I had read the books, seen the films, got the replica cycling shirt. With my family, I had gone to Paris last year to watch him coming down the Champs Elysées to collect his fifth Tour de France title. Now I was boarding a plane to Barcelona with a message from Texas that, when I got there, I’d get a call with the final details for “the summit”.
The call was on my answering machine when I landed and it was the great man himself. “Hey, Alastair, it’s Lance.” Very Texan. Very friendly. “We’re gonna meet tomorrow. I’m probably biking in the morning, so come by maybe 2. That’ll be great. If you need directions, just call.” And then he leaves his number and I think, that’s interesting, leaving your home number for someone you’ve never met. We talk a couple of times, about the race he’s just run, about Girona. I say I’ll get a haircut while he’s out training. “In Girona? Mmm. Could be risky,” and he laughs.
When I arrive at the flat at the scheduled time, it is Sheryl Crow, his new pop-star girlfriend, who greets me at the door, very warm and welcoming. She comments favourably on the haircut, then Armstrong appears at the end of the hallway, smaller and slighter than he looked on the bike in Paris, big Texan smile, T-shirt, blue jeans, brown boots. A long, firm handshake and we go into the kitchen for coffee and curly little chocolate biscuits he says he got from a store down the street.
He lives, close to several of his US Postal Service team colleagues, in a first-floor, four-bedroom apartment at the heart of Girona’s old town. Although a confirmed atheist, he takes me almost immediately to the tiny chapel, lovingly describes its features, and, above all, the 15th-century painting of the Crucifixion that takes pride of place.
A married man with three young children, he bought the flat as a wreck and, with the help of a young Texan architect, transformed it into a beautiful family home. Huge photos of his children cover the wall of the study, but the marriage to Kristin is over, so Armstrong’s four-year-old son, Luke, and his two-year-old twin daughters, Grace and Isabelle, are in Texas. As he’s showing off the 12th-century stonework in the tiny cloistered garden, he says this is where he used to play with them and he misses his children so much that it hurts.
Once we settle down to talk at a long wooden table, we are swapping stories about George W. Bush, his fellow Texan. We agree that our politics are different to Bush’s, but that the President is smarter, funnier and more likeable than the caricature. Even Sheryl, whose politics Armstrong describes as “way out Left”, says that it’s hard to meet Bush and not like him. I had assumed, because he and Bush were Texans and I’d seen pictures of them laughing and joking in the Oval Office, that Armstrong was a Republican. But he says his politics are “middle to Left”. He is “against mixing up State and Church, not keen on guns, pro women’s right to choose”. And very anti war in Iraq.
So the “summit” has begun and here I am, thinking that I’d be getting hours of top-quality insight for my triathlon training, and, instead, it’s like I am back in my old job, defending military action, defending the Bush-Blair relationship, insisting we did the right thing and saying, long term, it will make the world a safer place. But Armstrong is screwing up his face and he won’t have it. “I don’t like what the war has done to our country, to our economy,” he says. “My kids will be paying for this war for some time to come. George Bush is a friend of mine and just as I say it to you, I’d say to him, ‘Mr President, I’m not sure this war was such a good idea’, and the good thing about him is he could take that.”
He mocks my line that you have to “give it time” before those weapons of mass destruction show up. “You know when they caught Saddam and the doctors were rooting through his beard and Sheryl said to me, ‘Why are they doing that?’ and I said, ‘They’re looking for them weapons’. Come on, man.” He laughs and shakes his head and I know I’m not going to persuade him. “What’s Blair like?” he asks. “He a good guy?” I say he is. “Yeah, looks a good guy.”
Enough of politics. Now for religion. Despite the chapel, despite the crucifix around his neck (a link with a fellow cancer patient), Armstrong is deeply suspicious of organised religion. He never knew his “so-called father”, and he says that in all his 32 years, he has never asked his Mum, Linda, a single question about him. He was born with the name Gunderson, then his mother married the man who gave him his name. Terry Armstrong talked religion but used to beat Lance with a paddle and he was relieved when he walked out. “He was like me in that he got his name from someone else,” Armstrong says. “His biological name was Love. But his Mom married a man named Raymond Armstrong, a preacher. It’s weird, I’ve got his name, my kids have his name but I have never met him and I never want to meet him.”
His stance on religion is in marked contrast to his wife’s ever more fervent Catholicism and the difference may have been one of the factors that led to their marriage breaking up. Armstrong believes it is possible to be a good person while not believing. “I think we all have obligations to be good, honest, hard-working, caring and compassionate,” he says. “You have to try and it won’t always be easy but you try your best. I do not believe that because you are not prepared to submit yourself to a god or a higher being, that when you get to the end of the road, you will be sent down. I’m not prepared to believe that.”
The language of religion is never far away when Armstrong talks about his sport: sacrifice, pain and forfeit as the route to improving mind and body; sport as a calling with a higher purpose. In one of his two autobiographies, he said that life is a series of false limits and his job is to challenge them on a bike. I ask him to explain. “Cycling is one of the two or three toughest sports in the world. The Tour de France is the ultimate sporting event. I don’t think there is a harder sporting event anywhere. Imagine a marathon and Formula One combined — that’s what it’s like. It’s three weeks of agony and it’s hard and it hurts and it can be dangerous and every single guy who does it is one tough bastard.”
Armstrong is one of five men to have won the Tour five times. If he wins this year, he’ll become the first — and probably the last — to win six. It is a remarkable record. He was a good cyclist before having testicular cancer diagnosed in 1996. It spread to the lung and the brain. He saw off the disease and emerged a great cyclist. He is in no doubt that it’s the cancer that made the difference. He talks of it like some people talk of their closest friend.
