In 1993 I was a 34-year-old journalist and editor of “Bicycling Magazine,” when I called a precocious and slightly cocky athlete by the name of Lance Armstrong. In recent years, he had won triathlon championships and stage races in Italy and Spain. My mission: fly to Austin, hang with him at his apartment, maybe even go for a bike ride, and generally peer into his dizzying juggernaut of a life.
Armstrong, then just 21, said he was more than willing to host me for a few days. But there would be a condition.
“Sure, you can come,” he said. “But you need to put me on the cover.”
Excuse me? I was the editor of a glossy national magazine, after all. It occurred to me that I should be issuing orders to him.
Of course, I did go to Austin. And of course, we did put him on the cover. (He would grace it dozens of times in the coming years.) How could I not? Armstrong was, to the eyes of all who witnessed him, the future of cycling, a supernova of talent and athleticism, careening toward the far horizon. Neither I, nor dozens of national magazine editors in the years to come, had any choice but to do what this man asked of us.
The fact was, no rational person ever refused Lance Armstrong. And that, it turns out, would become part of the problem.
For three days in Austin that spring, Lance and I got along remarkably well. We walked around the expansive University of Texas campus. We ate Mexican food. I accompanied him on bike rides. He told me, in confessional detail, about his storied past, and the father and stepfather he had disowned. I was even invited into his modest apartment, which conveyed the happy chaos of a college dorm, replete with garish Texas longhorns above the fireplace, painted like the state flag.
In a stunning display, I got to observe him in the physiology lab, pedaling blithely along at a heart rate of near 200 beats-per-minute. Doctors gathered around, slack-jawed at the spectacle they were witnessing.
One afternoon we even went to Tower Records together. Lance loved music, especially from Austin’s prolific club scene, and he was then enamored with bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughan. As we strolled the aisles, I asked him which Stevie Ray CD I should buy. “Double Trouble,” he said without hesitation.
I’ll always remember that moment, and I still have the CD. I call it my Lance CD. What I didn’t know was that, when it came to Lance, there was a lot more trouble on the horizon.
The article appeared in the May 1993 issue, titled, “America’s Lone Star.” Later, through his surrogates, I would learn that it was Lance’s favorite profile written to date.
Over the years, I would have plenty more interaction with Lance. I saw him at races. I attended training camps with his team as an embedded journalist, where I would sometimes ride alongside, willingly accepting a helpful hand on the low back, until I expired and crawled, thoroughly defeated, into the team van.
I wrote a profile of his coach, Chris Carmichael, and the two men even approached me to write Armstrong’s training book. (I didn’t end up doing the project, for a variety of reasons, but would later wish I had. It was eventually published in 2000.)
But, while I respected and was even occasionally awed by Lance, I also said that he didn’t have what it took to win a major tour. Sure, he was an amazing one-day rider, winning classics and stages in some of the great races. But a three-week, 2,000-mile tour, with 200,000 of feet of climbing? That was something else entirely. To do this, I insisted, you must have three things: exceptional ability in time trials (races against the clock), superlative climbing power and—perhaps most important—a robust enough constitution to make it through a three-week race without a “bad patch,” as they say in the peloton.
I didn’t see these things in Lance. And, as a journalist covering the Tour in those years, my analysis seemed well founded, as he finished well back, or retired from the race after a few days. He would show brilliance, often winning stages, only to falter in the high mountains, or suffer a debilitating injury.
I remember thinking he would never win the Tour.
But, as would happen so often with Lance, I was wrong. Starting in 2000, I watched in amazement as he began a string of dominating performances that would result in seven consecutive Tours de France.
I can only remember thinking that—after covering national and world championships, three Olympic Games, and three Tours de France—that I was, in fact, a very bad judge of cycling talent. Lance’s devastatingly good performances impugned everything I knew—or thought I knew—about bike racing. How could I have erred so badly? Lance, in the space of a few quick seasons, had defied all the odds—and me.
In time, as I moved away from cycling journalism into other types of writing, my angst would give way to pride. I watched as the precocious 20-something I had once known went on to achieve remarkable, stratospheric fame. By the middle of the decade he had become not just a cycling star, but an international icon, an entire culture unto himself. The man I had spent so much time with was mountain biking with presidents, hanging with Michael Federer and Ben Harper, dating Sheryl Crow. His name graced every magazine worldwide. Were it not for an old Austin phone number that still resides in my contact list, I began to doubt that I had ever known him.
Then, a curious thing happened. No longer under the journalist’s unwritten oath of objectivity, I cheered for Lance, through his victories, his cancer, his charitable enterprises, his flirtations with the glitterati. I watched him dominate the high Alpine passes, dancing out of the saddle in his own inimitable way. I watched him mash the pedals mercilessly in time trials—and his opponents.
If I had doubted his capabilities, those doubts were now dispelled, obscured by the sheer,unrestrained joy of watching a physiological specimen dominate on a world stage.
Like millions of others, I wore the bracelet, and intoned the mantras: Livestrong! Go Lance!
Suggestions of cheating emerged along the way, but were easily dismissed as conniving, on the part of jealous competitors. There were those who doubted that such a degree of dominance could exist without some kind of artificial enhancement. But no one, including me, wanted to believe it.
And Armstrong, with his legions of lawyers, proved remarkably adept at fending off such skepticism, most notably with what has now become one the world’s most famous Tweets, fit neatly into less than 140 characters: “20+ year career. 500 drug controls worldwide, in and out of competition. Never a failed test. I rest my case.”
In 2011, I returned to cycling journalism to write a book about America’s first pro team, sponsored by 7-Eleven, the progenitor of Lance’s Motorola squad. In the forward I even went so far as to claim that Armstrong, by now universally acknowledged as the world’s greatest rider, was also the team’s greatest legacy. “While Armstrong never rode for the 7-Elevens,” I wrote, “he stood on the shoulders of all they had done.”
To me, it was direct a lineage, and Lance was the rightful heir to the success that American cyclists were achieving on a world stage. During my book tour, I repeated the line over and over. I wanted my own work to be part of the burgeoning Lance legacy.
I believed. I wanted to believe. Everyone did.
In June 2012, things began to change. After years of accusation, the U.S. Anti-doping Agency amassed evidence placing Lance at the center of one of the most remarkably sophisticated doping programs in sports history. Even more damning, nearly a dozen teammates came forward, after years of silence, to claim firsthand knowledge of Armstrong doping to enable his seven Tour titles.
Soon after, in what many viewed as an implicit admission of guilt, he elected not to contest the charges. In short order, his seven Tour titles were revoked.
Suddenly, it began to look like what I had observed all those years was, in fact, too good to be true. One of the world’s most effective Tweets had in fact been one of the world’s foremost lies.
The problem with heroes is they engender their own truth, their own weather system of right and wrong. We want to believe, forgive small transgressions. We become willingly blind.
In these moments, we lose ourselves to the world as we wish it would be.
And why not? Who doesn’t wish for a world in which there are people like Lance, supernatural beings capable of breaking sound barriers of human performance?
But there are times when the weight of the evidence inexorably overwhelms the dissonance we feel. We begin to doubt. And then we realize there are no miracles, only men, and they are only flesh.
I have not spoken to Lance in more than a decade. Where once we were familiar, he soon passed into another orbit entirely, beyond my reach and my station in life. Today, I would no sooner call him than I would call the president of the United States.
But I wonder: would he prefer those former days, when we orbited the same planetary system? Life for him was more modest then, but more manageable, and grounded in a kind of truth—even if it wasn’t nearly as exciting.
Like many others, I wanted to believe in what I saw as the truth inherent in Lance Armstrong. But at some point, the desire to believe is overwhelmed by the certainty of what is.
I erred in believing. We all erred. Heroes, like Lance, err even more, for the disservice they do to all of us. And in doing so, the world becomes a lesser place.
Featured image “Lance Armstrong MidiLibre 2002” by de:Benutzer:Hase