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Outside magazine, April 1998

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Tour de Revenge (cont.)

For months Armstrong didn't ride. He traveled, played golf, water-skied, went clubbing. He pushed stocks around on the Internet, enjoyed his new art-filled house and other trophies (a BMW, a Harley), answered thousands of get-well wishes, and got serious with his girlfriend, Kristin Richards, whom he would soon ask to marry. He hung out with the Wallflowers, the Austin-based band that performed a benefit concert for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. He learned, he repeatedly told interviewers, that there was more to life than cycling.

But Armstrong is a rider, compulsive by nature. With each monthly medical exam showing no return of his cancer, his thoughts once again turned to the idea of competing. He no longer thought he could shoot for the Tour de France, as he and Cofidis had hoped, but he believed he could compete again in one-day races. The problem was, after his disease and aborted early comeback, what team would have him? Even the highly optimistic statements from Nichols and his other doctors were insufficient to convince Cofidis that Armstrong was out of the woods.

Armstrong did not, in fact, ride in four races as stipulated by the terms of his Cofidis agreement, so in August of 1997 the company decided to terminate the contract. Armstrong held his tongue for two weeks; then, during a press conference at a bike show in Anaheim, he and Stapleton blasted the company. "For Cofidis to walk away," Stapleton fumed in a statement released at the time, "is both unthinkable and unbecoming

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of one of cycling's major players." Stapleton received a few "insulting" nibbles from other European outfits before accepting an invitation to ride on the U.S. Postal Service team. In the end, if Armstrong wanted to race again it would be with an American team, and against a European cycling community he felt had betrayed him.

Two days after the charity ride in California, Armstrong sprawls on an oversize camel-back sofa in the great room of his house in Austin. Outside, there's fog curling on the lake. Wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a Nike T-shirt, Armstrong absently pets his orange tiger cat, Chemo, while he watches the morning business news, his eyes locked on the stock quotes scrolling rapidly across the bottom of the screen. He rises to pour himself a second cup of coffee. In a week he'll leave for Santa Barbara with his fiancé to begin a month of prerace training before starting Postal Service team workouts in January. Toasting himself a bagel, he has a casual, self-made air the young professional athlete as entrepreneur. As he has said repeatedly, he's made enough from cycling that, with it properly invested, he never has to ride again.

So why do it? The historical challenge, surely. It's interesting to note that if Armstrong is attempting the greatest comeback in the history of sport, he in a sense will have to go through LeMond to achieve it. The two have been inexorably linked ever since the 1994 season, when LeMond quit racing after developing mitochondrial myopathy, a rare degenerative disease of the muscles that his doctors believed was undermining his performance. When LeMond bowed out, Armstrong replaced him as American cycling's best hope. Armstrong's achievements have always been measured against LeMond's, and so will his return.

And there are the obvious commercial prospects. Stapleton thinks that if Armstrong looks good in the early 1998 races, by late spring they can start looking for new sponsors. He convinced Nike to make Armstrong a Nike athlete before the company even made a cycling shoe. By comparison, Armstrong redux would be an exceptional fit for, say, a pharmaceutical company. "Bristol Meyers-Squibb makes the three cancer chemo agents that saved Lance's life," Stapleton says without a trace of irony. "Imagine the PR hit the company could get from having Lance advertise their products. Right now its an incredible story the guy beat cancer."

Stapleton plans to "leverage everything through the 2000 Games" in Sydney. If Armstrong can be competitive in Europe this year and next, Sydney could serve as the stage for his apotheosis, perhaps with a book about his comeback, maybe a movie.

Armstrong himself knows better than anyone else what's at stake and how hard it will be for him to win. Cycling is a ruthless sport. Even LeMond had to grovel as he climbed back through the ranks. Armstrong may be free of cancer, but even a 98 percent recovery won't be enough for him to return to the top tier of international cycling. If he is ever to ride again at the same level as before, he will have to come all the way back and then some. And so he lashes himself daily to prove to the world that he can do it. And to mollify doubters, he disseminates microscopically detailed health updates virtual Lance on the World Wide Web.

On the other hand, Armstrong already had cancer through most of his banner 1996 season. He's more than proved his ability to perform at the highest level despite being severely hampered. In 1996's last big World Cup race in Zurich he finished fourth in an eight-man sprint after 150 miles. A week later, at a time trial in Belgium, a flat-out individual race against the clock that riders call "the race of truth," he finished second to Chris Boardman, one of world's best in the event. "The performance," says Armstrong, "would not have indicated I was a sick person."

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