with Bill Strickland
Houghton Mifflin Company BOSTON NEW YORK
2008
Copyright © 2008 by Johan Bruyneel
Foreword © 2008 by Lance Armstrong
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to Permissions,
Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South,
New York, New York 10003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bruyneel, Johan.
We might as well win : on the road to success with the mastermind behind eight Tour de France victories / Johan Bruyneel
with Bill Strickland ; foreword by Lance Armstrong.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-618-87937-3
1. Tour de France (Bicycle race) 2. Sports—Psychological
aspects. 3. Bruyneel, Johan. I. Strickland, Bill, date. II. Title.
GV1049.2.T68B79 2008
796.6'20944 —dc22 2007043921
Book design by Melissa Lotfy
Printed in the United States of America
MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
TO MY FATHER,
my first and only heroTO MY DEAR MOTHER,
for being proud of meTO LANCE,
a true friend through good and badTO MY WIFE, EVA MARIA,
thank you for always being there,
supporting me, understanding me,
advising me, and above all, loving meAND TO MY DAUGHTER, VICTORIA,
my biggest win in life, who makes
me feel so fulfilled and from whom
I'm learning every single day
what real life is about
Foreword by Lance Armstrong ix
Prologue: "We Might as Well Win" 1
Part I: What I Learned from Winning
1 Follow Your Heart—But Bring Along Your Head 13
2 It Starts with Belief 26
3 Leave Some Dents 37
4 Do Whatever It Takes to Communicate 48
5 To Earn Confidence, Confide 54
6 Bluff When You're Weak—And When You're Strong 64
7 Lose a Little to Win a Lot 78
8 Recruit Too Much Talent 84
9 Trust People—Not Products 95
Part II: What I Learned from Losing
10 "Lucky to Stare So Boldly at Loss" 109
11 When Failure Is Inevitable, Limit the Damage 118
12 Find a Victory in Every Loss 127
13 If You're Breathing, You Still Have a Chance to Win 136
14 Build the Foundation of Victory During Defeat 147
Part III: Putting It All Together
15 "It Was My Dream" 161
16 Everything but Winning Is a Distraction 178
17 Winning Leads to Winning 197
Appendix: Johan Bruyneel's Cycling Career 207
Acknowledgments 215
Index 217
IT'S SIMPLE: I wouldn't have won one Tour de France without Johan Bruyneel, let alone seven in a row. Johan is a Belgian exracer who was my team director during that winning streak, but that doesn't begin to describe him. He became my friend, the closest thing I've ever had to a brother, my confidant, my partner in obsession, and the greatest coach not only in cycling but all of sport. He's a genius—not necessarily a schoolbook type of genius, but one whose intuition and street smarts are unrivaled.
But the first thing he did for me, the one thing that made everything else possible, was at once the simplest and probably the most difficult for people to do: he believed in me.
After I was diagnosed with cancer and was trying to make a comeback in professional cycling, Johan was the first person who told me I could not only return to the sport but win the Tour de France, the biggest and most important bike race in the world. This wasn't some kind of motivational trick or complex psychological strategy. Johan looked deep into me and understood something. And whatever he saw changed my life.
Once I believed in his belief and we began working closely together, I discovered that he is one of the few people alive who might be more obsessed with winning than I am. I was obsessed with racing, training, equipment, recovery, and rest. He was focused on all of that—for twenty-five riders—plus figuring out what races the team should do, what our travel schedule would be, what we should eat, who should room with whom, which riders on other teams we would need three years later. He's the poster child for winning.
No one can argue with his record—in nine years of contesting the Tour de France he won seven times with me and once with Alberto Contador, in 2007. Phil Jackson, John Wooden, Vince Lombardi—they're phenomenal. But no one has a consecutive seven-time championship record at this level, or anything near an eight-times-out-of-nine record—not in the NCAA Final Four, the Super Bowl, you name it. I mean, I had to pedal the bike, but he called 80 percent of our shots. Now that I'm retired and I've ridden in the team car with him, following the racing pack, I've gotten to see the race from his side—and I'm even more astounded by his instinct for victory. There's so much more going on in the team car than you can imagine. You're trying to formulate your strategy and gather information about the race while listening to a race radio and reports coming across in about five different languages, and you have to get water bottles or food up to one of your riders, or get someone with a flat tire back on the road, but you can't let your attention waver from the simple task of driving or you'll run over someone. You can kill a guy if you don't drive straight.
Meanwhile, because you're following the pack or stuck in a certain place, you can't really see the race, you can't see the faces of the other racers or competitors. You have to rely on the information your team's riders are sending back to you, and you have to filter everything through what you know about them: are they tired, are they only seeing part of the race, do they know what you know about the upcoming course—it's an environment few people would be able to drive safely in, let alone muster the brain power to implement a victorious strategy.
And, like any true winner, Johan made it look easy.
It was never easy, of course. Winning never is. In 2000, the first year I was a defending Tour de France champion, Johan and I spent the spring all alone and all over France, practicing some of the climbs that we knew would be key to that year's race. While I rode, he would support me, enduring hour after hour of driving a car at 20 mph. No one else was crazy enough, or committed enough, to help me study and conquer each road.
One time in particular stands out for me still. It epitomizes everything Johan and I were about. On a cold, wet day we came to Hautacam, a ski slope in the Pyrenees that streaks upward for nearly eight miles. It was slated to be that year's first mountain stage. As rain, then snow and sleet slashed down on us, I rode up the mountain. Johan and I tried out various places to attack. I got out of the saddle at certain corners while we tried to judge if that was the best place to attempt to gain an advantage. We tried to figure out where to conserve energy and where to spend it for maximum effect. I climbed for about an hour in weather so bad all either of us wanted was to be in a nice, warm room somewhere.
He was in a car, but it's not like he was basking in comfort. He kept sticking his head out the window into that driving rain. The wheels slipped and slid. He was aching from sitting so long. He'd given me the best, most nutritious food we had. But more than that: he was there with me. I knew instinctively and deeply that he'd have been out on the bike with me if that was what it took to win. Instead, we needed him in that car, taxing his mind as rigorously as I was thrashing my body.
At the top, Johan pulled the car beside me and stuck his head out the open window once more. His dark hair was plastered against his forehead. Water ran down into the cleft in his chin. "Well?" he said. "Good? Get in and let's get some hot tea."
I shook my head and said, "I didn't get it."
"What do you mean?" asked Johan.
"I didn't understand the climb," I said. "It's not my friend. Let's do it again."
It was crazy. I was crazy. We were cold and tired. We'd already studied this horrifically steep mountain in more detail than any professional racing team ever had in history. No one else on earth would have told us we needed to do the climb again. And, to be honest, I'm not sure that either of us would have even considered such a thing if we were not paired together. I drew inspiration from him, he drew determination from me. I could always count on the fact that Johan understood that, to win, we needed to go beyond what was reasonable.
To me, it's not so remarkable that we did Hautacam all over again. What sticks out in my mind about Johan is that, without one further question we turned around and descended the mountain for thirty minutes, then pointed ourselves back to the peak and spent another hour in misery going straight back up.
When the Tour de France started that year, I took the yellow jersey on Hautacam. That was the glory. But the victory really happened out there in the driving rain and sleet. That was Johan and me. Whatever it took to win. Without question. With absolute belief. And with a kind of closeness that is found so rarely—too rarely.
I love winning. But I just might love Johan Bruyneel even more.
LANCE ARMSTRONG
If you're going to expend that first big block of effort and energy to participate, you might as well go ahead and give whatever else it takes to win.
WHAT WAS IT LIKE?
That's one of the two questions I get asked the most.
The first thing most people want to know when they find out what I did for a living—and who I did it with—is: What was it like to work with Lance Armstrong, cancer survivor, hero, seven-time Tour de France champion, greatest athlete on earth? The answer, as with most of the answers I've found in life—and in the Tour de France—sounds deceptively simple.
Imagine, I tell people, you're standing in line to board a groaning city bus one day when someone plucks you up and plops you into the cockpit of a rumbling, roaring fighter jet. Or imagine you're invited to play a game of chess but when you sit down you realize that your king is some sort of unprecedented, one-of-a-kind phenomenon that, rather than needing to be protected and sheltered to win, will be able to launch blistering offensive attacks by leaping squares faster and farther and in different ways than any chess piece ever has.
People understand what I'm trying to tell them: Power. Adrenaline. Force.
But most people also miss the second half of those analogies —which is the important half, if you're interested in anything more substantial than simple thrills. Put a civilian in charge of a fighter jet and you're more likely to end up with a smoking wreck than a decorated and glorious hero. Give chess novices a superking—give them two, or three—and the board will still be ruled by a grandmaster opponent who has studied hundreds of thousands of games and memorized every opening and endgame and plays ten moves ahead of ordinary comprehension. Muscle power without mental power means nothing.
People—mostly insiders who understand the sport of cycling and the intensely symbiotic relationship between team directors and star riders—also ask the all-important second question: Could you and Lance ever have won if you'd not met each other?
There's no simple answer at all for that. Lance Armstrong and I found each other at the perfect time. We'd each had some success when we met but neither of us had really found our specialty, the thing that would take us to the top of our sport and our particular potentials.
In 1998 I was thirty-four, freshly retired from a twelve-year pro racing career whose highlights—I won two stages of the Tour de France, and once wore the yellow jersey given to the race leader—arose more from cunning and tactics than from sheer physical ability. I had the mind and heart of a champion, but not the engine; at my best, I could sometimes beat the best, but the hard truth was that winning the Tour de France was simply beyond my physical capabilities.
I'd been racing since my teens, and wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do. I'd always felt, from the time I was a child, that my destiny was to be a great champion of something, but my career had shown me otherwise. I wasn't disappointed in what I'd done, but I wasn't fooling myself either. In one sense, I'd accomplished great things—risen to the most elite level of bike racing, ridden alongside great racers and colorful characters, and lived a country-hopping life that aspiring cyclists dream of. I'd gotten new bikes every year, and uniforms, and clothes to wear, and all the food and other perks that enabled me to live comfortably. To those who'd tried to become a pro at that level but failed, I was living the dream. I knew that. I appreciated that. But in another sense I was also aware that I hadn't left my imprint on the sport the way I'd dreamed of doing when I was a kid.
I had half a thought that I might try to head up the pro riders' union, which at the time was weak, unorganized, not really an advocate for the athletes. I knew that someone needed to show the riders how, if they could all just band together and take a tough stand, they could quickly accomplish things such as raising salaries at the low end (where, after years of sacrifice, a rider sometimes makes just into five figures), securing better contracts with more guarantees, improving the insurance options. They were all important issues, issues that would leave a mark on the sport. But not in the way I wanted.
I also knew that I could go into sports marketing for some team, or help promote a race series. I'd studied marketing back in Belgium, when I was still racing as a young amateur. I loved the way ideas could be brought to life and communicated to people, the way a good marketer could bring excitement to any subject. There was something about the logical, methodical flow of progress from an idea's conception to its presentation to the public that appealed to me. And my facility with languages—I spoke five fluently, ripping through courses in school thanks to a natural affinity—would help get any message across in any country in Europe, which is the hotbed of pro cycling.
Either of those two options seemed like the natural next step. And yet, something held me back from committing to them. I knew it was time for me to retire but I also had this sense that if I abandoned the competitive part of cycling I would feel for the rest of my life as if pro cycling had somehow gotten the better of me.
And I hate losing more than I love winning.
It seems funny now that I gave no thought to the idea of being a team director—a position most often compared to that of a baseball manager or basketball coach, but which is really more like being a CEO and coach at once. Yes, of course you choose the lineup, create the game plan for the season and each race, call the plays, and organize, implement, motivate, and discipline the athletes. But you also manage the staff the fans don't see—the board, the assistant team directors, the mechanics, the massage therapists, the doctors, the office managers, legal counsel, public relations staff, and even a bus driver and a chef. (For our U.S. Postal Service and Discovery Channel teams, it was a support staff of as many as forty, in addition to up to twenty-eight riders.) It's not that I didn't want to be a team director; I just never thought of it. Why would I? Who would hire me? I had no experience.
Even if I'd had experience, I probably wouldn't have put Lance's team (which was then U.S. Postal) at the top of my list. They were, as Lance himself once described it, "the Bad News Bears, a mismatch of bikes, cars, clothing, equipment." The team's total budget was $3 million, less than the salary of some of the world's best racers.
And Lance, himself—well, he was not yet LANCE, the one-word beacon of human potential, hope, and triumph that he's become. He already had the obsession, and the drive, and the physical ability that's led him to greatness. But it hadn't all gelled—and there was no way it could have by then. He was twenty-seven, still a child in terms of experience in the peloton, which is what a pack of pro cyclists is called. He'd shown enormous promise as a one-day racer (winning a world championship at age twenty-one, and two stages of the Tour de France) before being struck by cancer, but his comeback was a patchwork of failures (dropping out of races) and near misses (finishing fourth in the Tour of Spain, a late-season stage race). He was not a Tour de France champion. He was an experiment.
We were opposites in many ways. I'm from a big, happy family in cycling-mad Belgium, where biking, second only to soccer in popularity, is shown on national TV nearly two hundred days a year, where no matter where you live there's a nearby race just about every day of the week that attracts thousands of spectators, and where from their teens promising riders are adopted and nurtured by local fans and coaches who buy their equipment and pay their expenses. From nearly as early as I could remember I'd been surrounded by bike racers and wanted to be one of them, the way nearly all American kids want to be basketball stars at some point in their lives. In my family, in my neighborhood, we rode more often than we didn't over the course of a week, and there were at least a couple local races each weekend and many through the week as well. The speeds were fast, the corners tight, the roads were in horrible condition, and the rain and wind were our constant opponents.
I was gifted enough physically to find success as a kid. I became a local star, then, as a teen, a regional power and a threat at the national level, and eventually, in my twenties, I found out that I had what it took to ride among the best in the world. It felt almost like a career track—in Belgium, you were lucky and gifted and determined if you made it as a pro cyclist, but you were not by any means an anomaly; it was what Belgian athletes became.
Once I began competing against other world-class athletes, however, I quickly realized that I could not dominate races the way I'd done back in my neighborhood, racing against my friends and kids I'd known all my life. But I found out that I could steal a win here and there by racing with my head as well as my heart. I became a sponge—soaking up the impressions and subtle clues riders gave off about their form, learning more about my opponents than they sometimes knew about themselves, studying course profiles, planning meticulous strategies for single races, and embracing both the nuances and the deep core truths about the curious and mysterious sport of cycling.
For instance, when two riders jump ahead of the pack and break away on their own, they must cooperate—each taking turns at the front to block the wind, saving energy for the rider in back so that together they have the strength to hold off the charging pack. But as the pair approach the finish line, at some point they must turn on each other; the very rider you've depended on for survival, cooperating like brothers for miles and miles and hours and hours, instantly becomes your most bitter rival and you try desperately to leave each other behind—but not too soon, or the pack will catch you as you struggle solo to the finish.
The strategies used to win a bike race, especially a multiday stage race as opposed to a one-day event, are shockingly simple, and not all that numerous. For instance, once you have a day where you gain some time on your chief opponents, you no longer have to beat them on the following days; you simply shadow them so you do not lose time. The leader wins by being led. There's no way around that, and your opponents know, so they must attack you, trying over and over to ride away. It's no secret. Another example: if you're behind in time, you send your second-strongest teammate to the front to attack before you do; if he is successful and rides away from the group, he tries to gain enough time to threaten the leader's top position, which means the leader must then stop following you and attack—making him vulnerable to fatigue, and to your own attack that will come later. Or, if your teammate gets away but doesn't gain much time, he might soft-pedal, waiting patiently far up the road. When you attack, dragging the leader (who is doing the right thing by following) along with you, you will at some point meet up with your teammate; the two of you can then take turns attacking the isolated leader.
Everyone in cycling knows and understands these few strategies. The difference is that amid the chaos and speed of a bike race, only a very few people in the world are able to execute them consistently, and at the right time. Only a few people are able to block out the madness of a bike race and focus on the fundamental strategies, while still being able to remember everything about the course profile or keep in mind a subtle clue an opponent might have given about his condition that day. So even at its most basic level, though cycling strategy is simple, the sport has no element as uncomplicated as throwing a ball through a hoop to score a point. I reveled in these complexities, and learned how to ride alongside cyclists who were much more talented than I.
Lance, famously now, grew up with unstable or absent fathers, roughing out life with his mother, who raised him as a single parent and sacrificed much to give him what little they had, in a country where the general public considers the bicycle more of a child's toy than a high-tech marvel of sport gear.
Where I was part of a long tradition when I began racing as a kid, he was an exception. And he won races differently, with raw horsepower and guts. He cared little for the traditions and unspoken rules of the peloton.
But in the few years we raced against each other, I as the aging insider and he as the brash kid, we'd improbably shared some key experiences—moments of intense beauty and agony—that forged an unlikely bond. By 1998, when I was retiring and Lance, who was searching for something, asked me to become his team director, it was perfect timing for both of us.
As soon as I realized I had a chance to be Lance's team director, I understood why I'd been hesitating about my other career options. It crystallized for me: I didn't just want a job. I wanted one last chance to become the champion that racing had both shown me I could be and kept me from being. Here was my chance—the opportunity to become the best team director in the best race on earth.
The Tour de France is the greatest sporting spectacle because it transcends bicycle racing. The Tour de France is like life. It's not a game, or a series of games. It's a two-thousand-mile, month-long odyssey that creates and breaks heroes, elevates some while diminishing others. There's unspeakable triumph and heartbreak, not in fleeting moments but washing over you for sustained periods. There are disasters, and illnesses. Babies are born while racers speed simultaneously away from and toward home. Deep friendships develop. Rivalries, too. Bikes crash. So do cars. There are cheaters—and there always have been, though the methods have varied. The Tour de France is the only sporting event, someone once said, so long that you have to get your hair cut in the middle of it. This messiness and glory is what I think of when I say the Tour de France is like life itself. It was always where I had most desired and most sought to prove myself.
Everything I knew about cycling, and about the Tour, was telling me something about Lance, this kid who'd been a spectacular one-day racer but had never even finished a complete Tour de France, and who was trying the most improbable comeback in all of cycling, if not sport. I turned off my brain and listened to my heart.
I accepted the job. Then I told Lance something shocking.
"I think we should focus on the Tour de France," I said.
"Okay," said Lance. "Which stages? I can win a few stages."
"No," I said. "I want to see you on the podium. I want to win the whole thing."
Lance said nothing for a moment. Years later he would tell me, "I thought it was far-fetched, but at that point I had nothing to lose."
"Look," I said. "If we're going to ride the Tour, we might as well win."
Finally, Lance said, "Sure. Okay, let's do it. Let's win the Tour de France."
We might as well win. I've always had this idea that if you're going to try something, if you're going to expend that first big block of effort and energy to participate—whether it's riding the Tour de France or applying for a new job or coaching your daughter's soccer team—you might as well go ahead and give whatever else it takes to win. I mean, I'm going to be there no matter what, right? Why not go ahead and get the victory?
It's a simple idea—but it's one of those simple ideas that, like cycling itself, or like trying to explain what it's like to work with Lance—is full of hidden meanings and finer points.
Over the course of the seven years Lance and I contested and won the Tour de France together—from 1999 to 2005—then during the year after Lance retired, when I didn't win the Tour, I absorbed a life's worth of wisdom about what it takes to win, and how to learn to win from losing.
The Tour de France became my crucible. I emerged from it as the most successful team director in history. I don't think you can become a winner, or figure out how to turn loss into victory, through some snazzy ten-step program full of catch phrases and bullet points. I think you have to immerse yourself in life, in the race, in the stories, in the experiences of triumph and failure. I think you have to absorb it, not memorize it. And I think we all have such chances in our lives; every day we deal with the elements of success and failure. Every day we bump into people who can help us or hinder us. Every day we are given a choice to attack or follow. Sometimes it's hard to figure out what to do, or to know if you're doing the right thing once you're doing it.
All I know for sure is that winning starts with belief. It's the one thread that runs through every story in this book, the one constant in my life: no matter what the experts said, no matter what the facts seemed to indicate, no matter which way I was being pushed, by money, or the media, or fans, I made every decision with my heart, and once I made a decision I committed to it all the way. I made decisions as if I were jumping off a cliff. I didn't want to leave any possibility for second-guessing.
That's not to say I leapt into those decisions blindly; I didn't want to fall to the ground and die. I wanted to jump, then soar. Leaping off a terrifying cliff takes heart. To fly instead of fall, you better have been smart enough to build a glider—or a jet—before you jumped. (Or possess the quick-wittedness to put one together on your way down.)
This is not an autobiography, nor is it a comprehensive chronology of every Tour de France I won with Lance and Alberto Contador. This is the expression of the moments that stick with me, the simple yet somehow profound stories about how I won and lost—and won again, thanks to all that I'd learned from Lance, from the Tour de France, from bike racing, from my father, from my team, and from the ticking of my own heart.