I was still willing to risk losing to win. Something inside me would never settle for being in the middle.
HOW MUCH of my life had I spent like this, in a team car? How many hours had I sat up here in the front watching a TV screen, talking to my riders over our race radios while scrolling through my text messages all at once—sometimes while also driving with my knees controlling the steering wheel? How many times had I looked in the rearview mirror and glimpsed—through a thicket of three spare wheels, two toolboxes, three cases of bike parts, twenty-nine food bags, up to one hundred water bottles, and a mound of rain jackets, gloves, vests, caps, and arm and leg warmers—the barely visible face of one of our mechanics?
Figure it out for the Tour de France alone: This was 2007, my ninth Tour de France. It usually takes around 80 to 90 hours of total saddle time for the racers to circle the country. Say it all adds up to 720 hours. That's thirty days, isn't it? One month, for a race that lasts a month. Fitting? Funny?
How about this way: one month of my life.
That's a good month—used up just right. I know I'll think that even when it's time for me to leave this life. No regrets about that month.
So goes the mind of a team director trying to distract himself at the start of what feels like the most important stage of his life: the 135-mile stage 16 of the 2007 Tour de France, at the end of which, on top of a monster of a climb called the Col d'Aubisque, I would know whether we had won or lost this Tour—whether I was a team director who had won seven Tours thanks to one rider, or whether I was a winner in my own right.
My eyes fixated on one of the saved text messages I'd been idly scrolling through: "I hope my rivals will be Valverde and Evans."
It was a reply to one of the many messages I'd sent out to our team a week before we'd met in France for the start. I'd gone over the course and the rosters again and again, then sent inspirational notes out to each rider, tailored to remind each of them what their roles and goals were for us. I thought Alberto was a near guarantee to win the white jersey, awarded to the best young rider, so I'd sent him a message outlining his rivals for the honor.
He'd quickly sent back his reply, and the meaning of it was clear. Alejandro Valverde and Cadel Evans were two of the top contenders not for the white jersey but for the yellow jersey—the overall win. Alberto had been letting me know he believed he could win the whole thing.
And now he had a chance to prove it.
Stage 16 was the last mountain stage of 2007—and our final chance to tear the yellow jersey away from Michael Rasmussen, who'd had a stranglehold on it for ten days, since the second stage in the Alps.
Rasmussen was nicknamed Chicken—either because, depending on who you chose to listen to, he loved eating poultry or he was lean to the point of scrawniness. He was a thirty-three-year-old Dane, five foot nine and 130 pounds, who'd started out as a mountain biker before turning to the road and making a name as one of the best climbers in the world. He'd won the King of the Mountains jersey twice in the Tour, in 2005 and 2006 (along with four stages) and a stage in the Vuelta a España. He was now riding for my old team, Rabobank.
As the pack set out from the town of Orthez, I could see Rasmussen near the front, resplendent and lean, surrounded by the orange-and-blue jerseys of his team. Off to the side I saw Alberto in the sparkling white jersey of the best young rider, and riding beside him Levi Leipheimer, who'd come into the race as our team leader but now found himself in the role of Alberto's lieutenant. Alberto was in second, two minutes and twenty-three seconds behind Chicken; Levi was fourth, at 5:25. (Between them was Cadel Evans at four minutes flat.)
There were four climbs standing between us and the yellow jersey. The first, and the steepest, would come less than fifty miles into the day: the hors categorie (HC) Port de Larrau, which averaged just over 8 percent for its nine miles; portions of it were nearly too steep to walk. Second up was the category 1 Col de la Pierre-Saint-Martin, which also climbed about nine miles but wasn't as steep. After thirty miles or so, the peloton—or what was left of it—would run smack into the category 1 Col de Marie-Blanque, which averaged nearly 7.5 percent for almost five miles, then, a mere ten miles later, into the cruel wall of the Col d'Aubisque, an HC beast whose ten-plus miles at 7 percent would rip the legs off most of the survivors. It was there that I knew we had to attack as if there would be no more attacks for us to give—ever.
I'd told the team as much the night before. I'm not a big pep-talk coach. I don't go in for the rousing, shouting, loud team rally. In small groups, twos and threes, I spoke to them not about strategy but about what was in my heart.
"We have done a great job of putting ourselves in a position to win," I said. "The Tour has been crazy this year. We have survived its madness and we have a chance very few people thought to give us: we can ride into Paris in yellow. But to do that we need full gas. We need all-out attacking. If we do not crack Rasmussen tomorrow, we will know that we have lost the Tour de France."
And to Levi and Alberto, who would have to do the cracking, I said, "We must ride in such a way that if we do not win, we lose. To have a chance at the top step, we have to be willing to never take one step onto the podium."
I was telling them that to take the yellow jersey they had to be willing to ride so hard it would endanger their podium spots—Alberto was solidly in second and Levi still had a shot at third. All or nothing.
No Plan B. Nothing in reserve. No save-the-day strategy. Just everything we were against everything Rasmussen was, everything the Tour de France was.
Stage 16 was going to be insane, chaotic, unpredictable, cruel, unforgiving, and punishing—and lead to unimaginable triumph or abject failure. The whole Tour de France had been that way. And not only because of the riding.
On stage 8, a racer on the T-Mobile squad, Patrik Sinkewitz, had to abandon the Tour after he broke his nose and injured his shoulder in a collision with a spectator. One of Sinkewitz's teammates, Linus Gerdemann, gave up his one-stage stint in yellow that same day. Gerdemann, a twenty-four-year-old climber who had ridden to a stage win and the maillot jaune in the first mountain stage, was a popular rider and a vocal opponent of doping. His victory was seen by many as proof that clean riders could not only compete but win.
"It is great to see Linus win," said an enthusiastic David Millar to reporters, even though he was not a teammate of Gerdemann's. Millar, a young Scot who was riding for Saunier Duval, had become an unofficial spokesperson for the sport. He himself had admitted to EPO use in June 2004 after police searching his home found syringes; after serving a two-year ban, he had returned to the sport vowing to help clean it up. "This is the sign of a new generation coming through," Millar said.
Two days later, it was announced that Sinkewitz had failed an out-of-competition drug test for testosterone doping in early June; he would have been kicked out of the Tour had he not already withdrawn.
Nine days after that—on the rest day before stage 16—it was announced that testing on Alexander Vinokourov had returned an A sample that was positive for blood doping, and that he and his entire Astana team were withdrawing from the Tour. Vino, as he's called, had been one of the prerace favorites for yellow until a crash on stage 5 forced him to ride with stitches in his knees, an injury that would slow him so much his chance at yellow was over. Though he could not make up all the lost time, Vino had sought to redeem his reputation with stage wins, taking in two out of three days the stage 13 time trial and the stage 15 climb through the Pyrenees.
Rasmussen, meanwhile, was at the center of a fast-growing storm of criticism. For about a week, reports had been circulating in the media that he'd been unavailable for several out-of-competition drug tests before the Tour. (By contract, racers must make their whereabouts known at all times for out-of-competition testing; missing too many tests is considered the same as returning a positive test for doping.) At the poststage press conferences, it seemed as if Rasmussen spent as much time defending himself against cheating as he did talking about how he planned to defend the yellow jersey.
Being inside the Tour de France felt like living in a tornado zone—and getting hit by twisters every day. No one knew where the destruction was going to come from next.
Amid this disorienting, discouraging, damaging whirlwind, I did a very selfish thing: I turned the focus of our team ever harder, ever tighter, ever closer to the race itself.
"We are here to win the Tour de France," I told them at night, stopping by their hotel rooms, or as one or two of us sat at the dinner table or sipped espresso in the team bus before a start. "There is nothing we can do to prosecute the guilty or protect the innocent. That is not for us. We are here to race. We are not here to judge anyone or to try to anticipate who might be doping or not. We are here to race the Tour de France, and we are racing it because we want to win it.
"We are here to win," I would say to the team. "Until the race is over, everything but the idea of winning is a distraction."
I was used to seeing the sport's doping problems this way—as one more barrier to winning. I had more or less been trained to do this since 1999, when, after Lance's first great ride up Sestriere, the leading French sports newspaper ran a headline over the story of his exploit—"On Another Planet"—that was a sort of European code for "he must be doping, because no mere human could do what he did."
But, in truth, this time I was shielding the team not only from the outside world but from my own turmoil.
For one thing, whether you thought doping got so much attention because it had become a pandemic, or a witch-hunt, or (like most of us) something in between, there was no arguing that the entire situation—from the actual cheating itself to the policing and penalizing and publicizing of it—felt wildly out of control. T-Mobile, for instance, had been lauded for its aggressive and public antidoping stance, which included a requirement that each of its riders submit to the team's own series of frequent tests in addition to those administered by the testing agencies. It suddenly felt as if any team might one day have its own Patrik Sinkewitz, who later admitted that, almost without forethought and with no real consideration of the consequences, on his own he'd applied testosterone cream to his underarm to help himself recover during a training camp. Not a single rider on U.S. Postal or Discovery had ever tested positive for doping while on the team. Not one. I could not help but think of what might happen to the legacy Lance and I had built—and to the hundreds of thousands of cancer survivors he helped and inspired—if someday even one of our lowest-ranked riders made a mistake that ended in a positive drug test at any race in any part of the world at any time of the year.
For another thing, I myself had taken our team too close to the center of the doping controversy in the off-season.
On October 18, 2006, Ivan Basso and his team, CSC, announced that they had terminated his contract "by mutual consent," due to his ongoing involvement in the Operación Puerto investigation that had resulted in his banishment from the 2006 Tour de France. There seemed to be a lot of evidence against him, but I am a fan of the American system of justice: innocent until proven guilty. I didn't outright dismiss hearsay and circumstantial evidence, but I didn't trust it, either: three entire books full of nothing but circumstantial evidence and unsubstantiated testimony had been written accusing Lance of doping.
Our team's policy was clear and ironclad: any rider who tested positive or confessed to using performance-enhancing drugs would be off the team; it seemed fair to me to base our decisions on evidence instead of innuendo. Great example: One of the names on the first, speculative list of who'd been involved in Operación Puerto was Alberto Contador. But shortly after he was banned from the 2006 Tour (along with four other members of the team that was originally known as Liberty-Seguros, then, after reorganizing, became Astana), both the Spanish judicial system and cycling's worldwide governing body, the UCI, cleared him, saying that although his name had appeared incidentally in some of the files alongside those of his teammates, there was no evidence he had participated. Alberto, in plain language, had absolutely nothing to do with the scandal. The doctor at the center of the scandal, Eufemio Fuentes, also said he had never worked with Alberto. If I'd acted on rumor instead of reality, I'd never have signed Alberto.
Basso was claiming he was innocent as well, and nine days after he left CSC, the Italian Olympic Committee announced that, based on insufficient evidence, it was acquitting him of any charges related to Operación Puerto. (When an athlete is accused of doping, no matter which lab or agency detected the alleged infraction, the trial is conducted by his own country's Olympic committee.) We asked four different lawyers to examine the rulings, the evidence, and the UCI code of conduct riders agreed to abide by, and the legal opinion was unanimous: the documents meant Basso was free, and eligible to ride.
He was the one guy Lance and I both knew could step right into our team's leadership role to begin another dynasty. We signed him to Discovery in early November 2006; he and Levi would be our coleaders for the Tour de France. From here to the end of Basso's association with us, I must respect his privacy and stick to the public details only. In late April 2007, the Italian Olympic Committee reopened its investigation; on April 30 he and I agreed that he would leave the team, and on May 2 he appeared before the Italian Olympic Committee and admitted to "attempted doping." In June he was banned from the sport for two years. Knowing everything I do now, I have to say that I made a mistake signing Basso.
I just wished we could all get together and race bikes as if we were kids again.
On climbs, though Alberto's accelerations never look ugly, their effect on other riders is violent and destructive. He jumps like a bullet coming out of a gun—and he can fire three, four, five, six times in a few kilometers, going all out, then recovering quickly before attacking again. He's what other cyclists call, admiringly, a "pure climber." It doesn't mean that's all he can do; it means that when he climbs, he is flawless.
But despite his gifts, Alberto was still only twenty-four years old. There was a good chance the Tour would wear him down after two weeks, strip away his power until the most we could ask from him would be to finish. So my plan had been to send him out fast and hard toward the end of the first set of mountain stages, which would come in stages 7, 8, and 9. I hoped to be able to let him ride moderately when we first hit the mountains, giving him a day or two to sort his legs out, then use him to tear the race apart and soften up the contenders before he got fatigued.
And that would align perfectly with my strategy for Levi. When he'd come back to the team at the end of 2006, I'd told him I thought he could make the podium of the Tour de France—that he should have been on it already.
"I know," he said. "But something always goes wrong. I feel like one off day costs me, every time."
I'd been thinking the same thing, and as I outlined my strategy I could see his face change from registering doubt to confidence. I wanted him to start the season in worse shape, I explained. For one thing, remember, I thought all along that he had been peaking too soon over the past few seasons—getting too fast too early, then slowing down during the Tour. "You have to accept that you're going to be slower than you've ever been in your life in May," I warned him. "You can't let that scare or discourage you."
And when it came to the Tour, I continued: "You have to hide. You have to be the quietest contender. Invisible, okay? The Tour for you is not about gaining time but about not losing time."
"Then," said Levi, "how do you ever win if you never gain time?"
I liked the way he asked the question: he wasn't trying to pick my idea apart but genuinely wanted an answer. "Each day in the mountains," I said, "someone different will win and someone who won before will fall back. Someone who finishes in front of you one day will be behind you the next because you will never fail. And in this way"—I paused, sliding my hand between our faces, dipping it into a valley at our chins, and then raising it back up to eye level—"in this way you will sneak to the top."
Gerdemann had won the first mountain stage with a long breakaway that didn't feel dangerous to our overall hopes; the contenders for the overall win—Rasmussen, Evans, Valverde, Levi, and Alberto—finished together in a trailing group, happy to mark each other rather than Gerdemann. It felt like a warm-up. And it turned out to be: the next day Rasmussen danced through the Alps, holding a lead over three category 1 climbs (including the Cormet de Roselend, where I rode off the cliff) and taking the yellow jersey.
"How do you feel?" I asked Alberto that night.
"Good. Strong."
"Eager?"
"Yes." He smiled. "Of course."
"Why don't we attack tomorrow? Not to win, just to attack. To play."
Stage 9 was tricky and hard: only ninety-eight miles, with a category 1 climb and two HCs—the first almost at the start and the last just before a twenty-two-mile descent to the finish line (which sat atop a short, steep uphill as well). Less than two miles into the stage, a rider from AG2R attacked, and we pounced.
"Popo, that's you," I said into the radio, and Yaroslav Popovych bridged up. "Let's make it hard today." He did, eventually being joined by a small, intense group of climbing specialists including Mauricio Soler—a twenty-four-year-old Colombian who would go on to win the stage and, in Paris, this year's polka dot jersey. Popo's breakaway had a three-minute lead on the yellow-jersey group by the time the race got to the last climb, the 10.8-mile, 7-percent-average-grade Col du Galibier.
"Okay," I said to Popo. "Now wait for Contador."
Then to Alberto: "Vamos!"
Alberto burst from the yellow-jersey pack. Only Evans could match the acceleration, and then only briefly before falling back. He dangled between Alberto and the yellow-jersey pack. Alberto opened space between himself and Evans, and Rasmussen, Valverde, and the others.
"Levi, tranquillo, right?" I said. Easy, I meant. He was sitting in the pack amid the leaders, hiding, holding back, as I'd asked him to.
Just as Popo crested, Alberto rode up onto his wheel and together they began screaming down the mountain, taking turns working together in front while the other rested in the draft. Soler was going to win, but I didn't care: behind Popo and Alberto, the leaders were shredding themselves in a desperate effort to catch our two riders. Teammates together off the front of a pack are dangerous precisely because they are teammates—unlike a breakaway made up of members of different teams, they will cooperate right to the finish line to gain maximum time. Rasmussen and his group caught Popo and Alberto before the finish, but it had been a great stage for us.
Levi had done no hard work so far, but he was sitting in ninth place, just 3:53 behind Rasmussen. Alberto was in fifth—and the white jersey—at 3:08 back.
The Tour traveled across France on flat roads and rollers for three days, then ripped through the town of Albi in the stage 13 time trial won by Vino. We entered the Pyrenees in stage 14 with Alberto in third at 2:31 back and Levi in fifth at 3:37. The stage packed two HC mountains—a total of twenty miles of climbing—into the last forty miles. Alberto and Rasmussen traded attacks on the final climb up Plateau de Beille, blowing apart Evans, Soler, Valverde, Carlos Sastre, and the rest of the pack. With half a mile to go, Alberto sat calmly behind Rasmussen, then unleashed one of his unmatchable sprints to take the stage. Levi rode in forty seconds later.
That night Levi came over to me and said, "You know Rasmussen and I were roommates sometimes when I was with Rabobank?"
"Yeah," I said.
"So we're friendly. So today after the stage he said to me, 'You should tell Contador not to ride like a little girl.' I guess he didn't like the way Alberto sat on his wheel at the end."
"Don't tell Alberto," I quickly said. It wasn't that I was afraid of hurting his feelings. I wanted to save Rasmussen's comment and use it when it might make a difference. At the same time, I found myself thinking about Levi's actions. The entire cycling world, from racers to fans, knew that Levi had been designated as our podium hope, and here he was having the best Tour de France of his life—sitting less than four minutes from the lead as he gained strength every day—yet he was finding himself overshadowed by Alberto, who was exceeding my expectations by staying strong and had a clear and better chance of winning. I could think of many cyclists on other teams who, in similar positions to Levi's, handled it by becoming bitter and divisive, creating tension within the team that sometimes grew into such a rift that no one won. Levi was not only not like that but, on his own, he'd come to me and volunteered information that might help us motivate Alberto.
He is one of the finest, noblest teammates I have ever known. He prizes winning above all, even above his own ambition.
Stage 15 was capped by an HC climb that averaged 8.5 percent for the final six miles—the steepest stretch of road in this year's Tour—and the category 1 Col de Peyresourde, which was nearly six miles at 7.8 percent. Vino escaped early in a breakaway of twenty-five riders, and would stay away to win the stage. But it was the yellow-jersey group that mattered, the top contenders riding together all the way to the base of the final climb, the mighty Peyresourde, eyeing each other like Saturday night brawlers in a pub waiting eagerly for someone to throw the first punch.
"Gas, Alberto," I said.
It was beautiful in a certain shocking way, something perhaps like the sure motion of a feeding shark. Alberto glided up out of the group, and only Rasmussen, crawling all over his bike for every bit of leverage he could muster, could stay in contact. Evans, Valverde, Andreas Klöden, and Sastre straggled behind, with Levi slotting neatly into their group. The road was lined with fans from Basque, the cycling-mad region of Spain, who dress in orange; the walls of our tunnel vision were colored by them, and the roar of their shouts rolled over us. Alberto slacked his pace slightly, recovered for half a mile, then attacked again.
Rasmussen held his wheel.
I picked up the radio. "Alberto," I said. "Just so you know, Rasmussen told Levi you rode like a little girl yesterday."
A pause. Alberto's voice, angry, came back through the radio: "He'll know what a little girl is today."
I think no one on earth could have stayed with Alberto through the next acceleration. He stood, scooping his feet through the bottom of his pedal strokes, dancing atop his bike and leaping up the hill. Rasmussen fell 50 feet back, 100, 120. His body stiffened; he was no longer rocking on his bike in mere fatigue but teetering on it in exhaustion. I could feel the yellow jersey slipping from his back.
Then, incredibly, somehow Rasmussen began crawling across the gap. Stiff, ungainly, mouth wide, eyes blank, he found Alberto's wheel, and that's how they finished, 5:31 behind stage winner Vino. We had been within a few pedal strokes of cracking Rasmussen.
And that brought us to stage 16. Win or lose. All or nothing—almost. I had one last chance to change my mind before we got to the endgame, the mighty Col d'Aubisque.
Carlos Sastre joined the polka-dot-jersey-wearing Mauricio Soler in an early attack on the first climb of the day, the nine-mile, HC Port de Larrau. Rasmussen, Alberto, Levi, and Evans let the move go. By the second of the day's four major climbs, Sastre and Soler and a few other riders with them had a gap of nearly four and a half minutes. Soler had started the day fifteen minutes behind Rasmussen; he was out to secure the polka dot jersey, not a podium spot. But Sastre could be trouble. He'd started the day in sixth, 6:46 behind Rasmussen, just over a minute behind Levi in fourth and about three and a half back from Alberto in second. He was, technically, ahead of Alberto right now—and closing on Rasmussen.
The Rabobank team car—Rasmussen's—pulled up beside me on the narrow, winding Alpine road.
"Erik!" I yelled out the window to their team director, Erik Breukink. I knew what he wanted: to work together to chase down Sastre. If Rabobank and our team went to the front, we'd pull Sastre back easily. He asked if we'd cooperate. "You've got second and fourth preserved then," Breukink said as he ended his request.
I'd raced with Erik back on ONCE, and for two years on Rabobank, and I respected him. He'd finished third in the 1990 Tour de France, and won the white jersey in 1988. Since he'd retired and taken over Rabobank, his team had won Paris-Tours, Milan–San Remo, the Tour of Spain, and a lot of other races. He was good at his job. And his offer made a lot of sense. It was the smart thing to do—what I would have done in his place.
"Sorry, Erik," I said. I smiled. "We're going for the win today."
I was going to force Rasmussen and Rabobank to do all the chasing on their own, even if it meant we never caught Sastre and it cost us any chance at a podium spot.
By the time we went up and over the third climb, the Col de Marie-Blanque, Rabobank's pace had whittled the yellow-jersey group down to just fifteen riders. By the time we hit the base of the Aubisque, we could see the break in front of us, forty seconds at the most.
"Patience," I said quietly into the ears of Alberto and Levi and Popo, for even here I knew we would have to wait, that Rasmussen could only be cracked, if at all, at the very end of the end. The Aubisque rewards those who can resist its early, gentler slopes. It climbs up out of a green valley with a cool stream, the Valentine, running alongside. There are chalets, stores, patisseries, fountains where dogs and children alike drink. Then in the last six miles it steepens, shoots up out of civilization, and grows hot and distant. The road winds around far curves, then identically around the next far curve, again and again, so that you can lose your mind, thinking you are pedaling as futilely as a man chasing the horizon. It was then that we would attack.
Seven miles from the summit, I said, "Popo."
He rose from his saddle, pedaled to the front of the group, then sat down and began grinding away at his bike as if it were a monster that was trying to drag him below the surface of the road. Only four of the world's best bicycle riders were able to hang on to his wheel: Alberto, Rasmussen, Evans, and Levi. They rode up to and around Soler, who could not stay with them, then Sastre. With six miles to go, Popo pulled off.
And Levi attacked.
It was a beautiful, spontaneous move made on guts and instinct. He'd been saving himself the entire Tour—originally for the purpose of riding his way onto the podium through attrition. But now he was burning himself to nothing for a teammate. Rasmussen caught his wheel and I said into the radio, "Tunnel coming."
In another mile, I knew, there was a landslide shelter built over the road. I wanted Alberto to attack out of its darkness. When I shouted into his ear, he burst out of the black mouth of the tunnel and I hoped that for Rasmussen, emerging back into the blinding sun with a rider flying away from him, it would feel like a nightmare.
Alberto was away. He had a gap.
But Rasmussen ever so slowly closed the distance—it was like watching a minute hand move toward the top of a clock. You could not quite see him gaining but you could not miss the gain. After a quarter-mile, he was back on Alberto's wheel. Evans was still hanging on, dragging himself along on sheer doggedness, refusing to let go of whoever's wheel happened to be last in that elite line.
And I shouted, "Levi!"
Levi rose from his bike though I knew everything in him just wanted to sit at this point. But he drove himself into his pedals and surged forward. Rasmussen immediately covered the move.
I gave them a few seconds. I didn't want the rhythm of attacks to be too predictable. At this point I had to keep my directions simple: their brains would be shutting down, their bodies operated by nothing more than that primitive impulse to triumph over whatever was in front of them. So I said only "Go! Now!"
Even in this state of duress, Alberto Contador can ride a bicycle on a mountain more beautifully than anyone else I have ever seen. If you watched hard you could see that his chest looked as if it were ready to pop, and his head was hanging sideways. But the motion of his legs never faltered. Looking as if he was doing nothing more than sprinting up his driveway at the end of a ride, he pulled away from Rasmussen again.
Levi fell away. Rasmussen wrestled his bike up to Alberto—then attacked, and Evans was swept backward by gravity and exhaustion. Levi, somehow, rode his way to the front again and began making tempo, setting up his teammate once more.
But it was Rasmussen who jumped from the group of three, in the final half-mile, flying away, Levi trailing behind, and Alberto, empty at last, able to do nothing but keep spinning and wait for the end to come.
We had lost the Tour de France.
That night I did something I've never done before: I celebrated a loss.
While the team sat somber at the dinner tables, I ordered two bottles of champagne. When I had a glass in my hand, I stood and raised it and said, "I wanted to say that to win is impossible for us now, as you each know." Rasmussen was 3:10 ahead of Alberto, a gap we could never make up now on the flat stages and in the one time trial left; Levi was in fourth, at 5:59, but just fifty-three seconds behind Evans; if he rode the time trial of his life, he could take third. That would give us two podium spots, Alberto's stage win, and the white jersey—a great year for any team. But not what I had wanted.
"We have reason to be disappointed," I said. "But I'm proud that..." I looked at each of them. We had blown ourselves up, but survived. "I'm so proud that we were willing to lose everything for a chance to win."
I hadn't quite known what I was going to say until it came out of my mouth, and I was both a little surprised to hear it and a little surprised at the instant realization that it was true: I was still willing to risk losing to win. Something inside me would never settle for being in the middle. After all those years of dominating the race, it was a good thing to know about myself.
The knowledge almost seemed worth the cost. Almost.
Later that evening, after the riders had gone up to their rooms, I was sitting in the restaurant, talking to a journalist, when he got a call. When he answered his phone, his mouth fell open. He listened for a moment, then put the phone down near his chest and said to me, "Rasmussen has been sent home by his team."
I started to register sadness—for the sport, for the fans, even for Rasmussen himself—then in the next instant, before I could fully feel the emotion, I knew I had to get to Alberto. I went to his room and knocked on the door. Benjamin Noval, his roommate, opened the door and I stepped in.
Alberto was on the phone, talking to his girlfriend.
"Hang up," I said.
I told him all that I knew—that Rabobank had withdrawn Rasmussen from the Tour after a credible report surfaced that he'd been spotted training in the Dolomites, in Italy, when he'd supposedly been in Mexico, which was one of his excuses for missing the out-of-competition tests.
Alberto said, "I don't want it." By the rules of the Tour, the yellow jersey would be passed to him.
"I know," I said. "I knew you wouldn't." We looked at each other. I said, "But we have it."
"I would rather be second than first this way."
But there was nothing we could do about it; you can't give back time. We were ahead of the 148 other riders left in the Tour de France, by less than two minutes at the closest, and by nearly four hours at the most distant. That didn't mean we had to be in yellow, though. We agreed at that instant that Alberto would not wear the jersey that just a few hours earlier we had been willing to sacrifice everything for.
There would be no yellow jersey for stage 17. No one would wear it. At the end of that stage, someone would be in first—whether it was Alberto or Evans or Levi or Sastre or Valverde or even Soler or Jens Voigt, who was thirty-fourth at 1:17 down, or Cédric Vasseur, who was in fifty-eighth two hours back, or anybody who had ridden, who had started the race and ridden the stage and ended it with less accumulated time than everyone else. That was all Alberto and I could think; that was all that made the thought of wearing the yellow jersey bearable.
In time, I would come to understand that while daily the race had exploded around us, we had outlasted those who had fallen from it the same as if they had cracked, or crashed and broken their legs, or simply, as happens, ceded to a stronger team. Like Levi deliberately pacing inside the pack, we had made no mistakes. I understood that not only is it not the victor's duty to apologize for a win, it is not even his right. A win is a win and you cannot excuse yourself from it because of circumstance. Your opponent's condition is not your fault, nor are their strategies. Rain, heat, the good luck to not get a flat tire, a dog running across the road—none of the infinite and unpredictable conditions of competition are yours to feel bad about. To do so dishonors those you defeated.
Of course the Tour de France was not over yet. There was still the 34.5-mile time trial the day before the race ended in Paris.
Cadel Evans, who was 1:50 behind Alberto, was a far better time trialist and could conceivably take the yellow jersey away from us. He'd have to gain more than 30 seconds every ten miles, which I calculated could only happen if Alberto crashed or I let him blow up. It was just like guiding Lance through his bonk on the climb of Joux-Plane: We didn't have to worry about losing 30 seconds, or 60 seconds, or even 109 seconds. All we had to do was ride fast enough to not lose all 110 seconds of our lead.
But just to be sure, I recruited a little extra inspiration.
"Okay, Alberto," I said into the radio once he'd gone down the start ramp for the time trial and I'd pulled the car in behind him. "Calm."
"GO!" screamed a voice from the seat beside me.
I looked over at Lance Armstrong and smiled.
"Can you believe it?" Lance said to me. "Can you believe it, Johan? You better believe it."
And I did, finally, punching our team car through that old, familiar wall of human bodies and sound, the yellow jersey that belonged to our team curved over a speeding bicycle in front of us.
"50 k," I said to Alberto. "Tranquilo, man. Don't blow up."
"GIVE IT ALL!" screamed Lance.
And that's how it went, me feeding tranquillity and the calculations of our split times to Alberto while Lance went nuts. I looked in the rearview mirror once and our mechanic had his hands over his ears. It felt perfect. Evans was eating into our lead, but it wasn't going to matter. Behind him, Levi was having the ride of his life, scorching across the streets on his way to a stage win. I was grinning like a buffoon, like a madman, like a victorious Tour de France team director.
"There's a tailwind," I said to Lance, sticking my hand out the window. We both knew that that was a good thing: the faster everyone went, the less time anyone could gain.
"Tailwind," I said into the radio.
"GO! GO! YOU!" screamed Lance as Alberto swooped around a corner.
I thought back to something Lance had said to me once during one of those many discussions we had in 2004 about how many Tours he wanted to win: "The dream is to win as much as you can and still be able to quit as a winner," he'd said, and it had always stuck with me. "That's the art of it, Johan, being perfect."
There in the car, with the former champion beside me and the future champion in front of me, that was the moment I knew.
I knew that when Alberto Contador crossed the line he was going to be assured of winning the Tour de France after the next day's largely ceremonial ride. (The last stage is really only raced once the peloton reaches the Champs Élysées in Paris, and then only among the sprinters.) I knew we were going to have a hell of a party in Paris the next night. I knew that the champion of many Tours de France to come had arrived. I knew that I was a winner. And I knew, finally, after all this time, that I was going to call Eva Maria and Victoria and tell them that I was coming home—that it was time for me, like Lance, to quit as a winner.