Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong was the fairy tale of the end of the 20th century, a man who came back from testicular cance which had spread to his brain, threatening to kill him, yet went on to win the Tour de France four years in a row (199-2002).

Armstrong is a driven man. He grew up in a broken home, son of a 17 year old mother and an absent father whon he has never forgiven for leaving them. It was cycling, he says, that stopped him going wrong in life. His background, though, left him edgy, and his early career was marked by spats with rivals and team mates, rows he now admits tarting and regrets.

Jeremy Whittle, editor of Pro-cycling, says of the first meeting in 1993, ‘Brash is an adjective that fitted him well. Back then, a raw and slightly brittle 21 year old, there wasn’t much time for doubt or uncertainty and even less patience for those who got in his way.’ (See MORENO ARGENTIN for an example.)

Armstrong started out as a triathlete and became national junior champion before dropping the swimming and running to concentrate on cycling. He came to world attention when he won a rain soaked world championship in Oslo in 1993. But his personality ensured that he met with less than total acclaim from European colleagues.

Three years later, on October 2 1996, he went to hospital in Austin, Texas, with a painful groin. He was 25. Doctors diagnosed testicular cancer that had already spread to his stomack and lungs, and was beginning to threaten his brain. He was given a less than 50-50 chance of survival. His hair fell out and he looked like a ghost as operations and drugs took their toll. The story varies but, according to Armstrong himself, his SPONSOR, the French moneylender Gofidis, sent an offical, Alain Bondue, to his bedside to renegotiate his contract before eventually dispensing with him.

Astonishingly Armstrong recovered enough to ride a bike again. But finding a team was a different matter. ‘All the teams in Europe that had offered me contracts before my cancer truned me down after I had recovered,’ Armstrong said. He recalled, as he put it, his AGENT’s fax machine overflowing with rejection letters in French, Dutch, Spanish and Italian. ‘They said I was damaged goods.’

The man who came to his recue was Thom Weisel, president of the new team being set up by the US Postal Service. Weisel personally guaranteed Armstrong a salary. It was less than what he had received before, but offers weren’t flaowing in and Weisel’s plan was to top up the retainer with performance bonuses.

Armstrong was still weak though. His coach, Chris Carmichael, was himself a former rider in Euripe in the 1980’s and had been American national coach. Medical treatment had left Armstrong in a poor state, Carmichael said ‘He couldn’t eat much and he had lost weight, including muscle mass. That meant he couldn’t push big gears the way he used to. We broke the workload down by having him pedal a smaller gear but more rapidly.’ Armstrong’s climbing style to this day is still to pdal fast, as quickly as 120rpm instead of the 70 to 90 of most riders. A benefit was that fast pedalling gave him the acceleration of a classic CLIMBER, dispensing with opposition like JAN ULLRICH, who preferred a high gear but constat speed, by using the sudden accelerations of mountain men like MARCO PANTANI.     

He came back to racing in 1998 but it was too early and he had to abandon Paris-Nice. Armstrong holed up first in Nice and then in Texas without answering calls. And before long the calls stopped coming anyway. Armstrong returned mid-season wit a win at the Tour of Luxembourg then showed his potentioal in September by finighing fourth at the Tour of Spain.

The following season Armstrong showed his dominance of the Tour de France by winning alone at SESTRIERE after a stage that covered six major summits. Wins followed in the 2000 and 2001 Tours. In 2002 Tour gave him one more than AMERICA’s only other Tour winner, GREG LEMOND.

All athletes have a strong sense of competition, of rivalry, or they wouldn’t succeed and it was probably more important to Armstrong to beat LeMond than it was disappointing for LeMond to be beaten. The two had already  clashed over Armstrong’s treatment by a controversial doctor, Michele Ferrari, who was at the centre of DOPING enquiries in 2001 (see below).

In 2000, Armstrong clashed with another rider involved in Italian doping inquiries, Marco Pantani. Pantani received an 8 month ban for insulin possession folling the drug police raids on the 2001 Giro. After a series of appeals and counter-appeals Pantani served a six month ban and returned to racing in March 2003. But while the spat between Armstrong and Pantini upset both men, it provided entertainment for everyone else. The back groud was MONT VENTOUX, one of the Tour’s most feared climbs and one on which reputations are won or wrecked.

Armstrong and Pantani duelled all the way up, each attacking the leading group until they arrived at the summit together. There Armstrong appeared to ease up to let the Italian win. At first Pantani looked happy but his mood changed when he bagan to suspect Armstrong had patronised him, ‘letting’ him win.

Armstrong said he wanted Pantani to win because he was a great climber and deserved it, but that just made things worse, Pantani now presumed that Armstrong thought him unable to win without help, and he took everthing Armstrong said as an insult. That in turn offended Armstrong and he made the row still more colourful by referring to Pantani at a press conference as ‘Elefantino’, a nickname the jug-eared Pantani merited but not surprisingly disliked. The now wound-up Italian said he didn’t like Armstrong’s ‘American ways’ and that he’d teach him a lesson.

Before long Pantani was too occupied with never-ending inquiries into his medical preparation to have time for Armstrong. But the American too, was no stranger to criticism and investigation. In 1999 the heavyweight French paper Le Monde reported that Armstrong had been found positive for steroids in a doping test. He answered that it was the accidental effect of a skin treatment and the row passed.

Many people wanted to know just what drugs Armstrong had been given during his cancer treatment, and the former winner LUCIEN AIMAR asked, ‘Is it now necessary for Tour winners to have been invalids if they want to succeed?’ The question may have stayed in the background had a French television crew not filmed the occupants of an unmarked car dumping bags of drug boxes, used medical pads and other items which the TV crew linked to Armstrong’s team. The main drug was Actovegin, a drug said to enhance the oxygen-carrying limits of an athlete’s blood.

A state inquiry opened but got nowhere. Actovegin wasn’t one of the banned drugs on the list of the sport’s governing body, the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale), although it was added afterwards. The US Postal team’s MANAGER, JOHAN BRUYNEEL, said nothing had been brought into France without permission and nothing used that was banned. Months passed and the national drug-testing centre confirmed that it had found no evidence in the team’s urine of a more popular popular blood-boosting drug, EPO. The inquiry was closed in 2002 and the US Postal team was cleared of any wrong doing.

Armstrong said after the skin treatment findings that ‘people are against me’ and it’s a view he has stuck to. More criticism followed when he agreed, prior to the 2001 Tour and just hours before a London newspaper was to break the story, that he had had repeated contact with the controversial doctor Michele Ferrari. The doctor himself said he had been in daily contact with Armstrong during the racing season. But, as the American has often pointed out, he has been found clear. However, the link with Ferrari proved embarrassing. Italian police had raided Ferrari’s home a number of times since Ausgust 1998 but nothing at the time of going to press has been found and the investigation is ongoing.

Armstrong is selective about what races he rides outside the Tour and his only objective of the season and that all other races lead to it. Team mates are employed precisely to help him win it. Because of that his palmares of wins outside the Tour is surprisingly thin, although in 2002 he won both the Midi-Libre and Dauphine Libere.

In 2001, before winning his third Tour, Armstrong announced he was a changed man. He regretted the rouws in which he’d been involved and which, he said, he had sometimes started needlessly. He said he needed anger to win and conceded that it burst out at the wrong time. But he had come to terms with that and with himself, he said, so he could focus it only onto his racing. The man who once snubbed Tour organiser JEAN-MARIE LEBLANC by saying his job was to win bike races, not popularity contests (Leblanc had suggested the French might warm to Armstrong if he took more trouble to learn their language) even began talking French in television interviews. The fact that it was such bad French merely made him seem more human, more vulnerable, and France began to like as well as to admire him.

Armstrong’s popularity in America has never been in doubt. His fairy-tale recovery from cancer overcame American indifference to cycle racing and also did a lot to raise awareness of testicular cancer, something Armstrong accelerated by founding an organisation to promote knowledge and research. His book It’s Not About the Bike sold in huge numbers round the world.

In the August following his third Tour win, Armstrong was a guest of the American president at the White House. George W. Bush said Armstrong was ‘a vivid reminder that the  great achievements of life are often won or lost in the mountains, when the climb is the steepest, when the heart is tested…. He’s done more than survive – he has triumphed.’ Bush called him on his mobile phone after the 2002 race to congratulate him on his fourth consecutive victory.

Winner

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1993 World championship, National Championship
1995 San Sebastian Classic, Tour DuPont
1996 Fleche Wallonne, Tour DuPont
1998 Tour Luxembourg
1999 Tour de France
2000 Tour de France, GP Merckx, GP Nations
2001 Tour de France, Tour Switzerland
2002 Tour de France, Dauphine Libere, Midi Libre
1993 DNF  Stage win Chalons-sur-Marne-Verdun
1994 DNF
1995 36th    Stage win Montpon-Monesterol- Limoges
1999 1st      Stage wins – Le Puy-de-Fou – Le Puy-de-Fou, Metz
                   Metz, Le Grand Bronand – Sestriere, Futuroscope-
                   Futuroscope, and Yellow Jersey and Points leader
2000 1st      Stage win Freiburg – Mullhouse, and Yellow Jersey
2001 1st      Stage wins Aix-les-Bains – Alped’Huez, Grenoble –
                   Chamrousse, Foix – St-Lary-Soulan, Montlucon –
                   St Armand-Montrond, and Yellow Jersey
2002 1st      Stage wins Luxembourg – Luxembourg, Pau –
                   Le Mongie, Lannermazan – Plateau de Beille,
                   Regine Durette – Macon and Yellow Jersey

 

 

 

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