DON’T CHECK MY MOTHER AT THE DOOR

THE LIFE OF A ROAD CYCLIST MEANS HAVING

your feet clamped to the bike pedals churning at 20 to 40 miles per hour, for hours and hours and days on end across whole continents. It means gulping water and wolfing candy bars in the

saddle because you lose 10 to 12 liters of fluid and burn 6,000 calories a day at such a pace, and you don’t stop for anything, not even to piss, or to put on a raincoat. Nothing interrupts the

high-speed chess match that goes on in the tight pack of cyclists called the peloton as you hiss through the rain and labor up cold mountainsides, swerving over rain-slick pavement and

jouncing over cobblestones, knowing that a single wrong move by a nervous rider who grabs his brakes too hard or yanks too sharply on his handlebars can turn you and your bike into a heap of

twisted metal and scraped flesh.

I had no idea what I was getting into. When I left home at 18, my idea of a race was to leap on and start pedaling. I was called “brash” in my early days, and the tag has followed me ever since,

maybe deservedly. I was very young and I had a lot to learn, and I said and did some things that maybe I shouldn’t have, but I wasn’t trying to be a jerk. I was just Texan. The “Tore de Texas,”

the Spanish press named me.

In my first big international race, I did everything my coach told me not to do. It was at the 1990 amateur World Championships in Utsunomiya, Japan, a 115-mile road race over a tough course

with a long, hard climb. To make matters more difficult, it happened to be a sweltering day with temperatures in the 90s. I was competing as a member of the U.S. national team under Chris

Carmichael, a sandy-haired, freckled young coach who I didn’t know very well yet–and didn’t listen to.

Chris gave me strict instructions: I was to hang back in the pack for much of the race and look for his signal before making any kind of move. It was too hot and the course too arduous to try

to race in front, into the headwind. The smart thing to do was to draft and conserve my energy.

“I want you to wait,” Chris said. “I don’t want to see you near the front, catching any wind.”

I nodded, and moved to the start area. On the first lap, I did what he told me to and rode near the back. But then I couldn’t help myself; I wanted to test my legs. I began to move up. On the

second lap, I took the lead, and when I came by the checkpoint, I was all by myself, 45 seconds up on the field. I streaked past Chris. As I went by, I glanced over at him. He had his arms

spread wide, as if to say, “What are you doing?”

I grinned at him and gave him the Texas Longhorn sign: I waved, my pinky and forefinger extended in the air. Hook ‘em, horns.

Chris started yelling to the U.S. staff, “What is he doing?”

What was I doing? I was just going. It was a move that would become known as classic early Armstrong: a contrary and spectacularly ill-advised attack. I proceeded to go solo for the next

three laps, and built a lead of about a minute and a half. I was feeling pretty good about myself, when the heat started to get to me. Next thing I knew, 30 guys came up and joined me. With

half the race still to go, I was already suffering. I tried to keep riding at the front, but I didn’t have enough left. Sapped by the heat and the climbs, I finished llth.

Still, it was the best American finish in the history of the race, and by the time it ended, Chris was more pleased than angry. Afterward, we went to the hotel bar and drank a beer together

and talked. I wasn’t sure how I felt about Chris. When I first came out of Piano he had split the U.S. national team into two groups, and placed me with the “B” team, and I hadn’t quite

forgiven him for the slight. I would learn, however, that his easygoing manner came with a brotherly loyalty and a vast amount of cycling wisdom; he was a former Olympian, and had

competed with Greg LeMond as a young cyclist.

We sipped Kirin and went over the events of the day, laughing about them. Then suddenly Chris turned serious. He congratulated me for the llth-place finish, and said he liked what he saw.

“You weren’t afraid to fail,” he said. “You weren’t out there thinking, ‘What if I get caught?’ ” I absorbed the praise happily.

But then he added, “Of course, if you had known what you were doing and conserved your energy, you’d have been in the medals.”

Here I had done better than any American ever before, and Chris was suggesting it wasn’t good enough. In fact, in his subtle way, he was telling me that I had blown it. He kept talking. “I’m

serious. You can do a lot better,” he said. “I’m convinced you’re going to be a world champion. But there’s a lot of work to do.”

Chris pointed out that the top riders, the Marco Pantanis, the Miguel Indurains, were all as strong as or stronger than I was. “So is everybody you’re racing at this level,” he said. What

would separate me would be my tactics.

I had to learn how to race, and the only place to do it was on the bike. That first year, I must

have spent 200 days overseas, riding around Europe, because the true test was on the road, where there was no hiding in a 160-mile race. In the last part, you either had it or you didn’t.

At home, I settled in Austin, in the Texas hill country where stony, dark-green banks surround the town lake that’s fed by the wide, uneasy waters of the Colorado River. In Austin, nobody

seemed to care what I wore, or whether I “belonged” or not. In fact, I couldn’t find two people dressed alike, and some of the wealthiest people in town looked like vagrants. It was a town

that seemed to be made for the young, with an ever-evolving selection of bars and music clubs on 6th Street, and hole-in-the-wall Tex-Mex joints where I could eat chili peppers for sport.

It was also a great town for training, with endless bike trails and back roads to explore for miles around. I rented a small bungalow near the University of Texas campus, which was fitting since

I was a student, not in the classroom, of course, but on the bike.

Cycling is an intricate, highly politicized sport, and it’s far more of a team sport than the spectator realizes, as I was discovering. It has a language all its own, pieced together from a

sampling of European words and phrases, and a peculiar ethic as well. On any team, each rider has a job, and is responsible for a specific part of the race. The slower riders are called

domestiques–servants–because they do the less glamorous work of “pulling” up hills (”pulling” is cycling lingo for blocking the wind for the other riders) and protecting their team leader through

the various perils of a stage race. The team leader is the principal cyclist, the rider most capable of sprinting to a finish with 150 miles in his legs. I was starting as a domestique, but I would

gradually be groomed for the role of team leader.

I learned about the peloton–the massive pack of riders that makes up the main body of the race. To the spectator it seems like a radiant blur, humming as it goes by, but that colorful blur is rife

with contact, the clashing of handlebars, elbows, and knees, and it’s full of international intrigues and deals. The speed of the peloton varies. Sometimes it moves at 20 miles an hour,

the riders pedaling slow and chatting. Other times, the group is spanned out across the road and we’re going 40 miles an hour. Within the peloton, there are constant negotiations between

competing riders: pull me today, and I’ll pull you tomorrow. Give an inch, make a friend. You don’t make deals that compromise yourself or your team, of course, but you help other riders if

you can, so they might return the favor.

The politics could be ambiguous and confusing to a young rider, even upsetting, and I got a harsh lesson in them in early 1991. My plan was to race as an amateur through the 1992

Olympics in Barcelona, and to turn pro right afterward. In the meantime, I continued to race in the U.S. for Subaru-Montgomery. Technically, I was a member of two different teams:

internationally, I raced for the U.S. national team under Chris Carmichael, but domestically I competed for Subaru-Montgomery.

While I was overseas with the national team in ‘91, we entered a prestigious race in Italy called the Settimana Bergamasca. It was a pro-am stage race, a ten-day ride through northern Italy, and

some of the best cyclists in the world would be there. No American had ever won it–but our U.S. team under Chris had great morale and teamwork, and we felt we might just pull it off.

There was an awkwardness, however. The Subaru-Montgomery team was also entered, and I would be racing against them, riding in my stars and stripes, while they would wear their

Subaru-Montgomery jerseys. Nine days out often, they were my teammates, but for this race, we would be competitors.

Early in the race, a Subaru–Montgomery rider and friend of mine, Nate Reese, took the overall lead. But I was riding well, too. I moved into second. I was exultant; it seemed like the best of

both worlds to have the two of us riding at the front. But the Subaru-Montgomery team director didn’t feel the same way. He was not happy to see me in contention, and he let me know it.

Between two stages, he called me over. “You work for Nate,” he said to me. I stared at him, uncomprehending. Surely he didn’t mean I was supposed to hang back and play the role of

domestique to Nate? But that’s exactly what he did mean. “You’re not to attack,” he ordered. Then he told me straight out that I was obliged to let Nate win.

I was deeply loyal to the national team. Compared to the rest of the field, we were underdogs, a ragtag crew staying in a tiny hotel, three guys to a room, with no money. We were on such a

tight budget that Chris washed our water bottles each night and recycled them, while the pro teams like Subaru–Montgomery would throw theirs away after one use. If I could win the

Settimana Bergamasca, it would be a huge victory for the U.S. program, and for American cycling in general. But my trade-team manager was telling me to hold back.

I went to Chris and confessed that I was being told not to ride hard by the Subaru-Montgomery director. “Lance, this is your race to win,” Chris said. “You can’t not attack. It’s yours.”

The next day, I rode hard. Imagine: you’re going up a hill with 100 guys in the peloton. Gradually, 50 guys get dropped, then 20 more get dropped, and then 10 more. You’re down to

15 or 20 guys. It’s a race of attrition. To make things even harder on your competitors, you attack–raise the tempo even more. Those remaining riders who can’t keep up get dropped, too.

That’s the essence of road racing.

But I was supposed to wait for Nate. The more I thought about it, it was not even an option. I said to myself, If he’s strong enough to stay here, fine. If he gets dropped, I’m not waiting for

him. He got dropped. And I didn’t wait for him.

I went with the leaders, and at the end of the day I wore the leader’s jersey, while Nate had lost about 20 minutes or so. The Subaru-Montgomery team director was furious, and afterward, he

angrily confronted Chris and me. “What are you trying to do?” he asked. Chris jumped to my defense.

“Hey, this is a bike race,” Chris said. “He’s riding to win.”

As we walked away, I was deeply upset. On the one hand I felt betrayed and abandoned by the team director, and on the other, I still struggled with guilt and conflicting loyalty. That night,

Chris and I sat down to talk again. “Look, if people are saying you shouldn’t attack, they aren’t thinking about what’s best for you,” Chris said. “This is a historic race and an American has

never won it, and you’re riding it with the best pros in Italy. If you win, it’s great for your career. What’s more, you’re riding for the U.S. national team. If you don’t do your best, what message

does that send?”

In my opinion, it would have been the worst possible message: “Sorry I’m in the lead–I have to let this other guy win because he’s a pro.” I couldn’t do it. Yet I was worried that the team

director could damage my future as a pro by bad-mouthing me.

Chris said, “Don’t worry, you just do what you think is right. If you win this race, you’re going to be set.”

I wanted to talk to my mother. I could barely figure out the phones and how to dial the States, but I finally got through to her.

“Son, what’s going on?” she said.

I explained the situation, so upset I was practically stuttering. “Mom, I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I’m in one of the leading positions, but the Subaru director is telling me Nate Reese is

going to win, and I have to help him.”

My mother listened, and then she said, “Lance, if you feel like you can win the race, you do it.”

“I think I can.”

“Then to hell with them,” she said. “You’re going to win this race. Don’t let anybody intimidate you–you put your head down, and you race.”

I put my head down, and I raced. I was an unpopular leader, and not just with Subaru-Montgomery; the Italian race fans lining the course were so incensed that an American

was in front that they scattered glass and thumbtacks in the road, hoping I would blow a tire. But as the race wore on, the Italians steadily warmed to me, and by the time I crossed the finish

line, they cheered.

I was the winner. I had done it, given the U.S. national team a victory in a European race. Our team was ecstatic, and so was Chris. That night, as I came down from the podium, Chris told

me something I’ve never forgotten.

“You’re gonna win the Tour de France one day,” he said.

CYCLING is A SPORT THAT EMBARRASSES YOUTH, rather than rewards it. As I had

planned, I turned pro immediately after the Olympics–and immediately finished dead last in my very first race.

I’d had a disappointing performance in the Barcelona Games, finishing 14th in the road race, but somehow I managed to impress one of the most influential men in American cycling, a man

named Jim Ochowicz, who took a chance and signed me to a pro contract. “Och,” as everybody called him, was the director of a team sponsored by Motorola, made up primarily of American

riders. Och was a cycling pioneer: in 1985 he had organized the first predominantly American squad to race overseas, and proven that U.S. riders could compete

in the traditionally European sport. (One of those early riders for Och’s Team 7-Eleven was Chris Carmichael.) A year later, Greg LeMond won the 1986 Tour de France and brought the

event into the American consciousness.

Och was always on the lookout for rising young Americans, and Chris steered me toward him. He introduced us one night in the midst of the Tour Du Pont, the biggest stage race held on

American soil. I went to Och’s hotel for what amounted to a job interview. I didn’t realize it then, but I was meeting my surrogate father.

My first impression was of a gangly, soft-spoken man in his 40s with an easy laugh and a broad, toothy smile. We sat around and chatted about where I came from, and he told me what he was

looking for in a rider: he wanted to find a young American who might follow in LeMond’s footsteps and win the Tour de France. Och’s teams had placed riders fourth on a couple of

different occasions, but had never won it.

Och asked me what my own ambition was. “I want to be the best rider there is,” I said. “I want to go to Europe and be a pro. I don’t want to just be good at it, I want to be the best.” That was

good enough for Och; he handed me a contract and packed me off to Europe.

My first race was the Clasica San Sebastian. They may call it a “classic,” but in reality it’s a horribly punishing single-day race in which riders cover more than a hundred miles, frequently

over bone-rattling terrain, in terrible weather. It is atmospheric and historic, and notoriously brutal. San Sebastian turned out to be a gorgeous seaside town in Basque country, but the day

of my debut was gray, pouring rain, and bit-ingly cold. There is nothing more uncomfortable than riding in the rain, because you can never, ever get warm. Your Lycra jersey is nothing more

than a second skin. Cold rain soaks it, plastering it to your body, so the chill mingles with your sweat and seeps down into your bones. Your muscles seize up and grow heavy with frigid,

sodden exhaustion.

The day of my debut, it rained so hard it hurt. As we started off into the stinging, icy downpour, I quickly faded to the back, and as the day wore on, I slipped farther and farther behind,

shivering and struggling to pedal. Soon, I was in last place. Ahead of me, the field was growing thinner as riders began to give up. Every so often one would pull over to the side of the road and

abandon the race. I was tempted to do the same, to squeeze the brakes, rise up from the bars,

and coast to the side of the road. It would be so easy. But I couldn’t, not in my first pro start. It would be too humiliating. What would my teammates think? I wasn’t a quitter.

Why don’t you just quit?

Son, you never quit.

Fifty riders dropped out, but I kept pedaling. I came in dead last in the field of 111 riders. I crossed the finish line almost half an hour behind the winner, and as I churned up the last hill,

the Spanish crowd began to laugh and hiss at me. “Look at the sorry one in last place,” one jeered.

A few hours later, I sat in the Madrid airport, slumped in a chair. I wanted to quit the entire sport. It was the most sobering race of my life; on my way to San Sebastian, I had actually

thought I had a chance of winning, and now I wondered if I could compete at all. They had laughed at me.

Professional cycling was going to be a lot harder than I’d thought; the pace was faster, the terrain tougher, the competition more fit than I ever imagined. I pulled a sheaf of unused plane

tickets out of my pocket. Among them, I had a return portion to the States. I considered using it. Maybe I should just go home, I thought, and find something else to do, something I was good

at.

I went to a pay phone and called Chris Carmichael. I told him how depressed I was, and that I was considering quitting. Chris just listened, and then he said, “Lance, you are going to learn

more from that experience than any other race in your whole life.” I was right to have stayed in and finished, to prove to my new teammates that I was a tough rider. If they were going to rely

on me, they needed to know I wasn’t a quitter. Now they did.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’ll keep going.”

I hung up, and boarded the plane for the next race. I had just two days off, and then I was scheduled to compete in the Championship of Zurich. I had a lot to prove, to myself and

everyone else–and unless my heart exploded in my chest, I was not going to be last again.

I finished second in Zurich. I attacked from the start and stayed on the attack for practically the entire race. I had little or no idea tactically how to ride in the race–I just put my head down and

bulled through it, and when I stepped onto the medal podium it was more with relief than elation. Okay, I thought to myself, I think I can do this after all.

I called Chris Carmichael. “See?” Chris said. In the space of just a few days I had gone from depressed rookie to legitimate competitor. The turnaround provoked murmurs around the sport:

Who’s this guy and what’s he all about? people wanted to know.

It was a question I still needed to answer for myself.

AN AMERICAN IN CYCLING WAS COMPARABLE TO A French baseball team in the World Series. I was a gate-crasher in a revered and time-honored sport, and I had little or no

concept of its rules, written and unwritten, or its etiquette. Let’s just say that my Texas manners didn’t exactly play well on the continent.

There was a big difference between the discreet jockeying of European cycling, and the swaggering, trash-talking American idea of competition I was reared with. Like most

Americans, I grew up oblivious to cycling; it wasn’t until LeMond’s victory in the ‘86 Tour that I really noticed the sport. There was a way things were done, and attitudes that I didn’t

understand, and even when I did understand them I didn’t feel I had to be a part of them. In fact, I ignored them.

I raced with no respect. Absolutely none. I paraded, mouthed off, shoved my fists in the air. I never backed down. The journalists loved me; I was different, I made good copy, I was colorful.

But I was making enemies.

A road is only so wide. Riders are constantly moving around, fighting for position, and often the smart and diplomatic thing to do is to let a fellow rider in. In a long stage race, you give a little

to make a friend, because you might need one later. Give an inch, make a friend. But I wouldn’t do it. Partly it was my character at the time: I was insecure and defensive, not totally confident

of how strong I was. I was still the kid from Piano with the chip on my shoulder, riding headlong, pedaling out of anger. I didn’t think I could afford to give up inches.

Sometimes I would yell at other riders in the peloton, in frustration: “Pull or get out of the way!” I didn’t understand yet that for various reasons a guy might sit on the back, maybe because his

team leader told him to, or because he was tired and hurting. It wasn’t his job to move out of my way, or to work harder so I could ride at a faster pace. (I don’t get so riled up about those things

anymore, and often I’m the one who sits on the back, hurting.)

I would learn that in the peloton, other riders can totally mess you up, just to keep you from winning. There is a term in cycling, “flicking.” It’s a derivative of the German word ficken,

which means “to fuck.” If you flick somebody in the peloton, it means to screw him, just to get him. There’s a lot of flicking in the peloton.

Guys would flick me just to flick me. They would race to see that I didn’t win, simply because they didn’t like me. They could cut me off. They could isolate me, and make me ride slower, or

they could surge and push the pace, making me work harder than I wanted to, weakening me. Fortunately I was surrounded by some protective teammates, guys like Sean Yates, Steve Bauer,

and Frankie Andreu, who tried to gently explain that I wasn’t doing myself any good, or them either. “Lance, you’ve got to try to control yourself, you’re making enemies,” Frankie would say.

They seemed to understand that I had some maturing to do, and if they were exasperated with me, they kept it to themselves, and patiently steered me in the right direction.

Teammates are critical in cycling–I had eight of them on the Motorola squad, and I needed each and every one. On a severe climb it could save me thirty percent of my energy to ride behind a

colleague, drafting, “sitting on his wheel.” Or, on a windy day, my eight teammates would stay out in front of me, shielding me and saving me up to 50 percent of the work I’d have to do

otherwise. Every team needs guys who are sprinters, guys who are climbers, guys willing to do the dirty work. It was very important to recognize the effort of each person involved–and not to

waste it. “Who’s going to work hard for someone who doesn’t win?” Och asked me, and it was a good question.

You don’t win a road race all on your own. You need your teammates–and you need the goodwill and cooperation of your competitors, too. People had to want to ride for you, and with

you. But in those first months, a couple of my competitors literally wanted to punch me out.

I would insult great European champions. In one of my first races as a pro, the Tour of the Mediterranean, I encountered Moreno Argentin, a very serious, very respected Italian cyclist. He

was one of the dons of the sport, a former World Champion who had won races all over the continent. But I surged right up to the front and challenged him. There were 150 guys bunched

all together, jockeying for position, flicking, coming over on each other, and pushing each other out of the way.

As I drew even with Argentin, he glanced at me, vaguely surprised, and said, “What are you doing here, Bishop?”

For some reason it infuriated me. He didn’t know my name. He thought I was Andy Bishop, another member of the American team. I thought, This guy doesn’t know my name?

“Fuck you, Chiapucci!” I said, calling him by the name of one of his teammates.

Argentin did a double take, incredulous. He was the capo, the boss, and to him I was a faceless young American who had yet to win anything, yet here I was cussing him out. But I’d had a

number of promising results, and in my own mind, he should have known who I was.

“Hey, Chiapucci,” I said. “My name’s Lance Armstrong, and by the end of this race you’ll know it.”

For the rest of the race, my sole aim was to throw Argentin off his pedestal headfirst. But in the end, I faded. It was a five-day stage race, and I couldn’t keep up–I was too inexperienced.

Afterward, Argentin came to our team compound, screaming. He ranted at my teammates about my behavior. That was part of the etiquette too; if a young rider was becoming a problem, it was

up to the older riders to get him in line. Roughly translated, what Argentin was saying was, “You need to teach him some manners.”

A few days later, I entered a race in Italy, this one the Trophee Laigueglia, a one-day classic.

The Trophee was considered an automatic win for Argentin, and I knew it. The favorites in any race in Italy were, of course, the Italians, and especially their leader Argentin. One thing you

didn’t do to a veteran cyclist was disrespect him in his home country, in front of his fans and sponsors. But I went after him again. I challenged him when nobody else would, and this time

the result was different. In the Trophee Laigueglia, I won the duel.

At the end of the race, it was a breakaway of four riders, and at the front were Argentin, Chiapucci, a Venezuelan named Sierra–and me. I hurled myself through the final sprint, and

took the lead. Argentin couldn’t believe he was going to lose to me, the loudmouth American.

He then did something that has always stayed with me. Five yards from the finish line, he braked. He locked up his wheels–intentionally. He took fourth, out of the medals. I won the

race.

There are three places on a podium, and Argentin didn’t want to stand beside me. In an odd way, it made more of an impression on me than any lecture or fistfight could have. What he was

saying was that he didn’t respect me. It was a curiously elegant form of insult, and an effective one.

In the years since then, I’ve grown up and learned to admire things Italian: their exquisite manners, art, food, and articulacy, not to mention their great rider, Moreno Argentin. In fact,

Argentin and I have become good friends. I have a great deal of affection for him, and when we see each other these days, we embrace, Italian style, and laugh.

MY RESULTS CONTINUED TO VEER UP AND DOWN, AS

crazily as I wove through a peloton. I’d attack anytime. I’d just go. Someone would surge, and I’d counter, not out of any sense of real strategy, but as if to say, “Is that all you got?”

I had my share of results because I was a strong kid, and I rode on the tactics and coattails of others, but much of the time I was too aggressive, repeating the same critical mistake I’d made

riding for Chris Carmichael back in Japan: I’d charge to the front and ride all by myself, and then falter. Sometimes I didn’t even finish in the top 20. Afterward one of my teammates would ask,

“What the hell were you doing?”

“I felt good,” I’d say, lamely.

But I was fortunate to ride for two very smart, sensitive coaches: I continued to train with Chris as part of the national team, while Och and his team director, Henny Kuiper, managed my daily

racing for Motorola. They spent a lot of time on the phone comparing notes, and they recognized and agreed on something important: my strength was the sort you couldn’t teach or

train. You can teach someone how to control their strength, but you can’t teach them to be strong.

While my aggression wasn’t winning me friends in the peloton, it might become a valuable asset one day, they suspected. Och and Chris felt that endurance events were not only about suffering

pain, but about inflicting it, too, and in my attacking nature they saw the beginnings of something predatory. “You ever hear about how when you stab somebody, it’s really personal?”

Chris said once. “Well, a bike race is that kind of personal. Don’t kid yourself. It’s a knife fight.”

Och and Chris felt that if I ever gained control of my temperament, I’d be a rider to reckon with. In the meantime they handled me very carefully, intuiting that if they started yelling at me, I

would most likely turn off, or rebel. They decided the lessons should sink in slowly.

There are some things you learn better through experience, and Och and Chris let me figure it out on my own. At first, I never evaluated my races. I’d think, “I was the strongest rider out

there; those guys couldn’t keep up with me.” But when I lost several races, I was forced to think again, and one day it finally occurred to me: “Wait a minute. If I’m the strongest guy, why didn’t

I win?”

Slowly, steadily, Och and Chris passed along their knowledge of the character of various courses, and the way a race evolves tactically. “There are moments when you can use your

energy to your benefit, and there are moments when you use it to no avail. That’s a waste,” Och said.

I began to listen to the other riders, and let them rein me in. I roomed with two veterans, Sean Yates and Steve Bauer, who had a lot of influence over me. I fed off them, picked up a lot of

knowledge just sitting around the dinner table. They helped to keep my feet on the ground. I was Mr. Energy, bouncing off the walls, saying things like, “Let’s go out there and kick butt!”

They would roll their eyes.

Och not only tamed me; more important, he educated me. I was uncomfortable living in Europe seven months out the year; I missed my Shiner Bock beer and Mexican food, I missed the hot,

dry Texas fields, and I missed my apartment in Austin, where I had a longhorn skull over the fireplace mantel covered in red, white, and blue leather, with a Lone Star on his forehead. I

whined about the cars, the hotels, the food. “Why are we staying at this dump?” I’d say. I was learning a cycling tradition: the discomfort of the sport extends to the accommodations. Some of

the hotels we stayed in made Motel 6 look pretty nice–there were crumbs on the bare floors and hairs in the bed-sheets. To me, the meat was mysterious, the pasta was soggy, and the coffee

tasted like brown water. But eventually I became acclimated, and thanks to my teammates, my discomfort got to be funny. We’d pull up in front of our next hotel, and they’d just wait for me

to start complaining.

When I look back at the raw young rider and person I was, I feel impatience with him, but I also feel some sympathy. Underneath the tough talk and the combativeness and the bitching, I was

afraid. I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of the train schedules and the airports and the roads. I was afraid of the phones, because I didn’t know how to dial them. I was afraid of the

menus, because I couldn’t read them.

Once, at a dinner for some Japanese business executives hosted by Och, I particularly distinguished myself. Och asked that each of the riders introduce himself, stating his name and

country. I stood up. “Hello, I’m Lance from Texas,” I boomed. The whole party broke up. They were laughing at me again.

But inevitably, living in Europe began to polish me. I rented an apartment in Lake Como, Italy, and was charmed by that misty, dusty town tucked in the Italian Alps. Och was a wine lover,

and I benefited from his taste, learning to recognize fine food and fine wine. I discovered I had a knack for languages. I was beginning to speak bits of Spanish, Italian, and French, and I could

even limp around in Dutch if I had to. I window-shopped through Milan, where I learned what a really handsome suit looked like. One afternoon I walked into the Duomo, and in that instant all

of my ideas about art changed forever. I was overwhelmed by the color and proportion of it, by the gray stillness in the archways, the warm parchment glow of the candles and the soaring

stained glass, the eloquence of the sculptures.

As the summer approached, I was growing up. On the bike, things began to come together and my riding steadied. “It’s all happening,” Och said. And it was. An American race sponsor, Thrift

Drugs, put up a $1 million bonus for anyone who could win the Triple Crown of Cycling, a sweep of three prestigious races in the U.S. I fixated on it. Each race was different: to get the

bonus you’d have to win a tough one-day race in Pittsburgh, then a six-day stage race in West Virginia, and finally the U.S. Pro Championships, which was a one-day road race covering 156

miles through Philadelphia. It was a long shot, the promoters knew. Only a complete rider could win it: you’d have to be a sprinter, a climber, and a stage racer rolled into one, and most

important, you’d have to be thoroughly consistent–something I hadn’t yet been.

All the riders talked about winning the bonus, and in the next breath we’d talk about how impossible it was. But one night when I was on the phone with my mother she asked me, “What

are the odds of winning that thing?”

I said, “Good.”

By June I had won the first two legs, and the press was going crazy and the promoters were reeling. All that remained was the U.S. Pro Championships in Philly–but I would have 119 other

cyclists trying to stop me. The anticipation was huge; an estimated half a million people would line the route.

The day before the race I called my mother and asked her to fly up to Philadelphia. On such short notice, she’d have to pay almost $1,000 round-trip, but she decided it was like buying a

lottery ticket–if she didn’t come, and I won, she’d always regret not being there.

I was resolved to ride a smart race, no irrational headfirst charges. Think the race through, I told myself.

For most of the day, that’s what I did. Then, with about 20 miles left, I went. I attacked on the most notoriously steep part of the course–Manayunk–and as I did, I was almost in a rage. I don’t

know what happened–all I know is that I leaped out of the seat and hammered down on the pedals, and as I did so I screamed for five full seconds. I opened up a huge gap on the field.

By the second-to-last lap, I had enough of a lead to blow my mother a kiss. I crossed the finish line with the biggest winning margin in race history. I dismounted in a swarm of reporters, but I

broke away from them and went straight to my mom, and we put our faces in each other’s shoulder and cried.

That was the start of a dreamlike summer season. Next, I won a surprise victory in a stage of the Tour de France with another late charge: at the end of a 114-mile ride from Chalons-sur-Marne

to Verdun, I nearly crashed into the race barriers as I sprinted away from the pack over the last 50 yards to the finish. A Tour stage was considered an extremely valuable victory in its own

right, and at 21,1 was the youngest man ever to win one.

But to show you just how experienced you have to be to compete in the Tour, I had to pull out of the race a couple of days later, incapable of continuing. I abandoned after the 12th stage, in

97th place and shivering. The Alps got me; they were “too long and too cold,” I told reporters afterward. I fell so far behind that when I got to the finish line, the team car had already left for

the hotel. I had to walk back to our rooms, pushing my bike up a gravel trail. “As if the stage wasn’t enough, we have to climb this thing,” I told the press. I wasn’t physically mature enough

yet to ride the arduous mountain stages.

I still struggled with impatience at times. I would ride smart for a while, and then backslide. I just couldn’t seem to get it through my head that in order to win I had to ride more slowly at

first. It took some time to reconcile myself to the notion that being patient was different from being weak, and that racing strategically didn’t mean giving less than all I had.

With only a week to go before the World Championships, I made a typical blunder in the championship of Zurich and used myself up before the critical part of the race. Again, I didn’t

even finish in the Top 20. Och could have lost his temper with me; instead he stayed over in Zurich for the next two days and went riding with me. He was certain I could win at the Worlds

in Oslo–but only if I rode intelligently. As we trained together he chatted to me about self-control.

“The only thing you have to do is wait,” he said. “Just wait. Two or three laps is soon enough. Anything earlier and you’ll waste your chance to win. But after that, you can attack as many

times as you want.”

There were no ordinary cyclists in the World Championships. I would be facing big riders, at their peak, and the favorite was Miguel Indurain, who had just come off of his third victory in

the Tour de France. If I wanted to win I’d have to overcome some long historical odds; no

21-year-old had ever won a world title in cycling.

In the last few days leading up to the race, I called my mother again, and asked her to come over and stay with me. I didn’t want to go through it alone, and she had always been a source of

confidence for me. Also, I wanted her to see me race in that company. She took some vacation time from Ericsson and flew over to join me, and stayed with me in my hotel room.

She took care of me, the way she used to. She did my laundry in the sink, saw that I had what I wanted to eat, answered the phone, and made sure I got my rest. I didn’t have to talk cycling

with her, or explain how I felt–she just understood. The closer we got to that day, the quieter I grew. I shut down, planning the race in my mind. She just read by a small lamp while I stared at

the ceiling or napped.

Finally race day arrived–but when I awoke, it was raining. I opened my eyes and saw drops on the windowpanes. The hated, dreaded rain, the source of so much anguish and embarrassment in

San Sebastian.

It rained torrentially, all day long. But there was one person who suffered in the rain more than I did that day: my mother. She sat in a grandstand in the rain for seven hours, and never once got

up. There was a big screen mounted in front of the grandstand so the crowd could watch us out on the 18.4-kilometer course, and she sat there, drenched, watching riders crash all over the

course.

When it rains in Europe the roads become covered with a slick sort of residue, made of dust and petrol. Guys were thrown off their bikes right and lef1″, their wheels sliding out from under

them. I crashed, too, twice. But each time I recovered quickly, got back on the bike, and rejoined the race, still in contention.

Through it all, I waited, and waited. I held back, just as Och had told me to. With 14 laps to go, I was in the lead group–and right there was Indurain, the bravura rider from Spain. Finally, on

the second-to-last climb, I attacked. I charged up the hill and reached the peak with my wheel in front of the pack. I hurtled down the descent, and then soared right into another climb, a steep

ascent called the Ekeberg, with the other riders right on my back. I said to myself, “I’ve got to go right now, with everything I’ve ever gone with,” and I rose from the seat and attacked again,

and this time I opened up a gap.

On the other side of the Ekeberg was another long, dangerous descent, this one of four kilometers, and in the rain anything could happen; the wheels could disappear out from under

you as the entire road became a slick. But I took the turns hard and tight, and at the bottom, I glanced over my shoulder to see who was still with me.

No one.

I panicked. You made the same old mistake, I thought, desperately, you went too early. I must

have forgotten what lap it was. Surely there was still a lap to go, because a lead like this was too good to be true.

I glanced down and checked my computer. It was the last lap.

I was going to win.

Over the last 700 meters, I started celebrating. I pumped my fists and my arms in the air, I blew kisses, and I bowed to the crowd. As I crossed the finish line, I practically high-kicked like a

Rockette. Finally, I braked and dismounted, and in the crowds of people, the first thing I did was look for my mother. I found her, and we stood there in the rain, hugging. I said, “We did it!

We did it.” We both began to cry.

At some point in all of the post-race confusion and celebration and ceremony, a royal escort arrived to inform me that King Harald of Norway wanted to greet me. I nodded and said, “Come

on, Mom. Let’s go meet the king.”

She said, “Well, okay.”

We began to move through the security checkpoints. Finally, we approached a door, behind which the king was waiting to give me a private audience. A security guard stopped us. “She’ll

have to stop here,” the royal escort told us. “The king will greet you alone.”

“I don’t check my mother at the door,” I said.

I grabbed her arm and turned around to leave. “Come on, let’s go,” I said. I had no intention of going anywhere without her.

The escort relented. “All right. Please, come with me.” And we met the king, who was a very nice man. Our audience was very short, and polite, and then we went back to celebrating.

It seemed like the end of something for my mother and me, a finish line. The tough part of the fight was over; there would be no more naysayers telling us we wouldn’t amount to anything, no

more concerns about bills or scrabbling for equipment and plane tickets. Maybe it was the end of the long, hard climb of childhood.

ALTHOUGH I WAS A WORLD CHAMPION, I STILL HAD plenty of learning to do, and the next three years were a process of testing and refinement. I had other successes, but life from

now on would be a matter of incremental improvements, of seeking the tiniest margin that might separate me from the other elite riders.

There was a science to winning. The spectator rarely sees the technical side of cycling, but behind the gorgeous rainbow blur of the peloton is the more boring reality that road racing is a

carefully calibrated thing, and often a race is won by a mere fraction of acceleration that was

generated in a performance lab or a wind tunnel or a velodrome long before the race ever started. Cyclists are computer slaves; we hover over precise calculations of cadence, efficiency,

force, and wattage. I was constantly sitting on a stationary bike with electrodes all over my body, looking for different positions on the bike that might gain mere seconds, or a piece of

equipment that might be a little bit more aerodynamic.

Just a few weeks after winning the Worlds, I went into a performance lab at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs with Chris Carmichael. Despite my big year I still had

some critical weaknesses, and I spent several days in the lab, plastered with electrodes while doctors jabbed me with pins for blood tests. The idea was to determine my various thresholds

and breaking points, and thus to figure out how I could increase my efficiency on the bike. They looked at my heart rate, my VO

2 max, and in one day alone, they pricked my thumb 15 times to check my blood.

We wanted to determine what my maximum effort was, and how long I could sustain it. We set out to learn my optimum cadence: what was my most efficient pedal speed, and where were the

weaknesses in my pedaling technique, the dead spots where I was wasting energy? My stroke was a symmetrical sledgehammer, straight up and down, and I was expending too much work

without getting enough speed from it. We went into a velodrome to look at my position on the bike and determine where I was losing power. The idea in cycling is to generate the most speed

with the least amount of work; watts indicate the amount of work you are doing as you pedal. We shifted me lower on the bike, and there was an immediate improvement.

At about the same time, I met the legendary Belgian rider Eddy Merckx, five-time winner of the Tour de France, and one of the most ferociously attacking riders who’s ever lived. I had heard all

the stories about Merckx, what a brave, hard-charging rider he was, and I thought that was the kind of rider I wanted to be. I didn’t just want to win, I wanted to win a certain way. We

became friends. Eddy told me that I could win a Tour de France someday–but that I needed to lose weight. I was built like a linebacker, with a thick neck and slabs of muscle in my chest,

remnants of my career as a swimmer and triath-lete. Eddy explained that it was hard to haul all of that weight up and down mountains over three weeks. I was still racing partly on raw power;

to win a Tour de France, I would have to find a way to lose weight without losing strength. So I quit eating pastry, and laid off Tex-Mex, and understood that I would have to find a new kind of

strength, that inner strength called self-discipline.

By 1995, I still had not completed an entire Tour de France, only portions. My coaches didn’t think I was ready, and they were right; I had neither the body nor the mental toughness yet to

endure the hardship. A young rider has to be carefully walked through the process and developed over years until he is ready to finish the race, and finish it healthy. I was steadily

improving: in ‘94 I was second in Liege-Bastogne-Liege, second in San Sebastian, and second in the Tour Du Pont, and in the first part of ‘95 I won San Sebastian and won the Tour Du Pont.

But now Och felt I needed to move to another level, I needed to finish the Tour de France, not just start it. It was time for me to learn exactly what it took to win the biggest stage race in the

world.

My reputation was as a single-day racer: show me the start line and I would win on adrenaline and anger, chopping off my competitors one by one. I could push myself to a threshold of pain

no one else was willing to match, and I would bite somebody’s head off to win a race.

But the Tour was another thing entirely. If you raced that way in the Tour, you would have to drop out after two days. It required a longer view. The Tour was a matter of mustering the right

resources at the right times, of patiently feeding out your strength at the necessary level, with no wasted motion or energy. It was a matter of continuing to ride and ride, no matter how

uninspired you felt, when there was no rush of adrenaline left to push you.

If there is a defining characteristic of a man as opposed to a boy, maybe it’s patience. In 1995,1 finally gained an understanding of the demanding nature of the Tour and all of its extraordinary

tests and dangers. I finished it, and I finished strong, winning a stage in the closing days. But the knowledge came at too high a price, and I would just as soon not have learned it the way I

did.

Late in the race, our Motorola teammate, Fabio Casartelli, the 1992 Olympic champion, was killed on a high-speed descent. On a descent, you ride single file, and if one rider goes down, it

can cause a terrible chain reaction. Fabio didn’t crash alone; 20 riders went down with him. But he hit a curb with the back of his head and fractured his neck and skull.

I went by too fast to see much. A lot of riders were down, and everybody was crouched around someone lying on the ground, but you see that sort of thing a lot in the Tour. It was only a while

later that I learned via the team radio what had happened: Fabio was dead. When they tell you something like that, you almost don’t believe it.

It was one of the longest days of my life. Fabio was not only the young hope of Italian cycling, he was a new husband and a new father. His baby was just a month old.

We had to keep riding, to finish the stage even though we were distraught and sick with shock. I had known Fabio since I first started racing internationally in ‘91. He lived right outside of

Como where I kept my apartment, and we had competed against each other at the Barcelona Olympics in ‘92, when he won the gold medal. He was a very relaxed, fun-loving man, a little

goofy, a joker. Some of the top Italians were more serious, or macho, but Fabio wasn’t like that. He was all sweetness.

That night we had a Motorola team meeting to discuss whether we should keep riding or not. We were split. Half of us wanted to quit and go home and cry with our families and friends, and

half of us wanted to keep riding in honor of Fabio. Personally, I wanted to stop; I simply didn’t think I had the heart to ride a bike. It was the first time I had encountered death, and genuine

grief, and I didn’t know how to handle it. But then Fabio’s wife came to see us, and she said she wanted us to keep riding, because she felt that was what Fabio would have wanted. So we sat

in the grass behind the hotel, said a few prayers, and decided to stay in.

The next day the peloton rode in honor of Fabio, and gave our team a ceremonial stage victory. It was another long, terrible day– eight hours on the bike, with everybody grieving. The peloton

did not race. Instead we rode in quiet formation. It was virtually a funeral procession, and at last our team rode across the finish line, while, behind us, Fabio’s bike was mounted atop the

support car with a black ribbon.

The following morning we began the race again in earnest, and rode into Bordeaux. Next was a stage into Limoges, and that night, Och came around to our rooms and told the team that Fabio

had had two goals in the Tour: he wanted to finish the race, and he especially wanted to try to win the stage into Limoges. As soon as Och stopped speaking I knew that if Limoges was the

stage Fabio had wanted to win for himself, now I wanted to win it for him, and that I was going to finish the race.

About halfway through the next day’s stage, I found myself grouped with 25 guys at the front. Indurain was in the yellow leader’s jersey, riding at the back. I did what came most naturally to

me: I attacked.

The problem was, I attacked too early, as usual. I went with 25 miles still to go, and on a downhill portion. Two things you never do: attack early, and on a downhill. But I went so fast

on that downhill that I had a 30-second lead in a finger-snap. The other riders were completely taken aback. I could feel them wondering, What’s he thinking?

What was I thinking? I had looked back, and saw guys were riding along, with no particular ambition. It was a hot day, and there was no incentive to pull hard, everyone was just trying to

get closer to the finish line where the tactics would play out. I glanced back, and one guy was taking a sip of water. I glanced back again. Another guy was fixing his hat. So I took off.

Peoooo. I was gone.

When you have 15 other guys back there from 15 different teams, they’ll never get organized. They’ll look at each other and say: You pull. No, you pull! So I went, and I went faster than I’d

ever ridden. It was a tactical punch in the face, and it had nothing to do with strength or ability; everything depended on the initial shock and separation. It was insane, but it worked.

Nobody got within 55 seconds of me again. The team support car kept coming up and giving me reports. Henny Kuiper, our team director, would say, “You’re thirty seconds up.” Then a few

minutes later he’d come alongside again and say, “You’re forty-five seconds up.”

When he came up the third or fourth time, I said, “Henny, don’t come up here anymore. I’m not getting caught.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” he said, and faded behind my wheel.

I didn’t get caught.

I won by a minute, and I didn’t feel a moment’s pain. Instead I felt something spiritual; I know that I rode with a higher purpose that day. Even though I had charged too early, I never suffered

after I broke away. I would like to think that was Fabio’s experience too; he simply broke away and separated from the world. There is no doubt in my mind that there were two riders on that

bike. Fabio was with me.

I felt an emotion at the finish line that I’ve never experienced again. I felt I was winning for Fabio and his family and his baby, and for the mourning country of Italy. As I came across the

line I glanced upward and I pointed to the heavens, to Fabio.

After the Tour, Och had a memorial built for Fabio. He commissioned a sculptor from Como to execute a work in white Carrara marble. The team flew in from all over the world, and we

gathered at the top of the mountain for the placement of the memorial and the dedication ceremony. The memorial had a sundial on it that shone on three dates and times: his birthday,

the day he won the Olympic Games, and the day he died.

I had learned what it means to ride the Tour de France. It’s not about the bike. It’s a metaphor for life, not only the longest race in the world but also the most exalting and heartbreaking and

potentially tragic. It poses every conceivable element to the rider, and more: cold, heat, mountains, plains, ruts, flat tires, high winds, unspeakably bad luck, unthinkable beauty,

yawning senselessness, and above all a great, deep self-questioning. During our lives we’re faced with so many different elements as well, we experience so many setbacks, and fight such a

hand-to-hand battle with failure, head down in the rain, just trying to stay upright and to have a little hope. The Tour is not just a bike race, not at all. It is a test. It tests you physically, it tests

you mentally, and it even tests you morally.

I understood that now. There were no shortcuts, I realized. It took years of racing to build up the mind and body and character, until a rider had logged hundreds of races and thousands of

miles of road. I wouldn’t be able to win a Tour de France until I had enough iron in my legs, and lungs, and brain, and heart. Until I was a man. Fabio had been a man. I was still trying to get

there.