The American has overcome testicular cancer to bid for a third consecutive crown
Martin Gillingham
Robert Hunter is barely a household name in his own household. But on Saturday in Dunkirk, as he rolls up the start ramp for the 8,2km prologue of this year’s Tour de France, he will do so as the first South African to have competed in the world’s toughest sporting event.
That is an honour in itself though whether Hunter, who is 24, is still part of the peleton (the main group of riders) when what remains of the almost 200-strong field sprint down the Champs Elysees for the final time on July 29 remains to be seen.
Hunter’s role in the Italy-based Lampre team is more that of domestique than team leader. A domestique, or servant, is how most riders start their careers. Rather than seek personal glory, their role is more to protect their team leader from the perils of the peleton and provide a back wheel for the team’s number one to latch on to during those tough climbs through the Alps and Pyrenees. In Hunter’s case, his function will be to lead out the sprints for more favoured Lampre riders like the Czech Jan Svorada and Zbigniew Spruch of Poland as they seek stage victories during the relatively flat first week.
Though Hunter’s role might be small, when Lance Armstrong starts he will be 23 days and 3 454km away from establishing himself as one of the greatest in the history of the race.
It will be the final chapter in a remarkable story that started five years ago when the young Texan, known in those days for his volatile temperament rather than his prodigious talent, dropped out of the 1996 Tour after just five days.
That was the start of a roller-coaster ride. Before the end of the year Armstrong was diagnosed with testicular cancer. The experts told him he had a 40% chance of survival. Privately, they rated his prospects as barely one tenth of that.
Remarkably, Armstrong survived though his successful return to the saddle was not guaranteed. There was a half-hearted comeback that ended on a wind and rain-swept road during the 1998 Paris-Nice race. Armstrong says: “I pulled over. I quit. I abandoned the race. I took off my number. I thought, ‘This is not how I want to spend my life, freezing and soaked and in the gutter.'”
But months later, spurred on by old friends including his then United States Postal teammate Kevin Livingston, Armstrong was back. And, what’s more, he was a different rider. His victory in the 1999 Tour was the sporting story of the year though, in a sport where doping scandals have conditioned aficionados to judge such dramatic improvements in form with a cynical eye, it was bittersweet. A whispering campaign had followed him all the way to the Champs Elysees even though Armstrong had challenged his critics at almost every press conference en route to Paris.
“Doping is an unfortunate fact of life in cycling, or any other endurance sport for that matter,” Armstrong says. “Inevitably, some teams and riders feel it’s like nuclear weapons that they have to do it to stay competitive within the peleton. I never felt that way, and certainly after chemotherapy the idea of putting anything foreign in my body was especially repulsive.”
In truth, those rumours have not altogether passed. In fact, they were fuelled during last year’s Tour when a television film crew followed US Postal team helpers who drive more than 150km away from the team hotel to dump binbags which, on inspection, contained a large quantity of used syringes and other medical bits ‘n’ pieces. When challenged about this chain of events Armstrong offered no explanation other than to protest his innocence.
But ahead of Saturday, Armstrong’s claims have been given official support. An investigation by a Paris judge into possible doping by the US Postal team has said that the binbags contained nothing against the law and that no action is likely to be taken against the team’s riders during the Tour.
So, with no apparent threat of dawn raids by the gendarmerie, who or what remains in the way of the Armstrong hat-trick?
If anything, the route suits him. It may be more than 200km shorter than the tours of either 1999 or last year but that shortfall is more than made up for in its severity. In addition to the prologue there are 20 stages in 22 days. They include four high mountain stages and what the race organisers have dubbed in typically understated fashion “medium mountain stages”.
No stage will be tougher, and perhaps more significant in determining the winner, than the 11th, a 32km time trial between Grenoble and the Chamrousse ski station. It’s the first mountain climb time trial in the Tour since 1996 and sees the riders climb at an average gradient of more than 7%.
It’s then, the midway point in the Tour and as the riders prepare for their first rest day, that Armstrong is expected to come into his own.
Just last Thursday, Armstrong completed his preparations for what he plans to be his final Tour by winning the Tour of Switzerland. That race is regarded as the fourth toughest stage race in the sport and saw Armstrong cruise through its two mountain stages. More significantly, however, was his Chamrousse dress rehearsal, a 30km time trial climb to Crans Montana. He won that by more than one-and-a-half minutes. It’s a staggering margin.
If there is to be a human threat to Armstrong’s supremacy over the next three weeks then it’s most likely to come, in part, from the man who inspired his comeback and served as domestique on his first two successful circumnavigations of France.
Livingston has recently switched to the German Telekom team and will be combining with former champion Jan Ullrich in an attempt to derail his best friend’s quest for a hat-trick.