Lance Armstrong
MAN ON A MISSION
If you thought Lance Armstrongwas aggressive on a bike, wait until you see what he does with
a cause.
By Mark Seal
Photo by Rick Chapman
While Lance Armstrong has officially “retired” from professional sports, he has never retired from the Cause, with which he has always ridden tandem. “To inspire a whole generation of cancer survivors,” is how he describes it. To do this, he is as driven — and disciplined — as he ever was on the bike, which is why he’s on the phone with me.
The Cause began with his diagnosis in 1996, when the world’s top-ranked cyclist was literally forced off of his bike in excruciating pain, which turned out to be testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and brain. The story of how he not only beat his 50-50 odds for survival, but also went on to win a record seven victories in the Tour de France, has been exhaustively told. The story that Lance Armstrong, at 35, wants to tell now is a story of activism, instead of athletics. It begins with his retirement after his seventh Tour de France victory in the summer of 2005, when he returned to his home in Austin, Texas, where his three kids, Luke, Grace, and Isabelle, were happy to have Dad finally home again.
“I knew that I wasn’t going back and I was happy with my decision,” he says. “I was getting older and slower inevitably, and so I was done. It was nice to win one and then step away. Well, we got home from the tour and a couple of weeks later I decided to go out for a leisurely bike ride, which I still do to this day. I put on my bike clothes and I walked into the room where my kids were and said, ‘All right, guys, I’m going to go for a bike ride.’ And my kids, you should have seen the looks on their faces. They just stopped in their tracks and said, ‘Dad, we thought you quit!’”
He founded the Lance Armstrong Foundation in 1997. Its mission: “To inspire and empower people affected by cancer.” Armstrong is, of course, the foundation’s unifying face and force, and sees his role as creating awareness, by whatever means necessary, which means nothing short of a crusade. Now, he’s not just a guy on a bike, but the leader of a burgeoning army, millions of members strong and growing by the millisecond. You know them by their yellow rubber wristbands, embossed with the word LiveStrong, now so ubiquitous it seems like they’re worn by practically everyone on this planet.
The bracelet wasn’t Armstrong’s idea, he admits, but Nike’s, the sportswear giant, which sent representatives bearing the bracelets down to see Armstrong in Austin in the spring of 2004. “They had always made the little rubber bracelets, so they came to us and said, ‘We will make these little yellow bracelets, they are called ‘ballers,’” he remembers. “We make them for basketball players and we are going to make some for you guys. We are going to make five million of them and put the name LiveStrong on there. The first handful of them, or the first five million, had a swoosh on them. Of course, we were blown away.”
“Did you ever think it would do what it did?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “I figured we wouldn’t get rid of half a million of them.”
Then, at the summer Olympics, 2004, he saw “different athletes from all over the world, all the different races and religions and cultures wearing the bracelets,” and Armstrong knew he had struck a chord. “Now there are 62 million of them,” he says. “They were a dollar apiece and we sold 62 million. That is a lot of money, no doubt about it. It enabled us to fund more programs. We do grass-roots programs, advocacy programs, scientific and research programs. I think, more importantly, it galvanized a force of people that bought something and wore it as a symbol for their cause or for what they care about. It’s just something, a dollar apiece, but it says, ‘Hey, I care about this, or I care about that.’ It is a pretty powerful piece of rubber.”
His role is something akin to putting that rubber band into action. “I wish it was as simple as telling you, ‘Here’s the one thing I want to do,’” he says. “In the past I had my sport and somebody said ‘What do you want to do this year?’ and my answer was, ‘I want to win the Tour de France.’ At the end of July we all knew whether or not that happened. This is a little bit tougher to define your exact goal and objective. Therefore it is tougher to monitor and declare a success. It is about awareness, it is about education, it is about access to care, it is about funding. It is all of those things, and, obviously, it is about research. I think the headline is just making it a national priority. That means for the president, for Congress, for the people on Main Street U.S.A.
“Our database now is about two and a half million people,” he continues. “Some of them — or a lot of them — are people that have bought wristbands that wanted to be included in this army. Those are the people that we will rely on in the coming years to make themselves heard and to be viewed as an army. If you put together a block of people like that, you have tremendous power in this country when it comes to voting and the political process.”
The best way to rally these troops and to enlist others?
For Armstrong to be everywhere at once.
The Drive
After his seventh victory at the Tour de France, he decided to take a break. So after taking his kids skiing near Lake Tahoe, he rented a car and pointed it west, toward Oregon, where, he figured, he would lose himself in the redwoods. It’s quite the picture: hyper-Armstrong in a rental car, seeking solitude. “I never had the chance to be alone,” he says. “It was an attempt to truly be alone for five or six days. I’m always on the phone, always at a gadget, so it was an attempt to leave that stuff behind as well. I went north basically from the Bay Area, up to Oregon to the redwoods, and just kind of relaxed.”
Then, he got a message on his BlackBerry: His companion of two years, and for a while his fiancée, rock star Sheryl Crow, had been diagnosed with breast cancer. “That was a very difficult time,” Armstrong says. “She was diagnosed, and I needed to be in touch.”
He flew back home, back to the Cause, back to being everywhere at once.
“I’m looking at this Runner’s World article where they talk about your typical schedule: ‘Run the ING New York City Marathon on November 5; to Indianapolis to drive the pace car at the Indy 500; to New York to publicize a partnership between Nike (one of his biggest sponsors) and Apple; to Boston to deliver the commencement address at Tufts University; to California for the first of five LiveStrong challenges, a series of cycling, running and fundraising events for the Lance Armstrong Foundation; to Europe ... to Hollywood ... to Iowa ...’”
“I just know that I’m going to spend a lot of time on airplanes,” says Armstrong.
“It’s a tougher schedule than when you were racing, isn’t it?” I ask.
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “It’s more complicated. The life of an athlete is fairly simple: Eat, sleep, train, potentially win or try to win. Outside of that, you can ask people to leave you alone and say, ‘I have to focus on my sport.’ And people pretty much respect that. Now, it’s open season. They are like, ‘The guy doesn’t need to try to win the Tour. Let’s get him to go here or get him to go there.’ I’m bad about saying ‘No.’”
Paramount in his life, pre- and post-retirement, are his kids. “I have my kids on a weekly basis, so everything basically revolves around that,” he says. “The kids are sort of the pillars. Then when they are with their mother, I will go away and work and do my own thing. The schedule is every Thursday, Friday, then every other Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. So it is kind of a tricky schedule, but I don’t like to miss any of my days. I stay here in Austin when I have them. When they go back to Mom’s, then I’ll fly out and do the sponsors or fulfill the obligations that I have.”
The Running Buddy
Last November, close to the 10-year anniversary of his cancer diagnosis, Armstrong decided to do something audacious in the awareness department, to show the world, and his troops, that he was still running at high speed. He decided to compete in the New York Marathon.
“Every day for me is a challenge, but I think the marathon was more of a challenge I had about retirement,” he says. “Not to let myself go and get over the hill and gain weight. I want to stay fit and stay out there and active, and try to set an example for 35-year-old guys. I don’t have to win the Tour de France to do that, and I certainly don’t need to do a marathon, because I’ve done a lot of other endurance stuff. I think it is important to look after our health and look after our lifestyles. Run, ride, go to the gym, kayak, throw a football in the backyard and break a sweat for an hour, and I feel like I’ve done something. It’s more about consistency, just doing something every day. To boil it down, it’s just basically breaking a sweat on a daily basis.”
That’s a Matthew line, I point out, referring to his celebrated running buddy, the actor Matthew McConaughey.
“Yeah, he is always, ‘Time to go break a sweat,’” he says.
“Did McConaughey help you train for the marathon?” I ask.
Armstrong laughs. “Did he help me or did he hurt me?” he asks.
They had known each other for eight years before being trailed by paparazzi last summer. “We kept in touch off and on over the years,” Armstrong says. Then came last year’s Rose Bowl in Los Angeles, featuring McConaughey’s proud alma mater, the Texas Longhorns. “So we had a huge Austin contingent,” says Armstrong. “We started doing some stuff there and then his relationship ended with Penelope [Cruz] and mine ended with Sheryl [Crow] so we had some more free time, so we just … I don’t know, I think he came to Austin and said let’s go have a dinner or something. We just started rolling from there.”
They rolled royally, running shirtless on the beach in Malibu and South Beach, and partying in Los Angeles. “My life has been 20 years of endurance, basically professional endurance sports, so it’s not your typical life of a young kid,” says Armstrong. “From 15 to 35, I did not have the freedom to go out and do whatever I wanted to do.”
“He calls you LiveStrong and you call him the Redneck Buddha?” I ask.
“I call him that sometimes; I don’t call him that to his face,” says Armstrong.
“And McConaughey has said, ‘Cancer could not have a worse enemy than LiveStrong.’”
“Yeah that’s true, I plan on being its worst enemy,” says Armstrong.
“We did a couple of trips, going around and having fun, and, of course, if we go somewhere and have some fun, there’s always exercise involved,” Armstrong says. “These places, there are always people taking pictures. It’s kind of awkward. I got him on the bike, so we ride a bit, but primarily run and lift weights.”
Armstrong and McConaughey are alike in their devotion to fitness, and fun, but diametrically different in other ways, like staying connected via phone and e-mail. Armstrong is, of course, always online or on BlackBerry; McConaughey, however, never is. “He does [have a BlackBerry], but he doesn’t ever check it,” Armstrong says.
“McConaughey once said, ‘You’re tin cans and string all the time,’” I say.
“I’m not even going to comment. He’s crazy,” says Armstrong. “He’s better about it now. He gets back quicker now. But he likes it when his voice mailbox is full, ’cause then you can’t leave him a message.”
The friendship put Armstrong even deeper into the headlines, which was, of course, more publicity for the Cause. But the grueling 26-mile New York City Marathon was an even bigger spectacle.
“It was harder because I had not trained properly,” he says. “The cycling stuff is … I think you cannot compare the two events because one is three weeks and one is one day. But for all the tours, I had trained as professionally as possible and I came in super fit and they were relatively easy. The marathon, I was not properly trained. I did not do enough endurance work. I didn’t do enough long runs. I got to 20 miles and my legs had never experienced that, just the pounding of running, and my legs started to seize up on me.”
He laughs.
“They had this camera on me the whole time, so I thought, ‘I can’t start walking on camera,’” he says. So he kept on, accompanied by his posse, including Doug Ulman, a three-time cancer survivor and chief mission officer of the Lance Armstrong Foundation whom Armstrong calls “My partner in crime.”
“He hung with us through [mile] 16, then he ended up running 3:09, which is about 25 minutes better than his best time.”
Wearing the number 1002, to commemorate the October 2, 1996 date he was diagnosed with cancer, Armstrong finished one hour behind the winner, achieving his goal of finishing in three hours, but suffering a stress fracture in his leg in the process.
The Road Ahead
Now, he’s racing toward the 2008 elections, ensuring that the Cause is at the forefront of debate, awareness, and, eventually, funding. “We have a lot of work to do,” he says. “It’s my dream that we elect somebody, or at least get a couple of candidates talking about the issue, and making sure that they know we care about it and the country cares about it. Just making it a national priority … make sure that the National Cancer Institute is well funded, well led, well staffed, and has all the resources and morale that they need.”
The Cause takes him forward, faster, farther, stronger — lunch with Hillary Clinton, meetings with U2’s Bono — using his celebrity to influence everyone from pedestrians on the streets to President George W. Bush on his ranch.
Every appearance, every interview, every bit of awareness takes him closer to the eventual finish line: a Cure.
“The more I’m out there talking about it, sharing my experience, rallying, basically rallying the troops, the more effective it is,” he says. “It could be one of our LiveStrong rides. It could be a week in Iowa that I do a big across-the-state bike ride. It could be a couple of days in D.C. when you are there with people from all over the country talking to the leaders. Or it could be just a media opportunity that comes along. Theoretically, I’m doing the work right now. I’m talking about it, you are going to write it, people are going to read it, and people are going to think, ‘Man, I care about that! How do I get involved?’”