The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  Every ounce of fat, bone, and muscle on Armstrong’s body is regularly inventoried, analyzed, and accounted for. I asked him if he felt it was necessary to endure the daily prodding and poking required to provide all this information, and to adhere so rigidly to his training schedules. “Depends whether you want to win,” he replied. “I do. The Tour is a two-thousand-mile race, and people sometimes win by one minute. Or less. One minute in nearly a month of suffering isn’t that much. So the people who win are the ones willing to suffer the most.” Suffering is to cyclists what poll data are to politicians; they rely on it to tell them how well they are doing their job. Like many of his competitors in the peloton, Armstrong seems to love pain, and even to crave it.

  “Cycling is so hard, the suffering is so intense, that it’s absolutely cleansing,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The pain is so deep and strong that a curtain descends over your brain…. Once, someone asked me what pleasure I took in riding for so long. ‘Pleasure?’ I said. ‘I don’t understand the question.’ I didn’t do it for pleasure. I did it for pain.” Armstrong mentioned suffering (favorably) in each of my conversations with him. Even his weekend in Texas, which was ostensibly time off from the grinding spring training schedule, seemed designed to drive him to the brink of exhaustion; there were dozens of meetings with donors, cancer survivors, and friends. On Sunday, he led the foundation’s annual ride with his friend Robin Williams, a surprisingly fit and aggressive cyclist. Williams and Armstrong rode at a fairly rapid pace for about two hours, at which point a car suddenly pulled up alongside them on the highway. Armstrong hopped off his bike, climbed in, and was driven to the airport to catch a plane for New York and then Paris. During his forty-eight-hour drop-in, the Lance Armstrong Foundation raised nearly three million dollars.

  In Austin, Lance (other than Dubya, he is the only one-name Texan) has a more devoted following than Bush, Lyle Lovett, and the Texas Longhorns football team combined. One night during my weekend in Austin, I drove over to Chuy’s, an informal Tex-Mex place that is one of Armstrong’s favorite local restaurants. (It was famous locally even before a hardworking bartender carded President Bush’s nineteen-year-old daughter Jenna.) Armstrong has a weakness for Chuy’s burritos. I asked my waiter what he thought of Armstrong. “When he walks in here, you can feel the buzz coming right off him,” he said. “When Lance shows up, people are delirious. They love the guy. His life is like an Alamo-level myth, and everybody loves a myth, particularly in Texas.”

  Armstrong tries to resist being described as a hero of any kind. “I want my kids to grow up and be normal,” he told me, backstage at the concert, as he tentatively ate exactly two Dorito chips. He and his wife, Kristin, have three children: a son, Luke, who is two, and twin girls, Isabelle and Grace, born last year. “I want them to think their father worked hard for what he got, not that it was the result of some kind of magic,” Armstrong said.

  Three types of riders succeed in long stage races like the Tour de France: those who excel at climbing but are only adequate in time trials, in which a cyclist races alone against the clock; those who can win time trials but struggle in the mountains; and cyclists who are moderately good at both. Now there appears to be a fourth group: Armstrong. He has become the best climber in the world, although he wasn’t much of one in his early years. And there is no cyclist better at time trials. He lost nearly twenty pounds when he was sick, but he is no less powerful and is therefore faster. Still, many people have wondered how, so soon after a nearly fatal illness, he managed to take such complete control of the sport.

  “After the cancer, Lance got a second chance,” Carmichael explained to me. “It was that simple. You get a second chance at something that you took for granted before and all of a sudden you see everything you could have lost. When he came back, he just went into a different zone. He works as if he is possessed. It’s a little bit nutty, in fact, what he puts himself through so that he can win the Tour de France each year.” As a young man, Carmichael was an Olympic cyclist himself, but he almost died in a freakish skiing accident, in 1986. He returned to competition, but something was gone. While he was trying to figure out what to do next, he took a job coaching the United States national team. He has now been training people for fifteen years. He works with many elite athletes in addition to Armstrong—runners, hockey players, even one Indy driver—and also with thousands who just want to ride faster every Sunday with their local club. He has a company, Carmichael Training Systems, based in Colorado Springs, that employs more than seventy-five coaches; his clients, including Armstrong, log on to the company website to find their latest training instructions.

  Carmichael believes that rigorous training is what ultimately turns a talented athlete into a star. “Who hits more practice balls every day than any other golfer?” Carmichael asked. “Guess what? It’s Tiger Woods. Well, Lance trains more than his competitors. He was the first to go out and actually ride the important Tour stages in advance. He doesn’t just wake up in July and say, ‘God, I hope I am ready for this race.’ He knows he is ready, because he has whipped himself all year long.”

  Armstrong describes his bike as his office. “It’s my job,” he told me. “I love it, and I wouldn’t ride if I didn’t. But it’s incredibly hard work, full of sacrifices. And you have to be able to go out there every single day.” In the morning, he rises, eats, and gets on his bike; sometimes, before a particularly long day, he waits to eat again (in order to store up carbohydrates) before taking off. “We schedule his daily workouts to leave late in the morning, so that he can ride for six hours,” Carmichael said. “He returns home about five or six o’clock, in time for a quick dinner—a protein-carb smoothie, a little pasta. Then it is time for bed.”

  During the cycling season, Armstrong calculates each watt he has burned on his bike and then uses a digital scale to weigh every morsel of food that passes his lips. This way, he knows exactly how many calories he needs to get through the day. When he is racing, his meals are gargantuan. (It took three men to lug the team’s rations—boxes full of cereal, bread, yogurt, eggs, fruit, honey, chocolate spread, jam, peanut butter, and other snacks—into the hotel breakfast room during the Dauphiné.) On days when a race begins at noon or later, Armstrong will eat two heaping plates of pasta and perhaps a power bar three hours before the race, after having had a full breakfast.

  When I visited Carmichael in Colorado Springs, he showed me Armstrong’s training schedule for a few weeks this spring. On April 28, a Sunday, Armstrong competed in the Amstel Gold, a one-day annual World Cup race in Holland. He finished fourth, covering the 254-kilometer course (which included thirty-three climbs) in six hours, forty-nine minutes, and seventeen seconds. His average speed was 37.32 kph, the same as that of the winner, who beat him by about three feet. Carmichael scheduled a rest day and urged Armstrong to stay off his bicycle. “He almost never listens when I tell him to do that,” Carmichael said. “But I tell him anyway.” Tuesday was an easy day: a two-hour ride, maintaining an approximate heart rate of 135 beats a minute. The next day was more typical: five hours over rolling terrain, with a heart rate of about 155 beats a minute and an average effort of 320 watts. Friday was a slow ride for two hours. Then, on Saturday, Armstrong rode for four hours with two climbs, each lasting about half an hour, during which he kept a heart rate of 175 beats a minute with a power expenditure of about 400 watts. After that, Carmichael had him draft at a fast rate behind a motorcycle for two hours without a break. In addition, Armstrong always stretches for about an hour a day, and during the off-season he spends hours in the gym, improving his core strength. “Nobody else puts himself through this,” Carmichael said. “Nobody would dare.”

  I have been riding a bicycle since I was a boy, and over the years, as the technology improved, I kept trading up, from heavy steel to aluminum, and then to titanium. Only once have I traveled more than a hundred miles in a day; I have never entered a race (or wanted to), and I don’t ride particularly fast. Yet, like a lo
t of middle-aged cycling enthusiasts, I now have a bicycle that is far better than I am and I have become a fetishistic devotee of the sport. I have never quite permitted myself to attend bicycle camp or to take lessons from a bicycle mechanic (though I have considered both). But I have never seen Campagnolo gears, an aerodynamically advanced set of wheels, or a complicated cycle computer that I didn’t want to buy. My apartment is littered with catalogs advertising “carbon titanium supercycles,” and bicycling magazines with stories about obscure pro races.

  Every month or two, Carmichael tests Armstrong’s capacity to generate power—or watts—and, when I told him that I rode a lot, he suggested that if he tested me in the same way I might have a better sense of what these measures really meant.

  Our plan was to cruise up into the mountains not far from Carmichael’s office, in a converted grain barn in downtown Colorado Springs. The wind was strong enough so that he asked if I wanted to reconsider. The answer was yes, of course, but that’s not what I said. We rode for about five miles through the thin air six thousand feet above sea level. Carmichael chatted the whole time—about pedal motion, femur length (the longer the better, since length improves leverage), gearing choices, and the finer details of carbon-fiber technology. I gasped and answered only when I had to. We rode into North Cheyenne Cañon until, finally, it looked as if we had ridden as far as he could ask me to go. Carmichael got off his bike. “Now the test begins,” he said. He pointed at the mountain slope—it wasn’t as steep as some of the slopes in France, but it looked unconquerable nonetheless—and said, “I want you to ride as fast as you can up that road for ten minutes and then come back.”

  I was seriously winded within two minutes. My legs were burning within five. I remember watching four men and women climbing a steep rock face and rappelling down. They waved at me, but I was far too light-headed to risk lifting an arm from the handlebars. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. (I managed to continue for eight minutes and thirty-two seconds. Naïvely, I had asked Carmichael what I should do when I reached the top. “You won’t be seeing the top,” he had said.) I turned the bike around and met up with Carmichael, and we coasted most of the way back to the office. Then we looked at my data: I had generated an average of 200 watts on the test, and had climbed exactly one mile. Carmichael told me that a decent pro cyclist would have put out at least 400 watts, and that the stragglers at the end of the peloton (known as the gruppetto) would clock in at perhaps 350. Armstrong—in top Tour shape—would have come close to 500.

  I stared at the graph of my performance, which Carmichael and his colleagues had printed out for me. I had managed to generate 470 watts for just ten seconds. That’s about average for Armstrong over the course of a four-hour ride.

  After that humbling experience, I went across town to see Edmund Burke, a former physiologist for the U.S. Olympic cycling team, who has written several books on training for cyclists (including one with Carmichael). “I think the genius of Chris is that he understands how much small gains matter,” Burke said. “In fact, small gains are all you will ever see. People will say, ‘You have shown only half a percent of improvement.’ Well, half a percent is huge. I am not talking marketing or sales here. I am talking about elite athletic performance.”

  Carmichael takes nothing for granted and relies heavily on technology. (He noted with approval, for instance, that Greg LeMond won the Tour by just eight seconds, on the last day of the race, in 1989. He was the first cyclist in the Tour to use aerodynamically tapered handlebars for the final time trial. “It made all the difference,” Carmichael said. “Technology might not win you the Tour. But why wouldn’t you want to have the best chances possible?”) Every few months, Armstrong trains in a wind tunnel, which allows Carmichael to measure his aerodynamic efficiency under a variety of conditions. He will push his seat back a centimeter or his stem up a few millimeters. (Each adjustment is a trade-off between power and speed; when you sit farther back, you can use more of your leg muscles, but you also expose more of your body to the resistance of the air.)

  Carmichael takes the same radical approach to the physical limits of endurance. It had long been assumed, for example, that aerobic power doesn’t vary greatly in adults. Carmichael refutes this emphatically. “Look at Lance,” he said to me in his office one day. Over the past eight years, through specific programs aimed at building endurance and speed, Armstrong has increased this critical value—his aerobic power—by sixteen percent. That means he saves almost four minutes in a sixty-kilometer time trial.

  In fact, Armstrong is superior to other athletes in two respects: He can rely on his aerobic powers longer, and his anaerobic abilities are unusually high as well. When muscles begin to work beyond their aerobic ability, they produce lactic acid, which eventually accumulates and causes a burning sensation well known to anyone who has ever run too far or too fast. Somehow, though, Armstrong produces less lactic acid than others do, and metabolizes it more effectively. “For whatever physiological reason—and science can’t really explain it, because we don’t know that much about what is occurring—the effect is clear,” Carmichael said. “Lance goes on when others are done.”

  At the end of last year’s Tour, the French sports newspaper L’Équipe ran an article with the headline SHOULD WE BELIEVE IN ARMSTRONG?, suggesting it was time to consider the possibility that, since Armstrong has never been found guilty of doping, he may indeed be innocent.

  After I watched Armstrong train and spent time with his coaches, the only way I could be convinced that he uses illegal drugs would be to see him inject them. After all, the doubts about him have always been a function of his excellence. Greg LeMond, America’s first Tour de France champion (he has also won three times), put it well, if somewhat uncharitably, after Armstrong won the 2001 Tour: “If Lance is clean, it is the greatest comeback in the history of sport. If he isn’t, it would be the greatest fraud.” It is impossible to prove a negative, and so Armstrong can do nothing to dispel the doubts. But his frustration is clear; in 2000, he made a television ad for Nike in which he said, “Everybody wants to know what I’m on. What am I on? I’m on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?”

  If the French don’t approve of Armstrong, it is not only—or even principally—because they suspect him of using drugs. They don’t believe that he suffers enough. French intellectuals love the agony displayed on the roads each July in the same way that American writers love to wail over the fate of the Red Sox. Thirty years ago, before much was known about sports nutrition, riders would finish the race—if they could—having lost twenty pounds, their eyes vacant even in victory. Armstrong represents a new kind of athlete. He has been at the forefront of a technological renaissance that has made European cycling purists uncomfortable. Referring to the gulf that now exists between the race and the racers, the French philosopher Robert Redeker has written, “The athletic type represented by Lance Armstrong, unlike Fausto Coppi or Jean Robic”—two cycling heroes from a generation ago—“is coming closer to Lara Croft, the virtually fabricated cyberheroine. Cycling is becoming a video game; the onetime ‘prisoners of the road’ have become virtual human beings…Robocop on wheels, someone no fan can relate to or identify with.”

  “It’s so funny to hear people talk that way about Lance,” Craig Nichols, Armstrong’s oncologist, told me. “The fact is that no cyclist can have seen more pain than he has. The hard work and the inconvenience of the Tour just can’t scare him, because he has been through so much worse.”

  Despite Bruyneel’s warning not to push himself on the treacherous slope of the Col de Joux Plane, Armstrong was spinning the pedals a hundred times a minute, faster than any other competitor. (This cadence is a technique that he, Carmichael, and Bruyneel have been working on for years.) With just two days to go, Armstrong was in the lead of the Dauphiné Libéré, and there was little doubt that he would go on to win the race. (“There are not so many guys left,” Bruyneel said to me with a smile and a shrug. “If he
feels good, you have to let him go.”) It would have been understandable—maybe even smart—for Armstrong to take it slow just a few weeks before the Tour. Yet clearly he wasn’t going to be satisfied unless he also took this stage.

  “Good job, Lance!” Bruyneel cheered into the radio. “Go! Go! Go!” Armstrong picked up speed; he was dropping his opponents one by one. “Moreau is done, Lance, he is over!” Bruyneel shouted into the radio as Armstrong whizzed by Christophe Moreau, the lead rider for Crédit Agricole. “Go if you can. But, remember, the mountain is not your friend.”

  “Kivilev is dropped, Kivilev is dropped!” Bruyneel screamed, as Armstrong began to pedal faster. “Lance, get on Menchov’s wheel. He is a great train to the top.” Denis Menchov, of the Ibanesto.com team, is a fine climber. Bruyneel had hoped that Armstrong would glide in behind him and conserve energy on the way up. Instead, Armstrong blew past Menchov, and then overtook the last two men between him and the summit. He wove through the fans gathered at the top of the mountain.

  Armstrong shifted into a higher gear to descend, and suddenly he was in trouble. His radio stopped working, his leg began to cramp, and Kivilev and Moreau were gaining on him. “Twenty-seven seconds,” Bruyneel said. He was screaming. “Lance, they are gaining!” We could see the little ski resort of Morzine in the near distance. Chalets were built everywhere into the steep slopes of the mountain. The thickening wall of fans suggested that we must be near the end, but we were driving so fast that it was hard to tell.

  Incredibly, Bruyneel drove right up beside Armstrong. He was in pain and was massaging his thigh while pedaling as fast as he could. “Six seconds!” Bruyneel shouted out the window at full speed. “Move!”