Point: John Wilcockson
Almost everyone I run into is asking me: ”Can he do it again?” People want to know whether Lance Armstrong, after an almost four-year absence, can win the world’s greatest bike race an eighth time. I tell them that everything is stacked against him.
At 37 years and 10 months, he is 18 months older than the oldest previous winner, the 1922 champion, Firmin Lambot of Belgium. And Armstrong has not won a single important race this year in his return to cycling that began at January’s Tour Down Under. Yet I am confident that he will be a leading contender at the 2009 Tour starting in Monaco on Saturday. I even think he could win.
My opinion is not based on speculation, but on the spirit and must-win attitude that I have observed ever since meeting him two decades ago. It is also based on my interviews — in writing a book about his life — with more than 50 people who know him.
His stepfather, Terry Armstrong, told me about the time that a nine-year-old Lance crashed in a BMX race and started crying. His stepdad didn’t sympathise. He picked him up and told him: ”We’re finished… If you’re gonna come out here and quit and cry, we’re done… I’m not gonna have a quitter.”
Armstrong’s first professional team trainer, Massimo Testa, an Italian sports doctor, told me a story from the American’s first Tour de France in 1993. Armstrong was only 21 and in his first year as a pro. Experts said he was too young to ride the Tour and his team director said he would pull the youngster once the Tour entered the mountains.
Armstrong could have left the race early after he became the youngest rider in more than 50 years to win a Tour stage, but he persevered. He got through the first day in the Alps by riding with his English teammate Sean Yates. He then told Testa: ”I want to try one more stage to see how I recover overnight.”
Twenty-four hours later, after an even tougher day of climbing ended with a 16km haul to the Isola 2000 ski resort, Testa found Armstrong in his hotel room.
”Outside it was super-hot,” Testa said, ”but he was in bed with two or three sweaters on and a wool hat. He was under the blanket and he was shaking. That’s what happens when you’re dehydrated. So I asked: ‘Hey, Lance, how do you feel?’ He said: ‘Doing great. Tomorrow, I want to try another.”’
It’s that same indomitable spirit that carried Armstrong though his near-fatal bout with cancer in 1996 and gave him the temerity to make his incredible comeback to win the Tour de France in 1999 — and go on to win the race seven times in seven years.
Can he win it again? When Armstrong phoned me last August to tell me he was thinking about coming out of retirement to ride the Tour in 2009, he confided: ”I’m doing this for my kids… I don’t want them growing up and reading all these things about me and doping on the web.”
When I asked Armstrong how he thought he could perform after his extended absence from competition and against riders many years younger than him at this year’s Tour, he said: ”I’ll kick their asses.”
I believe him.
Counterpoint: Richard Williams
Many times during the coming month the Tour de France peloton will traverse railway crossings where the warning signs read:
Attention! Un train peut cacher un autre! One train, that is, can hide another. In the case of the 2009 Tour, the first train is Lance Armstrong. The other one is the rest of the race. Until he crashes out or gives up or crosses the finish line in Paris on July 26, Lance’s comeback is the story, for better or worse.
But a million Twitterers can’t be wrong, can they? And those checking out Lance Armstrong’s regular 140-character updates are just a small proportion of the cycling obsessives and cancer survivors following the progress of his comeback.
Week after week, month after month, his face has featured on the covers of the world’s cycling magazines, his progress monitored and analysed for signs of a return to form. It would have been surprising, of course, if the public imagination had not been caught by the idea of the man who came back from cancer surgery to win the Tour seven times in a row returning after a four-year break in an attempt to win it for an eighth time at the age of 37. But this is still a staggering example of how one man’s story can overshadow the greater narrative of an entire international sport.
But unlike golf in which the absence of Tiger Woods causes a collapse in viewing figures, cycling has shown no sign of a downturn since Armstrong announced his retirement in 2005, and his return has drawn attention away from competitors involved in new and compelling rivalries.
Young fellows such as Mark Cavendish will no doubt welcome their chance to race alongside a legend. —