Force Majeure - Lance Armstrong

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Outside Magazine June 2003

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Force Majeure - Lance Armstrong

By Eric Hagerman

SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN AUSTIN, TEXAS, the warm air pungent with pollen, the sky sharp blue, the grass plain brown. Good day for a bike race. You're standing in Walnut Creek Park, a terraced ramble of tennis courts, picnic cabanas, and cedar thickets, talking tire treads with one of the bike hounds who've gathered for a cyclocross event sponsored by the local REI, when a black Suburban rolls up and makes its own VIP spot along the curb. The vanity plate reads oct 2, and you don't have to think twice about who's inside. You remember the press conference—what was it, six years ago?—when he announced his diagnosis to a roomful of reporters who had grown accustomed to calling him brash and cocky and typically Texan, but who now had to figure out how to address an ashen-faced 25-year-old champion who'd just had a swollen, cancerous testicle cut away from his body and was talking about modest things like wanting to live.

That was the day everything changed for Lance Armstrong: October 2, 1996. Year Zero.



	"I don't like to lose. I just despise it." Armstrong in Girona, Spain, his spring training grounds for the 2003 Tour de France. (Anton Corbijn)

The Suburban's doors open all at once and five man-boys clad in various hues of polyester pile out. Lance steps down from the driver's seat—he can't stand being a passenger, rarely lets anyone else take the wheel—and boosts himself into the back to change. Two product developers from Nike lean in when he gets to his bike shoes, recording the moment on digital cameras. The footwear is based on a prototype that Lance eviscerated to his liking with a pair of scissors, and they're hoping he'll wear the new design in July, when he goes for Tour de France victory number five.

"They feel good," Lance says, standing and shifting from one foot to the other. He clomps over to his full-time mechanic, Mike Anderson, who is assembling his bike, and squeezes the rear tire.

"Flat," Lance says. "What's up with that?"

"I'll fix it," says Mike. "Maybe I'll put in a puncture-resistant tube. Looks like there might be thorns out here."

"Dude, I'm losing my warm-up time," he says, sounding a little antsy. "I need to do some squats or something."

You think about going over and saying something, because it all seems pretty mellow. But you don't, and neither does anybody else. Probably best not to bother him before the race, even though it's just a dinky cyclocross—cycling's version of the steeplechase—and you'd love to ask him what the hell he's doing here. It's a training run, sure, but Lance showing up to hammer two dozen locals is like Tiger going to a mini-mall amusement park and wasting everyone at putt-putt. This guy needs to prove something?

Definitely not. At 31, Lance Armstrong is many things, most of which are listed on the cover of his best-selling 2000 autobiography, It's Not About the Bike, in an order that seems telling: winner of the Tour de France, cancer survivor, husband, father, son, human being. He is also a philanthropist (the Lance Armstrong Foundation has raised $23 million for cancer survivors); an adviser to George W. Bush (he sits on the President's Cancer Panel along with three world-famous oncology specialists); and a highly paid spokesman for Subaru, Nike, Coca-Cola, and Bristol-Myers Squibb. This summer, if he succeeds in matching the five-in-a-row record of Miguel Indurain, the mighty Basque who ruled the Tour from 1991 to 1995, Lance will be poised to attempt an unprecedented six victories—a feat that would secure his place among the all-time greats in the history of sport.

Just before the race starts, Kristin Armstrong, Lance's blond, green-eyed 31-year-old wife, meanders over with their three-year-old son, Luke, and the one-year-old twins, Grace and Isabelle. Her parents, Dave and Ethel Richard, and her younger brother, Jon, have also turned out to cheer Lance on. It's a few days before Christmas; six weeks from now, Lance and Kristin will separate, but you wouldn't know it from the way the family looks today.

The racers start off full-tilt, cross-eyed with effort and flirting with lactic acid from the gun, dreaming, perhaps, that Lance is out of shape, or hungover, or doesn't care about this pissant competition. For most of the race—an hour of laps around the park's grassy circuit—Lance hovers 20 seconds behind the lead group, which dwindles from eight riders to one, and then he closes in on Will Black, the Texas state cyclocross and mountain-bike champion. At the finish it's you-know-who in front. Lance crosses the line to scattered yelps and keeps on rolling back to the Suburban to switch bikes so he can ride the 15 miles home.

Black hustles over to shake hands with the Man.

"Hey, thanks a lot," he says.

"No problem," says Lance, toweling off his face. "That was good. You made me work today."

"You coming out tomorrow for that other race?"

"Yeah, I'll be there. Unless I drink too many beers tonight."

"That's cool," Black says absentmindedly. "No! Wait. Do drink a lot of beers tonight."

"OK," Lance says, cocking his head agreeably. "I was going to anyway." He looks around at his entourage and lets out a snort.

It would be nice if it were always like this—no press conference, no throng, no scandal, no pissing in a cup. Then again, normalcy is a place Lance only visits.

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Correspondent ERIC HAGERMAN profiled the U.S. Olympic snowboard medalists in the November 2002 issue.

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