Ian McDonaldMY SON gave me for Christmas a book, It's Not About The Bike, which tells the story of Lance Armstrong, the American cyclist who won the most gruelling event in world sport, the Tour de France, after surviving testicular cancer which spread to his abdomen, lungs and brain, giving him only the smallest of chances of living more than a few months longer.
But Armstrong wasn't willing to die. Surgery removed the cancerous testicle and the tumours from his brain and then he took on four rounds of chemotherapy so powerful that the chemicals destroyed his musculature and caused considerable kidney damage. He vomited continuously, hacking up mysterious, tar-like matter deep in his chest. He lay curled on his side, wrapped in blankets, his hair lost, his weight way down, grunting as the fever from the poisons raged. By the final round of treatment the chemicals were burning his skin from the inside leaving scorch marks which freckled him. He was wasting towards skeleton. Even so, out of these depths, he sometimes tried to get up and move, attached to his IV cart. "Move," he said to himself. "If you can still move, you aren't sick."
Cofidis, the French cycling team, with whom Armstrong had signed a two-million-dollar contract not long before his illness, gave up on him and broke their contract while he was in hospital. That turned out to be the worst bet in the history of sports. Nike bet differently and stood by him, but basically nobody, including his doctors, gave him a chance of returning to cycling. Racing in the Tour de France was unthinkable.
The Tour de France, remember, is by far the most physically daunting event in all sport. One day Tour cyclists have to ride 200 kilometres through mountains, the next day there might be a long sprint lasting seven hours. Hot sun, pelting rain, mountain cold, slippery roads, jostling bikes, intrusive spectators, and through it all the relentless, grinding, lung-bursting jack-hammer pedalling hour after hour after hour for three weeks. It has been described as the equivalent of running 20 marathons in 20 days.
Lance Armstrong's come back is surely more astonishing than any other ever made. Towards the end of 1996 he was diagnosed with what seemed to be that terminal cancer.
He then underwent treatment of the harshest and most debilitating kind. Yet by mid-1997 he was again riding hard four hours a day. But it didn't last, it seemed too hard, he thought he felt the cancer coming back, he gave up. "I was a bum. I played golf every day, I water-skied, I drank beer, and I lay on the sofa and channel-surfed."
His friends got him to agree to prepare for one last race, the US Pro Championship in May 1998. One day while training for the race he decided to ride Beech Mountain in North Carolina, a desperately hard 5,000-foot climb, snowing towards the top. The ascent triggered something in his soul. His coach reported it like this:
"Something happened on that mountain. He just dropped his partner and he went for it. He was racing. It was weird. I was following behind him in the car. The cold rain was now a wet snow. And I rolled down the window and I was honking the horn and yelling, 'Go Lance, go!' He was attacking and cranking away as though we were in the tour. Nobody was around. No human being. Not even a cow. He got up to the top of the that mountain and I said, 'O.K., I'll load the bike on the car and we can go home.' He said, 'Give me my rain jacket - I'm riding back.' Another 30 miles. That was all he said. It was like throwing on a light switch."
The rest is already part of sporting legend. Lance Armstrong went on to win the Tour de France in 1999 and won it again in 2000, 2001 and 2002. He will try again in 2003 and if he wins he will be equal with the greatest of the great, Eddy Merckx and Miguel Indurain, and then, no doubt, he will try to surpass even those heroes of his sport.
There is a passage in which Armstrong contemplates the lessons he learned when he was dying of cancer. For a pugnacious extrovert, brought up tough and hard, the passage is unusually lyrical:
"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, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe - what other choice was there? 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. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery...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. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. 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."
Ian McDonald is a regular contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.
