William Fotheringham CYCLING
Lance Armstrong was pushed into a small, but interesting Freudian slip. He was asked whether a second Tour de France victory would be harder to achieve than his first: “It’s hard to win the first because you don’t have the experience, it’s hard to win the second because you don’t have that animosity.”
He corrected himself swiftly. He meant to say “anonymity”, meaning the relative lack of attention paid to a Tour contender who has yet to win the three-week loop around France. However, Armstrong has never been a pro cyclist who has gone unnoticed, from the day he finished his first race in Spain in August 1992, in last place, with the crowd whistling.
His first choice was the right one. Armstrong has never faced poverty of the kind that faced cycling champions of the past, the sons of farm labourers, coal miners and small shopkeepers. Instead, he is fired by anger at the world around him. “He’s a man with a lot of chips on his shoulder,” says Briton Chris Boardman, who witnessed the Texan’s Tour win last year. “I wouldn’t particularly like to be around him in the same team.”
In his recently published autobiography (It’s Not About the Bike, with Sally Jenkins), there is anger aplenty – against the father who walked out before Armstrong reached two, the stepfather who beat him and cheated on his mother, his former team, Cofidis, which renegotiated his contract downwards while he lay in his hospital bed receiving chemotherapy treatment for life-threatening testicular cancer, and the other squads who did not believe he could come back after the cancer and would not offer him what he considered his market value.
Cycling has not seen a Tour winner with internal anger to match Armstrong’s since the great Bernard Hinault, the “Badger” who won five Tours between 1978 and 1985, and who was once famously pictured delivering a straight left to striking dockers who blocked his way in the Paris- Nice race.
Armstrong has now shown the world he can come back from cancer, he has an eight- month-old son, Luke, and he admits: “Life is comfortable. Fatherhood has helped calm my nerves.” He is also now the highest- paid cyclist in history – according to a report in USA Today which estimated his earnings for this year at $7,5-million. But, significantly for the Tour de France, he is still angry.
Last year, as he demonstrated total mastery of the Tour in the Alps, there were insinuations that Armstrong’s performances were unnatural. They came from the French press, which was – and remains – paranoid about doping matters after its favourite rider, Richard Virenque, was embroiled in the 1998 scandal involving Festina.
This year, the hints were repeated when Armstrong and cyclists from his US Postal Service-backed team dominated the principal Tour warm-up race. This followed an article in L’Equipe implying that the Texan was charging $100E000 for interviews, the same hourly rate that he charges for corporate appearances.
Armstrong is, not surprisingly, annoyed: “The insinuation that I ask for money for interviews is absurd.” Over the doping insinuations, he said: “Why should cycling be ‘two speeds’ because a rider was a champion when he was young and is still a champion when he’s getting older? It has to stop. a suffit.”
On a more mountainous route with fewer of his favoured time trials, Armstrong faces a tougher task than last year against a field including the 1997 winner, Jan Ullrich, and 1998’s victor, Marco Pantani, both absent last year.
Where Armstrong has the edge, though, is in what the French call “rage vaincre” – which roughly translates as the will to win.
ENDS