Lance Armstrong: Love or loath him, it's hard to look past this feisty Texan's exploits on two wheels

By RUPERT GUINNESS___Originally Published in the December 2009 issue of SPORT&STYLE

Lance Armstrong is slouched in the beige leather seats of a private jet on a flight back to Texas. “Sometimes I am sick and f…ing tired of hearing cancer stories. But that is just because I am sick and f…ing tired of cancer. We ought to all be sick and tired of it. I would love to say I don’t have to go to any more hospitals any more.”As Armstrong talks, his assistant, Mark Higgins, sits behind him, updating a schedule that mounts by the day. His girlfriend, Anna Hansen, is feeding their seven-month-old son, Max, with the help of a nanny. Armstrong keeps one eye on Max while chatting to me. Also on board is Dennis Cavner, a former chairman and current board member of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, the non-profit Livestrong organisation that has raised more than $US350 million since its inception in 1997. Sport&Style was invited to join this round trip from the Texan capital, Austin, to the Colorado town of Durango to see how the seven-time Tour de France champion and cancer survivor manages his life.While clearly exhausted, he says this trip “was a simple one. We went out and back to one place. If you go to a hospital or a situation where you have cancer survivors, that weighs on your mind. It pulls it out of you. I have had situations where for no reason – it’s not like you stood up for 20 hours or rode your bike for seven – you stood for an hour and are devastated because it has taken an emotional toll. This wasn’t like that.”
The journey began at 1pm the day before, when I met Armstrong at Austin airport’s terminal where he’d just finished a three hour training ride. After take-off, Armstrong was buoyant and relaxed, but hungry. As we chatted he ate lunch: two servings of soup, two chicken salads and biscuits.Once we landed in Durango, however, it was business. Within an hour, Armstrong was at Fort Lewis College meeting cancer patients backstage at the world premiere of Race Across the Sky – a documentary of this year’s Leadville Trail 100 mountain-bike race; a race he won.Before and after the film, he answered questions as part of a panel that included race founder Ken Chlouber, and mountain bikers David Wiens, Matt Shriver and Olympian Travis Brown. Armstrong then spoke and answered questions at a $US500-a-head dinner at the college where Shriver is head cycling coach. The aim of Armstrong’s visit was not to raise money for the Livestrong foundation, though. It was to support Trails 2000 – a local trails work and advocacy group – and the college cycling team Shriver coaches. Armstrong’s appearance was also a way of saying thanks to Shriver for his pace-setting work in the Leadville Trail 100.It was from that 2008 race that Armstrong drew inspiration to come out of a three-and-a- half-year retirement and race the Tour once more, finishing third to Spanish teammate, and now arch rival, Alberto Contador.No matter the cause or reason, Armstrong’s visit hit Durango like a typhoon: in 12 minutes all 500 seats for the film preview and 100 for the dinner were sold. During the flight back to Austin, I can’t help but reflect on the first time I met Armstrong, a confident young Texan who had just turned professional. It was at the 1992 Tour of Lombardy, where he was meeting teammates from the now-defunct American Motorola team. I had heard of his last place in that year’s Clásica San Sebastián one-day race in Spain and how he finished more than 30 minutes behind the winner, alone and at dusk, but driven on by the words of his sports director, Hennie Kuiper. “Push yourself, Lance,” Kuiper told Armstrong when it was clear that he would have to ride on to the finish alone. “What you do now will only benefit you later.” In his next race, the Championship of Zürich, Armstrong finished second.As a long-time cycling journalist, I have plenty of other memories that flood back. There was the Armstrong who was dropped from the 1993 Tour of Flanders classic. After starting with a vanilla-f lavoured explanation, he halted and said: “Ah, excuses – they’re like assholes. Everybody has ’em and they all stink.”Then came the Armstrong who, later in 1993 and in rain at Oslo, Norway, became the youngest rider since Eddy Merckx to win the world road race title – then picked me up the next week from the train station in Como, Italy, in a modest second-hand car for an interview at his apartment. Then there was the Armstrong who on October 2, 1996, aged 25, was diagnosed with testicular cancer that spread to his lung and brain, then beat it to produce one of the greatest comebacks of all time – including winning the Tour de France from 1999 to 2005.This year’s return was not only aimed at reaping further sporting success, and fulfilling personal ambitions, but to also generate millions of dollars for, and spread awareness of, the fight against cancer.Sure, there has been controversy in the years that preceded his comeback – plenty of it. He has long been the target of doping accusations and, despite never failing a test and constantly denying the use of performance-enhancing drugs, his detractors have continued to attack him. As his domination in the sport mounted and popularity in the US soared, relations between him and many riders, officials and cycling fans in Europe became strained.If anything in Armstrong’s life is going to create more interest than his foundation work, it will be his duel with Contador in next year’s Tour. There will be nothing charitable in this combat. Theirs is a clash of Ali-Frazier proportions. It will be the highlight not only of next year’s cycling season, but the 2010 sporting calendar. Some doubted the seriousness of the divide that developed during this year’s Tour. Armstrong set the record straight – and bluntly – when Sport&Style raised the heated verbal exchanges that followed the Tour finale in which Armstrong did not attend Contador’s celebration dinner in Paris, but instead met up with representatives of RadioShack, the sponsor of his new ProTour team. At a press conference in Madrid after the Tour, Contador said: “My relationship with Lance is non-existent. Even if he is a great champion, I have never had admiration for him and I never will.” Armstrong’s terse reply on Twitter read: “Seeing these comments from AC. If I were him I’d drop this drivel and start thanking his team. w/o them, he doesn’t win.”Five months on, the ice has not thawed. Armstrong grabs a handful of almonds from a bowl and throws several in his mouth before saying: “It’s no secret we are not friends. It was just typical. Young guy, tons of success, never faltered. I called his PR guy and said I don’t want to tell you what to do, but I don’t think that’s such a good thing to say. That’s stupid.” He says attention on their personality clash will be “a distraction for he and I, and perhaps a distraction for our teams”. But then he adds: “It will be good for cycling. It will make for an epic build-up, an epic Tour. Those key stages will be epic.”Listening to Armstrong, you suspect he is relishing the scenario. He admits his best Tour victories came when he engaged in bitter conflicts, whether they were with a rider, official or those in the media who challenged the legitimacy of his successes. “We would create those things [to sharpen his competitive edge]. But I am a different person than I was 10 years ago,” he says. In regards to his rivalry with Contador, he adds: “We are not making it up. It’s there.”While Armstrong was satisfied with third place in this year’s Tour, he believes he can do better. “I had mixed emotions. I was glad to make the podium,” he says. “There was a point there where I could have easily been fourth or fifth. So I was happy to make that step, but I have been so many times on another step. I wasn’t bitter. I know cycling pretty well. I know he [Contador] was by far the strongest guy in the race. I am cool with that. In 2010 I will be better.”No one should doubt Armstrong’s desire to win, but these days even he admits to being a more mellow soul. “I am not going to get worked up about something I can’t control,” he says. “It could be a traffic jam. It could be a media frenzy, bad luck in a bike race. If you can’t control it …”He is also more at ease talking with his peers in the peloton. “I think people, the boys in the bunch, view me as a different person now,” he says. He cites “as the perfect example” German rider Andreas Klöden, who has signed on to Armstrong’s RadioShack team (which is racing in next year’s Tour Down Under in Adelaide) after spending years with rival squad T-Mobile and a stint this year with Astana (Armstrong and Contador’s team). “I never would have talked [to Klöden before],” Armstrong says. “In fact, I never would have talked to anybody.”Does Armstrong regret that? “Yes and no. It was a lot more tense back then. There was a lot more pressure,” he says, referring to the time between 2001 and 2004 when he was also riding for a $US10 million pay-out broken into three instalments for wins in the 2002, ’03 and ’04 Tours. The full payment would become his if he became the first to win six successive Tours. “When I crashed at Luz Ardiden in ’03, I had $3 million on the line … $3 million on the way to $10 million [in 2004]. There is a lot of pressure with that,” he says.Does Armstrong believe his detractors will ever get off his back? “Well, they probably won’t, but it’s harder now for them. They are in a very tough position. I answered a lot of those questions [with my comeback] and I have been a different rider. I think there is greater support from the people. So they are up against not just me, they are up against public opinion.”At the Durango film premiere, there was no sign of those detractors. There was hooting at every sight and sound from him. Unsurprisingly, there was only optimism and energy at the Livestrong headquarters in East Austin – the poor end of town – that is adorned with Armstrong memorabilia (next to his seven Tour yellow jerseys there’s a place for an eighth). Business never stops. When Sport&Style visited, preparations were in full swing for that weekend’s final Livestrong Challenge – a series of fundraising rides – in Austin, and a Livestrong auction at Sotheby’s in New York. Going under the hammer were his race bikes, custom-painted by artists Shephard Fairey, Kenny Scharf, Yoshitomo Nara, Damien Hirst and KAWS.But Livestrong initiatives are not solely aimed at raising money to fight cancer. They seek to prevent the disease with health programs, while Livestrong hopes to open a facility designed to help underprivileged cancer sufferers without access to rehabilitation and care programs. But for all his energy and commitment, Armstrong is human. And while he defied cancer and returned to win the Tour, there are moments when dedicating your life to eradicating the disease and educating people about it can become daunting. “There is every chance I will go to my grave when people are still dying of cancer. There is a chance I will go to my grave dying of cancer,” he says. “My chances of dying of cancer are greater than yours just because I have some genetic predisposition.” But give up? That is not in his make-up, whether against cancer or his rivals on the bike.Armstrong turns 39 next year and he understands the time will come when he’ll have to lay his Tour dreams to rest – next year could be his last. He’s then expected to focus even more on his work for Livestrong and competing in other high-profile sporting events that will aid the foundation. They include the 2011 Ironman Triathlon and, maybe even next year, the 800-kilometre Cape Epic mountain-bike race in South Africa. Off his bike, there are suggestions Armstrong may pursue a political career, but if he does, insiders says he is keeping his political allegiances close to his chest.There is also his unbridled devotion towards his role as a father of four: baby Max, as well as Luke, 10, and twin daughters, Isabelle and Grace, 8, from his marriage to Kristin Richard. Armstrong doesn’t take fatherhood lightly, overwhelmingly because he survived testicular cancer and fathered his first three children from sperm banked before chemotherapy (Max was conceived naturally with Anna Hansen).Armstrong is also firm about not allowing the time he sets aside for his children to slip into time that requires him to be the sports star. “I try to keep my feet on the ground, their feet on the ground,” he says. “When I am with them I only sign something if I have to. If I am at a restaurant, the football or at the park – no pictures, no autographs. All I am then is their father. That is their time.” It is only natural that being raised by a single mother, Linda, who was 17 when he was born, had an influence on Armstrong; especially in light of the poor relationships he had with his father, Eddie Gunderson, and stepfather, Terry Armstrong, who also divorced his mother. Armstrong doesn’t speak in detail about either man, and when asked if the fallout affected his view of fatherhood, he says: “I don’t pull any lessons out of that other than trying to be involved. I think it’s safe to say I have a better relationship with Kristin than what my [birth] dad’s relationship was with my mother, or my stepfather’s relationship was with my mother.”When Armstrong speaks of family discipline, the man who used to be known as “The Boss” for his hard rule of the peloton reveals a softer side. “I try to be their friend. You have to be an asshole sometimes, to be tough. It’s not being a disciplinarian [and] yelling. I don’t believe it. Spanking, I don’t do that. I was spanked as a kid and I was like, ‘This is bullshit.’ … If anyone spanks my kids, they better be ready.”It’s obvious from the protective look I receive from Armstrong as I disembark the plane in Austin cradling Max in my arms that nothing is more important to him than his family. But having spent two days with the cyclist, it’s also obvious he believes nothing is impossible – whether it be yellow jersey number eight or curing cancer.