclists—so they deny doping. "The reason they're such good liars is that their consciences are clean," says UT's Hoberman. "It's a psychological phenomenon from being forced to lead double lives."
Should they have to? If everybody dopes, what's the big deal? Well, for one thing, everybody doesn't do it. Doping isn't fair. Also, it's dangerous. And it turns cycling into a contest of one rider's doctor versus another's. Ultimately, doping is wrong. As French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote in an essay on the Tour de France, "to dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark."
Learning To Suffer
Lance loves winning, but the payoff is more than just being the first to cross the finish line. He wants to crush his enemies, real and imagined, like the dogs they are. In the spring of 1999, as he trained for the Tour de France, he did an interview with procycling magazine in which he talked about how various sponsors and teams had abandoned him when he tried to come back following his fight with cancer. "I remember what they did and I remember what the sport did," he said. "And I just keep a list, a mental list. And if I ever get the opportunity, which I may or may not, I'm gonna pull out that list." He soon got his chance, shocking everyone by winning the first stage of the 1999 Tour. Then, as he passed by members of the team sponsored by French credit company Cofidis—who dropped him in 1997, when he was recovering—he said, "That was for you." By the end of the Tour and his smashing victory, he would find sweet vindication, rubbing the noses of all nonbelievers into the pavement. But many riders had not raced in the 1999 Tour in the wake of the Festina scandal, so they, as well as the media, questioned the legitimacy of Lance's win, and he had something to drive him in 2000. It did.
"I've always been better when I've had things stacked against me," Lance told me. This goes back to his childhood. He was born September 18, 1971, in Dallas and grew up mostly in Plano with a single mother, Linda Mooneyham. Lance refers to his father (last name Gunderson) as a non-factor. He called his stepfather, Terry Armstrong, "an angry testosterone geek" in his autobiography, It's Not About the Bike. His mother would become his closest friend, staunchest ally, and inspiration, working her way up from selling fast food to selling real estate and supplying her son with such affirming truths as, "Make a negative a positive." Lance took her advice, converting his resentments and insecurities into fuel ("I was a kid with about four chips on his shoulder," he wrote). Eventually he was proving himself in long-distance running and swimming events. "If it was a suffer-fest, I was good at it," he wrote, and soon he was doing triathlons and making money at it. By the time he was sixteen he was starting to concentrate on cycling, in which he was coolly defeating men in their twenties. When most kids were scraping for movie money, Lance was making $20,000 a year—paying for his car and food but still living with his mother.
He didn't like Plano, which he has described as a "soul-deadened" place with no good cycling routes. After graduating from high school in 1989, he moved to Austin, a hilly city with great rides and more to do. Lance became hell on wheels. He was the U.S. National Amateur Champion in 1991, and he turned pro the next year, riding for Motorola and winning the 1993 World Championships. In his early years as a pro, Lance's "Texan exuberance" (as one British commentator put it) rubbed a lot of Europeans the wrong way. He was young, brash, and reckless and didn't know or care to know the history or traditions of the sport he was so blithely beginning to dominate: a handsome Ugly American. "I would bite somebody's head off to win a race," he wrote. He talked trash and brazenly pumped his fists at the finish, which was just not done. "He thought he was invincible," his old cycling buddy John Korioth told me. The truth was, Lance was a scared and insecure kid who didn't know any better, who feared more than anything being laughed at and not being liked by others. He didn't know strategy and often suffered for it, riding too hard too soon and then losing energy and falling far behind.
His coaches, Jim Ochowicz and Chris Carmichael, would tell him to be patient. They knew Lance had the killer instinct. Carmichael once told him how cycling is personal, like a stabbing is personal, and Lance knew exactly what he was talking about. As long as the races were short, one-day affairs, he had a chance. Lance won a stage of the 1992 Tour de France, becoming the youngest ever to do so, but dropped out soon after, humiliated by the Alps. In 1996 he was the number one ranked cyclist in the world. He bought a Porsche and built a million-dollar home on Lake Austin, but he also spent a good part of the year in Europe. He was dating coeds and models. In September 1996 he signed a $2.5 million contract with Cofidis.
A few days after his twenty-fifth birthday party, Lance began coughing up blood in the sink. His right testicle swelled up like an orange. He went to the doctor, who had horrible news: Lance had advanced testicular cancer, which had spread to his lungs and brain. They gave him a less than 40 percent chance of living. His testicle was removed, lesions were taken off his brain, and he underwent four rounds of chemotherapy, during which his red blood cell count fell so low that he was given the miracle drug EPO. It was, he wrote, "the only thing keeping me alive."
Lance survived, and cancer changed him in every way. He had always been an outcast, but now he found a community of others like him—scared almost to death but waking to a second life. Cancer dimmed his arrogance and gave him a new understanding of human frailty. It changed the way he dealt with pain. "I was shown a new level of misery and suffering," Lance told me. "A hard training ride, bad weather conditions—stuff just doesn't faze me anymore." He changed his diet, and he lost weight. At 175 pounds Lance had always been too heavy to climb mountains well. Now, as he recovered and began riding again, he was a trim 158. He changed the way he pedaled and trained. His style became more mature and patient. "He always had this gift," says Carmichael, "but after the cancer, he realized he couldn't rely on it. To be a grand champion he was going to have to develop it."
But he was damaged goods. Convinced he would never return to form, Cofidis terminated its contract with Lance in 1997. Other teams passed on him too. Only US Postal, a new team, made an offer, at a low salary. Lance accepted, but he would never forget those humiliating days. After a bout with self-doubt and semi-retirement, during which he lollygagged in Austin, playing golf and the stock market, Lance married Kristin Richard in 1998 (they would have a son, Luke, seventeen months later) and returned to racing. He won the 4-day Tour of Luxembourg, then placed fourth in both the Tour of Holland and the 23-day Tour of Spain. He had never done well in long races before. But that was then, this was now. And he was better.
J' Accuse!
"I came back from the illness," Lance told me, "and everybody said, 'You're not gonna do anything, you're not gonna win anything, you're not gonna finish anything.' So I said, 'Screw you. Why don't I just focus on the biggest, baddest race there is?' So I did." In July 1999, 33 months after he was given a death sentence, Lance made history. He gave notice right away that he was not the same rider, winning the prologue and wearing the maillot jaune for the first time in his life. Ten days later, wired to Bruyneel, who gave orders and heart rates over the two-way radio, Lance was 2:20 ahead of his closest challenger when, on the eighteen miles of mountain leading up to the town of Sestrière, he made his most controversial climb. He was in a group of five, 32 seconds behind the two stage leaders and five miles from the top when he attacked, scooting around the others and taking off, a determined look on his face. "Armstrong is flying away," said a TV announcer. He overtook all six and never looked back. One mile later he was 30 seconds ahead of the stage; by the time he hit the top, he was 6 minutes ahead of everyone. The Tour was, for all practical purposes, over. "That climb was so amazing," L'Equipe writer Rouet says today. "It was so quick."
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