CHAPTER 1
HE OF THE DOUBLE DOOR

FEBRUARY 2004

Each morning, even in winter, the European continent looks as if it is simmering over a cookfire. Not one big fire, but a thousand tiny blazes exhaling threads of smoke and steam until everything is bathed in a white-gray haze. The haze rolls over the countryside, concealing borders, filling hollows, flowing over the steeples of the thousand sleepy villages that float in and out of view like so many ghost towns, half-dissolved in the heat of the modern world.

Over the simmering haze, screaming eastward at five hundred miles an hour, came a silvery white Gulfstream aircraft, with its wings turned up at their tips like a fighter jet. Inside its sleek cocoon, Lance Armstrong was peering down into the mist, trying to spot the trolls.

That's what Armstrong called them, the sneaky lowlifes who tried to snare him, to pull him down into the muck. The landscape was crawling with them. A month ago, a troll had swiped his Visa card and gone on a spree at JC Penney's ("They must not have known which Armstrong they had," he said). Then, a couple days later, some troll had jimmied his way into a cabin on one of his properties outside Austin, and had set up camp there. Dozens of media trolls were whispering that Armstrong was too old, too distracted, washed up. An Italian troll named Filippo Simeoni —a cyclist, no less —was suing him for libel. The biggest trolls were David Walsh and Pierre Ballester, journalists who were writing a book claiming that Armstrong may have used performance-enhancing drugs. Trolls were down there in the mist, creeping around, grasping at him with hairy fingers, daring him to fight. All of which made Armstrong happy.

"Fucking trolls!" he said when he watched Walsh, Simeoni, or any of the others on the liquid-crystal display of his handheld personal organizer, which sent him constant updates on their activities. "Little fucking goddamn trolls!"

Well, perhaps "happy" is the wrong word. "Enlivened" is more like it. Others might have been tempted to ignore the trolls, or at least pretend to ignore them, but not Armstrong. He watched them obsessively, getting ready to fight, to go to battle, to take the bastards on. Armstrong is fascinating for many reasons, but mostly because he's our purest embodiment of the fundamental human act —to impose the will on the uncaring world —an act that compels our attention because it seems so simple and yet is secretly magical. Because at its core, will is about belief, and with Armstrong we can see the belief happening.

It's etched on his face, in that narrow-eyed expression Armstrong's friends warily refer to as The Look. His is the latest rendition of the gunfighter's squint, a look made more powerful because the weapon Armstrong brandishes is no more or less than himself. He is a living fable, the man who had cancer and who came back to win the hardest athletic event on the planet five times. He's been fighting from the start, starting out as Lance Edward Gunderson, the willful son of a seventeen-year-old mother in Plano, Texas. He fights to survive, to win, and also to show us his force, and he has been successful enough that his face, like that of Joe DiMaggio in the forties or the Mercury astronauts in the sixties, has become America's face, a hero who embodies many people's best idea of what they want to be.

What Armstrong wants to be? That's a tougher question.

You can attempt to find out by asking him, to which he'll respond that he wants to (1) be a good dad, (2) fight cancer, and (3) ride his bike. Or you can examine the causes into which he channels his energy: the tens of millions of dollars raised by the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Or you can add up his business interests: the $19 million in annual endorsements and his part-owner-ship of his cycling team. Or you can peruse the family drama: his fatherless childhood, his intense bond with his mother, his refusal to meet his birth father. Or you can look at the topography of his relationships; the walled kingdom of close friends and business associates; the warm, endless expanse of acquaintances; the icy archipelagoes filled with former friends who have been, as one puts it, excommunicated. Or you can look at the range of emotion he inspires. There are not many people whose mailbox regularly receives both death threats and calls for his beatification.

"People find this hard to believe, but he's not a happy-go-lucky, Mr. Smiley, save-the-world-from-cancer type of person," said John Korioth, nicknamed College, who is one of Armstrong's closest friends. "I look on it as almost an animalistic thing. In sports or business or anywhere there's always the question of who's the alpha, who's the meanest, who's the toughest? And it's Lance. Always Lance."

"It is simple, no?" said Armstrong's longtime trainer, Dr. Ferrari, smiling. "Lance wishes to swallow the world."

Two thousand years ago, Greek storytellers told of young commoners who ventured alive into the kingdom of the dead. They survived with the aid of magical helpers, then returned in a kind of second birth to perform a triumphant act, bringing their teaching to the rest of humanity. One was called Dithyrambos, or "He of the Double Door."

Funny thing is, the Greeks were a little fuzzier about endings. Without the escape hatch of "happily ever after," their death-venturing heroes tended to fade into obscurity, or sulk as the world refused to hear their teachings. Now, flying to Spain, Armstrong was embarking on his attempt to break one of the more legendary marks in sport. His first step, as it happened, was also one of the trickiest. He had to be calm.

The difficulty of this lay in the fact that Armstrong's life was usually anything but calm, particularly at the moment. The trolls were the least of it: a few weeks before, he had finalized a painful, expensive divorce from Kristin, his wife of five years and mother to their three young children. He was coming off his worst season in half a decade, an injury-and accident-riddled tour he'd politely termed a near-disaster. To top it off, he'd just lost his best teammate, Roberto Heras, who'd unexpectedly defected to the powerful Liberty Seguros team.

But even in the face of such facts —especially in the face of such facts —Armstrong's instinct had called for a response; in this case, a show of off-season contentedness that was also a show of control. He'd smiled. He'd spoken cheerily about his new role as a single divorced father ("Kristin and I are better friends than ever," he said). He attended movie premieres, NBA games, and award ceremonies with his new girlfriend, rock singer Sheryl Crow. He proclaimed to USA Today that he'd "never been happier."

Less debatable was the fact that he was older: thirty-two, to be exact. Looking at side-by-side photos from his first Tour win in 1999 was like examining before-and-after photos of a one-term U.S. president. The rosy boyishness had been replaced by a drier, hard-cut look, along with a salting of gray hairs which were duly noted, if not actually counted, by cycling cognoscenti all too aware of the pertinent statistic: none of the four previous five-time winners had won after the age of thirty-one. (Indeed, only four men older than thirty-one had won the Tour in the previous seventy-three years.) Five wins, thirty-one years; the numbers hardened into a wall. Perhaps, the thinking went, there was some physiological odometer, some secret number of pedal strokes or heartbeats, beyond which the human body simply collapsed.

Examining attempts for number six was akin to examining early attempts to climb Mount Everest: long, steady progress to a certain height, ending in dazzlingly swift demise in the Death Zone. You could look it up: Miguel Induráin at Les Arcs in 1996; Bernard Hinault on Superbagneres in 1986; Eddy Merckx at Pra Loup in 1975; Jacques Anquetil on the road from Chamonix to St. Etienne in 1966 —boom, boom, boom, boom. More mysteriously, few had seen it coming. The crack, as the event is aptly called, opened with the hungry suddenness of a crevasse. One moment, the five-time champions rode supreme, sailing toward the holy shores of number six. The next they were simply gone, swept down as if by the hand of God. The 2004 season existed as nothing so much as a question: Would Armstrong crack or not? Behind the question stood perhaps a more interesting possibility: when Armstrong's time arrived, nobody would know, perhaps not even he.

"Lance does not admit weakness," said his trainer Ferrari. "It is not a possibility. Even last year, when he was weak, he would not show it."

"I think he's often a lot closer to the edge than he lets on," Carmichael said. "The ability to hide weakness at all costs is his great strength, and like any strength it can sometimes be a handicap."

"The mental edge is important this year," Bruyneel said. "He must show them how strong he is. And show himself, too."

Or, put another way, "The game is to show them nothing," said teammate Landis. "If they get a whiff, they'll be on him."

The game had already started, the preseason intelligence-gathering that Armstrong loved, where he peered through the mist to check on his rivals. He knew, for instance, that Jan Ullrich had suffered a cold and had skipped the first days of team training. He knew that Tyler Hamilton was angling to sign another top Spanish climber to strengthen his Phonak team. Armstrong also knew they were all watching him, and he did his best to make sure they couldn't see much (in fact, Armstrong had a cold at his training camp and quit his first ride early, too, though it wasn't reported). What they could see —well, Armstrong did what he could to influence their vision.

A good example of this involved Armstrong's newly departed teammate. Before Heras left, he was a hero. Heras had twice won the Vuelta a España, a three-week tour; he was the second-highest-paid member of the team, the key lieutenant, the one whom Armstrong called "a really special talent," and the keystone of his 2002 win ("It was Roberto who made the difference. He made the pace and all I had to do was follow," Armstrong said after the decisive mountain stage). A few days after he left, Heras was rechristened Roberto Who?

"If you add up all his good days, his really good days, at the Tour, there were what, three? Four?" Armstrong said at training camp. "I think that can be replaced. You watch."

Armstrong beamed them The Look, which morphed into a smile of contentment, the mug of a guy who's got the world on a string. Everything was in place. He was in good shape, his tech team was cooking up a top-secret new bike, last year's troubles were gone, banished.

Copyright © 2005 by Daniel Coyle