Hurts So Good

They should've buried Lance Armstrong this time. They had him laid out like a yard sale on a Pyrenees road. Had him sick, white-mouthed and dizzy. Had him riding in the weeds, riding borrowed bikes and cracked bikes. Hell, once they had him carrying his bike. Had him scabbed and swollen, hip throbbing, saddle sores mounting, out of water and luck and hope.

But they didn't bury him. Couldn't.

Now here he is, with his first beer and the last laugh on Sunday night in his swank Paris hotel suite, sitting gingerly on a saddle sore -- "the size of Pikes Peak," he says -- and toasting his ugliest yet most magnificent Tour de France victory, his fifth straight. But cinq nearly sank him.

"At one point, as I was crashing," he says with a grin as big as Texas, "I actually thought, O.K., this Tour is finished for me. I mean, I was already down to my last chance."

Armstrong and his three-year-old son, Luke, play a little game. Lance asks Luke, "What does Daddy do?"

And Luke always answers, "Daddy makes them suffer."

But this Tour was all about Armstrong suffering. Diarrhea to start. Hideous road rash left over from a pre-Tour tumble, ripped flesh that made even doctors' faces go chalky. A shoe snafu that caused killer hip tendinitis. A pileup during stage 1 that produced new grotesqueries, including an 18-inch tire track across his back.

That was just the beginning. There was the day he darted to avoid a crash and wound up in knee-high weeds. A rabid mountain biker, Armstrong simply churned through the weeds until he came to a ditch, clicked out of his pedals, held the bike in the air, leaped over the ditch and discovered he was in front of the leaders again. "Mon petit shortcut," he told French TV.

It got worse. In the brick-oven heat of stage 12, Armstrong miscalculated the amount of water he would need -- "Dumb," he says -- and became so dehydrated he could barely keep the bike upright. He was dizzy, face beet-red and swollen, eyes bulging, a pasty white ring around his mouth. In the last 30 minutes of that stage, he says, he lost 14 pounds, and 1 minute, 36 seconds to rival Jan Ullrich of Germany. Says Armstrong, "That's as close as I've come to just getting off the bike and quitting."

For the next two days he looked as though he should have. "At breakfast he just didn't look like Lance," said Armstrong's best friend on the U.S. Postal Service team, George Hincapie. "We were all freaking out. We're like, Oh, s---, we're in trouble."

Yes, they were. With six stages left, Armstrong's lead over Ullrich was only 15 seconds. "Do you know how little 15 seconds is?" Armstrong says. "It's nothing!" Nothing that can't be lost when a little boy on the Luz-Ardiden in the Pyrenees accidentally catches the strap of his tote bag on Armstrong's handlebars, sending him flying off his bike for a taste of asphalt.

Panicked, Armstrong picked himself up and rethreaded the bike chain -- screaming "every swear word I know" -- then climbed back on and realized his dream of six straight wins was on ruin's doorstep. After all, getting to four straight and then starting over isn't practical.

"It was one of the most intense feelings I've had in my life," he says. "Your back is against the ropes. They're coming at you, and you've been losing it all week, and now you're about to lose it all. What's your answer? What are you gonna do?"

If you're Lance Armstrong, you deliver the greatest single-day performance of your life.

"For the first time the entire Tour," said Johan Bruyneel, the USPS team director, "I saw that pissed-off look on Lance's face." The unsquashable Texan danced the Watusi on the field. Riding a bike with a crack in the rear chainstay, he turned the mountain stage into a French cuffing, increasing his lead to 67 seconds -- three touchdowns in biking.

Afterward, jubilant and speeding down that mountain in his bodyguard's car, he saw the team bus up ahead. Armstrong can't leave with the team after stages because of all the doping tests, interviews and autographs, but he desperately wanted to be with them. "Stop the bus!" he began yelping. "Stop 'em!" When the bus pulled over, Armstrong burst on board like an ATF agent, screaming like a maniac, "How ya like me now?"

Some of his USPS teammates don't speak English. It didn't matter. Everybody on the bus went berserk. "It was all of us piling on top of each other, hugging, tears, throwing fruit at each other, everything," he says. "These guys had busted their hump for me -- kept me in it. It was just a great, great moment."

And this was Armstrong's great, great win, in that he still wound up best even at his worst. This was his Michael Jordan, Game 5, Salt Lake City, food poisoning. This was the year Armstrong beat them aching, beat them dumb, beat them unlucky.

They won't get him like this again.

So, no, they didn't bury him. Lance Armstrong once had 14 tumors in him and a 40% chance to live. If cancer can't bury him, a bunch of guys in Lycra shorts have no chance.

Issue date: August 4, 2003

Rick Reilly, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, has been voted National Sportswriter of the Year eight times. His latest book, Who's Your Caddy?, his misadventures caddying for tour pros like Jack Nicklaus and David Duval, hit bookstores in May. He is also the author of the best-selling compliation The Life of Reilly, and the cult classic golf novel, Missing Links, as well as five other books.

 

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