PART TWO
10
‘Okay, game on. No prisoners. Everybody’s going down’
—Lance Armstrong
Lance Armstrong’s silhouette appears suddenly, urgently in the hallway, underneath the enormous map of Texas by contemporary artist Tom Sachs that greets every visitor to his Austin home.
He has instructed me over email to get here at just gone eleven on this early spring day in 2015. His partner of eight years, a blonde-haired biology graduate from Colorado named Anna Hansen, has answered the door. She has warmly ushered me in and promised that Lance won’t be long. In the meantime, she asks, do I know Mark Higgins, Lance’s long-time manager, who has also just appeared over her shoulder? I doubt Higgins will remember me from back in the day, so I shake his hand and leave it at that. The three of us then exchange pleasantries – about when I got to the US, my Airbnb on the other side of town, the run Anna’s about to do – until the approaching jangle of golf clubs announces Armstrong’s arrival.
We have never properly met, unless one counts the uncivilized ping-pong of barked questions and answers in finish-line scrums and press conferences. Despite this, Armstrong doesn’t appear particularly wary. On the contrary.
‘Man, look at you! Hey, look at this guy, Anna! Look at the Englishman! Short sleeves? Dude, have you seen the weather? You’re going to be cold. Sure you don’t want a jacket? You got your clubs? Shoes? You got balls?’
‘Yeah,’ Anna interjects, ‘because he’s only got one ball.’
Armstrong has heard this one before, many times before, but still the laughter comes. ‘She’s good, huh? Real good.’
He grabs a waterproof jacket and golf shoes. Adidas, not Nike. Swooshes have been banned – literally covered up or thrown out of his garage – ever since the day in 2012 when, beginning with the Oregon-based sportswear giant, one by one eight of Armstrong’s eleven personal sponsors announced that they were ditching him over doping allegations. Conservative estimates put the future earnings Armstrong lost in the space of twenty-four hours at about $35 million. ‘That was a pretty bad day,’ Armstrong conceded to Oprah Winfrey a few months later. His baseball cap today bears the name not of a sports apparel company but an Aspen eatery, Cache Cache. The restaurant was another waypoint on Armstrong’s Via Crucis – the scene of a supposedly chance altercation with former teammate Tyler Hamilton in May 2011, a few days after Hamilton had blown a bit more of Armstrong’s cover on the 60 Minutes TV show. That night, Armstrong’s alleged threat that he would ‘destroy’ Hamilton on the witness stand and was going to make his life ‘a living hell’ represented a final act of defiance, a last stand at the Alamo. And here too Texas would lose out in the end.
Armstrong drives us to the course in his black SUV. The questions, his not mine, begin almost before we leave the driveway: So why a book on Jan? Who have you spoken to? Did he go through some of the same shit? You think he’s doing OK?
Over email, Armstrong has already made his fondness for Ullrich clear. A book on Jan? Cool. Wanna come and see me? You bet. Golf? Bring your A-game. Then, after the rat-a-tat-tat of two- and three-word replies, a significantly longer missive, and the warning: ‘And just for the record, not sure what your angle is with regards to Jan, but I wanna make it clear that I love Jan Ullrich. I respected him as a rival and cherished our time on the road together. I will not utter one negative word about him. So if you’re writing a hatchet piece (which I don’t think you are) then don’t bother flying to Texas.’
After around twenty minutes, we pull into the parking lot of the Barton Creek resort. Back when Armstrong was a teenager in Plano, Texas, there were two country clubs in town – one, kind of scruffy, on the east side of Highway 75, and another, a glistening, manicured playground for rich Republicans, on the west. An old pal, Scott Eder, told the French magazine Pédale in 2013 that the highway symbolized Plano’s class divide. ‘Even if he wasn’t thinking about conquering the world, he wanted the same clothes as the kids on the west. He wanted to live on the other side of the highway.’
Recent troubles notwithstanding, Armstrong has made it across the breach – but still appears to revel in the role of punkish arriviste. He is more at home talking smack with the teenage valet than etiquette with the on-course stewards. As we warm up on the range, he answers a call on his mobile in a familiar, spiky tone: ‘Don’t bore us, get to the chorus. I’m about to tee off . . .’ He then pulls out a wireless speaker, jams it into the cup holder in our golf cart and lets Springsteen serenade us to the first tee.
Despite his protestations to the contrary, Armstrong is a decent, well-coached golfer. His teacher, Chuck Cook, has played swing guru to major champions including Tom Kite, Keegan Bradley and the late Payne Stewart. Armstrong crams in over 200 rounds a year, usually for much more money than the fifty bucks being staked today. His backswing is fast, mechanical and tight, not unlike his old pedalling style. On and around the greens, he epitomizes that old maxim – that, in golf, you drive for show and putt for dough.
He says that golf provides both focus and escapism. Not that he ever can or seems to want to switch off. He is larger than life and relentlessly engaging company. On every tee, the wait for the three-ball in front gives him a few minutes to spin his wheels: on the meeting with his nemesis, US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) chief Travis Tygart, that is secretly scheduled for the day after our game; on his kids; on being sick of Austin, ‘because everyone here’s got a Lance Armstrong story’; on Tyler Hamilton and how ‘he was always the one pushing it, wanting to do crazy shit’; on the ‘arrogance and stupidity’ of his comeback – ‘the stupidest thing I’ve ever done’; on how Michele Ferrari, Armstrong’s most vilified aide, was ‘the fucking man’ when it came to training; on how he’s got another story for me in a minute – ‘Just wait until I hit this shot.’
Then, as his ball is still bounding across the turf 230 or 240 yards away – ‘I don’t hit it long, I’m always playing defence’ – he’s straight back into the flow, or rather back at the hideaway in Hawaii that he’s recently had to sell to cover legal fees. ‘What were we saying? Oh, my house in Hawaii? Yeah, Floyd took that.’
Indeed, the topic to which he returns most often and is clearly causing him considerable anguish is the ‘whistle-blower’ lawsuit brought by former teammate Floyd Landis. Armstrong hopes and believes it will finally end in ‘about a year, give or take’, with victory, if you can call it that.* ‘It’s all just bullshit,’ Armstrong says as we wait on one hole, kicking dirt off his spikes. ‘I’ve paid enough now. I mean, come on. Now it’s just . . . bullshit.’
‘Bullshit’ is also what he thinks of the way the media is still portraying him, in March 2015, two years on from USADA. ‘You know the one I hate? “The disgraced Lance Armstrong”. Disgraced? Disgraced?? Really? Ask Hinault. Ask Merckx. Ask anyone I raced with who won those Tours. Come up with something else . . .’
What would he suggest?
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘How about, “The Controversial Lance Armstrong”? Just not “disgraced”. I mean, come on . . .’
At moments like these, Armstrong sounds wounded, diminished in his once ironclad vainglory. But that is because this war is old and maybe now unwinnable. Going forward, it’ll be a question of picking his battles.
On one hole, a course steward admonishes us for driving our buggy off the cart path. Armstrong nods in acknowledgement, then turns away, muttering, ‘It was those women in front who snitched on us. Did you see that? Unbelievable.’
A minute later, he is still indignant. ‘Those tittle-tattlers. No one likes a snitch . . .’
Sometimes, I suspect, he gets a kick out of playing the part.
It doesn’t take Lance Armstrong’s goading about the long carry over a lake to Barton Creek’s Par 5 18th – ‘Go for it, dude! Don’t poop your pants . . .’ – for me to know that this is a man who believes in the value of taking risks.
In the late summer of 1996, three years after becoming the third youngest professional world road race champion of all time in Oslo, Lance Armstrong remained one of the hottest properties in the sport of professional cycling, despite his clear limitations in the long-form, mountain-laden three-week tours. That year’s Tour de France had been particularly disappointing for Armstrong, as he climbed off his bike, feeling wasted, after only a week of racing. Three months later, on 8 October, Armstrong ended his season in a conference room in Austin, telling the world through sobs that he had been diagnosed with testicular cancer. He had undergone his first chemo session just hours before addressing the media.
Oncologists at MD Anderson hospital in Houston gave him less than a 50 per cent chance of survival. The ensuing treatment was punishing. At one point, his haematocrit dropped to 25 per cent. Only a prescribed course of EPO, the banned elixir of his earlier and later athletic life, stopped him from dying.
By January 1997, Armstrong had completed a twelve-week course of chemo and, remarkably, was already pedalling. The question of whether he was still a bike racer awaited an answer. In the summer of 1996, Armstrong had agreed a two-year, $1.25 million-a-season contract with the French team, Cofidis, but a return to competition would still represent another almighty roll of the dice; an insurance policy with Lloyds of London stipulated that he could earn $1.5 million over the next five years, tax-free, as long as he didn’t race again. True to form and character, Armstrong gambled.
Cofidis, for their part, informed Armstrong that their contractual obligations in 1997 and 1998 were now contingent upon him passing a full medical exam. He – a man who had once declined an invitation to meet the king of Norway because his mother wasn’t on the ticket – told them to get fucked. As he would put it to Playboy in 2005: ‘Through my illness I learned rejection. I was written off. That was the moment I thought, Okay, game on. No prisoners. Everybody’s going down.’
Finally, the US Postal team bit on his agent’s pitch – a soul-stirring albeit niche comeback story that casual sports fans didn’t need a degree in modern languages or PhD in bicycle mechanics to understand. By December, Armstrong was going to Spain to see his old doctor, Michele Ferrari, having his blood drawn (haematocrit 41 per cent) and mapping out a strategy for 1998. Hell, he only needed to race once, maybe a couple of times, then quit and the world would gasp – which is what he nearly did after abandoning Paris–Nice in March. For a few weeks thereafter, he played golf and guzzled Tex-Mex until an epiphany of sorts on a training ride in Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains a few weeks later. As he would soon be writing in his autobiography: ‘As I rode upward, I reflected on my life, back to all points, my childhood, my early races, my illness, and how it changed me. Maybe it was the primitive act of climbing that made me confront the issues I’d been evading for weeks. It was time to quit stalling, I realized.’12
A couple of months later he was finishing fourth in the Vuelta a España – by far his best result to date in a three-week tour. One day in Spain, the recently retired Belgian rider Johan Bruyneel, who was working as a TV pundit, commended Armstrong on his ride. Armstrong returned the compliment by suggesting to the US Postal management that Bruyneel would be an ideal candidate for the position of directeur sportif.
Bruyneel accepted the offer. Soon he was sending Armstrong an email that he signed off with the tantalizing line: ‘You will look great on the podium of the Tour de France next year.’
We’re now back in Armstrong’s SUV, picking our way through the school-run traffic, on our way to his mansion on the west side of downtown Austin. He won our golf game on the seventeenth, holing a clutch putt for birdie. He says he intends to brag about the victory on Twitter. When I request that he doesn’t, he seems hurt. ‘What, you don’t want to be associated with me?’
Thankfully, finally, we’re soon back to discussing the real reason for my visit to Texas.
‘When got that mail from Johan, I thought, Hmm, kinda cool. I’ve never thought about that necessarily. The thing was, I had no idea how I was going to measure up against Jan in 1999. The only thing I could use to get a sense of what that level was like was talking to Kevin Livingston. He had climbed well in that ’98 Tour and trained with me every day in 1999. We’d go out on training rides that winter and then next spring and I’d tell Kevin, “I’ve really gotta work on my descending, because I’m going to be getting dropped on the climbs. I’ll have to catch up on the downhills . . .” But of course he’d done all the climbs with those guys in ’98, and he’d look at me, like, “Dude, you’re not getting dropped on the climbs.”
‘As for Ferrari, he would never . . . Ferrari was always very guarded on his predictions. You’d have an amazing test, an amazing lead-up to the Tour, and he’d look at you with a straight face and go, “You’ll be close.” He would never say, “You’re going to kill them. You’re going to win by X amount.” He was always very humble about it. And this would drive me crazy sometimes. I’d be like, “What? Did you not see the test I just did?” But that wasn’t his style. That’s also what makes him what he is.’
In the spring of 2015, I also meet Johan Bruyneel in London, where he lived for several years with his Spanish wife and young family. He tells me that he too had felt Ullrich would dominate the Tour after 1997, but that view had changed by early 1999, when he was ready to unleash Armstrong.
‘There was nothing to back up what we were thinking in the spring of 1999 except that fourth place in the Tour of Spain . . . but you don’t necessarily need to have been racing against these guys. I can remember a reconnaissance ride we did in the Pyrenees in the April of 1999. I had just retired, so I could easily compare what I could do with what I saw from Lance, and I remember thinking, This guy’s gonna win the Tour. Doesn’t matter what the other guys do. This guy’s got it. Or if it wasn’t Lance, I thought the guy who beat him was going to win the Tour.
‘Of course, Ullrich was always a fear,’ Bruyneel goes on. ‘He was the only guy we were scared of. You knew that physically he was super powerful and that, if he got everything right, he was going to win. But he never got everything right. I can remember the Tour of the Basque Country, the same April, in 1999, thinking it was just unbelievable, how out of shape he was. He was the last guy in front of the broom wagon. He was just huge. After that I thought we had less to worry about.’
As soon as we’re in the door, Armstrong beckons me through the hall and invites me to take a seat at his kitchen table. Asks whether I’d like a beer. I hesitate but the fridge door is already half open. He grabs two bottles of Shiner Bock, the beer with which he’d always celebrate his return home after a stint of racing in Europe. He sits down and slides one of the bottles across the tabletop. Asks where were we, in the car.
Ah, yeah, Ullrich – we were finally talking about Jan.
‘So yeah,’ Armstrong picks up. ‘I could see the media was exasperated. Like, “When’s he going to get his shit together?” But it endeared him to the fans – I mean, versus this robotic American.’
Armstrong takes a swig. Stretches his right arm towards me and places his hand palm-down on the marble.
‘I mean, they could say what they wanted about Jan . . . but he was the North Star. There’s your quote. And it’s true. He was the standard. He was the bar. Basso, wonderful guy. Klöden, Beloki . . . sure. But Jan? Jan gets me up early. Jan stops me having a beer. OK, there were years when he didn’t come through, but he was what I used to set my standards by. Nobody else.
‘I’ll tell you my favourite Jan story. Do you know about the 2005 victory party? This is my favourite story. This is Jan Ullrich. And this is why I love him. So we do the 2005 Tour, and I catch him in the prologue, which is just surreal, man. I go off the ramp, I nearly fucking unclip and fall off the front of the bike, I clip back in, then it’s just that straight shot out to Fuck-Knows-Where . . .’
‘Noirmoutier.’
‘Right, Noir-whatever. Anyway, Johan can see what’s happening. I hear him on the radio like, “You’re catching him.” Which I don’t really believe. But I keep going, and I’m getting closer and closer, until finally I can see him. And part of me was, like, I can’t go by this guy, I’m going to beat him over the next three weeks, but I can’t go by him here. But I did. So anyways, we do the Tour – which was meaningless for me, because I’d broken the record, there were no bonuses. I was just doing one more Tour so the team would get two more years of Discovery Channel sponsoring us. Then we get to Paris and we have our big party in the Crillon or Musée d’Orsay or Ritz – I can’t even remember where the fuck it was. Anyway, like an hour before this starts, our press guy, Jogi Müller, calls me and says he just got a call from Jan’s press guy and, you’re not going to believe this, but Jan wants to come and speak tonight. I said, “What, at our party?” He said yeah. And you know Jan’s English was not that good. But I say, “Allllriiight then . . .” ’
Another swig. Bottle down. He’s jumped ahead, way ahead in the timeline, we’re now in 2005, at the end not the beginning, but I don’t interrupt.
‘. . . So this motherfucker rolls up, into a crowd of 600 rabid Americans. And this guy, in his bad English – you could have heard a pin drop. He takes the mic, talks to me, makes a toast to me, talks to the crowd, because I was retiring, that was it for me, and he just sends me out. I mean, dude . . .’
Armstrong is shaking his head.
‘Dude . . . it was one of the nicest things anybody’s ever done for me.’
Armstrong has stopped shaking his head. Now he is pinching the peak of his Cache Cache baseball cap to cover his eyes, though it can’t conceal the trickle of saltwater down his cheeks.
Armstrong is crying.
Lance Armstrong is in his kitchen, sobbing, because Jan Ullrich’s few words of mangled English ten years ago were among the nicest things anyone’s ever done for him, in his forty-four years of being Lance Armstrong.
For exactly twenty-four seconds, no one speaks.
‘Yeah,’ he says finally. ‘Kinda funny, ain’t it?’