Lance Armstrong: Winner Making the most of life
Champions are made, not born. And four-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong is no exception. However, he is exceptional. Kate Jones tells why.
On a glorious July summer afternoon in Paris, Lance Armstrong claimed his fourth successive Tour de France victory. He’s not the only person to do so, but his journey may nevertheless be unique.
Armstrong has unmistakable drive and ambition— anyone who completes the gruelling race does—but his is unmatchable, a story worth the telling. Armstrong’s journey took him to the depths of physical and emotional despair and allowed him to understand what most people spend their lives searching for— that life is a journey and the journey is a gift.
At the age of 25, in 1996, just as he was coming into his prime, he began a different race, one that would change his outlook on life forever: the race to save his life. Suffering from the flu, he visited his doctor. In fact it wasn’t the flu; rather, he had testicular cancer, with large metastasis to the lungs. In his biography It’s Not About the Bike, * he says his reaction of the moment was, “I’m 25, why would I have cancer?” n But the prognosis kept getting worse, and the aggressive cancer reached his brain. Within just a couple of weeks, he lay in a hospital bed waiting for dawn to break, mentally preparing himself for brain surgery.
He did as would most people and contemplated his own mortality. “How do you confront death?” he asks. “I asked myself what I believed. . . . I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness . . . we do it every day, I realised. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics.
“Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn’t fully see until the cancer how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism.
. . . I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit. So I believed.” Each day presented new challenges, setbacks were followed by small steps forward and his physical fitness began to fade. His body was battered by the chemotherapy that was fighting the cancer. One chapter in his book is simply titled “Chemo.” In it he writes: “One day I noticed strange marks on my skin, almost like faint, brown stains.
They were chemo burns. The drugs were scorching my tissues from the inside out, leaving patches of discolouration on my flesh.
“By now I was well into my third [chemo] cycle, and I didn’t look like the same person. My physique was shot, compared to the one I entered the hospital with. . . . I remember looking down at myself in my gown. It was as though my body was being steadily diminished: my muscles were smaller, and flaccid. This is the real McCoy, Lance, I thought. This is what it means to be sick. ” n But once he was well enough to go home, his thoughts soon returned to cycling, despite being all but dumped by his major sponsor, and he was concerned about his financial future along with his ability to race again. But still he rode his bike; friends would take time out and ride with him, and whereas before they’d struggled to keep up, now he struggled to keep their pace.
He tells of how one day he was overtaken by a woman in her 50s on a heavy mountain bike: “She cruised without even breathing hard, while I puffed and chugged. . . . I couldn’t keep up with her.
“You fool yourself to think you may be riding faster and feeling better than you really are. . . . I had to admit I was in bad shape.
“It became an increasing struggle to ride my bike between the chemotherapy sessions, and I had to accept that it was no longer about fitness. Now I rode purely for the sake of riding—and that was new for me. . . . I didn’t love the bike before I got sick. It was simple for me; it was my job. . . . It was a means to an end . . . a potential source of wealth and recognition. . . . But I would not have said I loved it.” n Lance came to realise that he now not only loved his bike, but also needed it. He needed the freedom and the ability to escape—if only for half-anhour from his problems. I can still do this, he told himself. I might not be able to do it like I used to, but I can still do it.
Armstrong, who fought his cancer with the same determination he fights hills, began to realise that he had to give “something back.” “I was beginning to see cancer as something that I was given for the good of others. I wanted to launch a foundation [which he did]. . . .
I had a new sense of purpose, and it had nothing to do with my recognition and exploits on a bike. Some people don’t understand this, but I no longer felt that my role in life was to be a cyclist. Maybe my role was to be a cancer survivor.” n It took Armstrong three years to reenter the ranks of the elite, but in his comeback he was stronger, more focused and better knew what he wanted: “I wanted to win the Tour de France.” He had a dream that motivated him, but before he pulled on the leader’s yellow jersey for the first time, he went through what he terms “survivorship.” “What you learn in survivorship,” he says, “is that after all the shouting is done, after the desperation and crisis is over, after you have accepted the fact of your illness and celebrated the return of your health, the old routines and habits, like shaving in the morning with a purpose, a job to go to, and a wife to love and a child to raise, these are the threads that tie your days together and that give them the pattern deserving of the term ‘a life.’” n Armstrong tells the story of his first Tour de France win. It reveals the determination to which he lives his life. At the end of one stage of the race, “I fell off the bike, so tired I was cross-eyed,” he says. “As tired as I have ever been.
But I led the Tour de France again. As I pulled the yellow jersey over my head, and once more felt the smooth fabric slide over my back, I decided that is where it needed to stay.” And although it was the fulfilment of a dream, Armstrong never wants us to forget that he is, first and foremost, a cancer survivor; he wants to send his message of “belief ” to others, for it is this that motivated him to achieve.
It seems almost like a movie plot that Lance Armstrong, after cancer, finishes a race that before cancer he’d never completed. Not only finished it but came home first. In the media conference following his victory he said, “I’m in shock. I’m in shock. I’m in shock. . . .
I would just like to say one thing. If you ever get a second chance in life for something, you’ve got to go all the way.” But what if he hadn’t won, and not just the Tour de France but also his battle with cancer? he asked himself. “I still believe I would have gained something in the struggle, because in what time I had left I would have been a more complete, compassionate, and intelligent man, and therefore more alive,” he says.
“The only thing the illness has convinced me of beyond all doubt—more than any other experience I’ve had as an athlete—is that we are much better than we know. We have unrealised capacities that sometimes only emerge in crisis. So if there is a purpose to the suffering that is cancer, I think it must be this: it’s meant to improve us.” n For the onlooker, it’s both not surprising and quite apparent that his experience with cancer and beating it has had a huge impact on his life.
He’s learned to embrace each new day, he says. “Cancer no longer consumes my life, my thoughts, or my behaviour, but the changes it wrought are in there in me, unalterable. . . . I’ve learnt to be more thoughtful, and resist saying the first thing that otherwise might come out of my mouth. Above all, I’ve learnt that if I have a tough week, all I have to do is sit back and reflect. It’s easy to say ‘these things don’t bother me anymore.’” And there’s a lesson for all of us—from a man who learned it the tough way.
* Lance Armstrong, It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life, Allan&Unwin, 2002.
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