‘I’ve Always Been a Fighter ... a Scrapper’

When doctors told Lance Armstrong three years ago that his 5-foot-11 frame was riddled with cancer, with 15 tumors as large as marbles and golf balls in his lungs alone, he was terrified. But he was also determined not to give up.

“I’ve always been a fighter, always,” Armstrong said Friday night in a small hotel in this hot-springs town of south-central France. “Always something of a scrapper.”

The 27-year-old Armstrong is now the most talked-about American in Europe--and just nine days away from winning what may be the most challenging test of physical stamina in the world: the Tour de France bicycle race.

Barring a disaster--and in cycling, one can’t--Armstrong is expected to pedal 11 laps along the cobbled Champs-Elysees in Paris on July 25 and claim victory in the 2,288-mile endurance race--an event often likened to running 20 marathons back to back--with the fastest time ever.

After Friday’s 126-mile leg of the Tour, won by David Extebarria of Spain, Armstrong had an overall lead, considered unassailable, of 7 minutes 44 seconds. If he wins the Tour, he will be the first American since Greg Lemond in 1990 to do so.

“It’s an inspiration for millions of people with cancer around the world,” the windburned, lanky rider for the U.S. Postal team said, relaxing after a massage and awaiting a pasta dinner cooked by the team’s traveling chef.

Armstrong said he hopes his cycling success will prove that life can, and does, go on for people with cancer, AIDS, diabetes or other health problems.

“You can be told all of the bad news--you go through this whole spectrum and cycle of the diagnosis, and the bad news and the depression and the treatment,” Armstrong said. “You spend a year so scared and terrified that you feel like you deserve the rest of your life to have a vacation. But you can’t. They don’t give you those. You have to return to your life, and your family and your peers.”

For Armstrong, who was one of the world’s top-rated cyclists before falling ill, the road back to normality meant cutting-edge platinum-based chemotherapy that made him violently ill and caused his hair to fall out. He underwent surgery to remove a cancerous testicle, as well as two lesions on his brain.

As recently as last year, when Armstrong quit the Paris-Nice race and didn’t cycle for a month, he said, he was unsure whether he could succeed in his comeback attempt. Now he believes he is a better bike racer than ever, a transformed man, at once determined and serene.

“The way in which Armstrong dominated the beginning of this Tour de France is exceptional, really great,” five-time Tour laureate Eddy Merckx of Belgium, one of the greatest cyclists of all time, said in an interview Friday. “This is an example of willpower and character for people who have the same disease.”

The exact reasons for Armstrong’s comeback, however, are being persistently questioned by some members of the Tour pack, and by the influential French sports daily L’Equipe. The 1998 race was nearly wrecked by a doping scandal, and this year some are openly asking whether Armstrong is being granted a special dispensation to use drugs because of his cancer history.

Armstrong dismisses these allegations. “I feel a little bit like Bill Clinton having to defend myself all the time,” he said Friday. “But Clinton obviously made some mistakes; we don’t have anything to hide.”

Jean-Marie Leblanc, director-general of the private company that manages the Tour de France, shrugged off the accusations as wholly unproven and termed Armstrong a living example of what the race, now in its 86th season, wants to become itself.

“He’s a revenant [somebody who has made a comeback], with all the symbols that carries--courage, tenacity and the rest--that illustrate what the Tour wants to be--a revenant--after fighting against doping, after making many changes,” Leblanc said.

Born in Plano, Texas, on Sept. 18, 1971, to a single, teenage mother, Armstrong has never met his father and says he doesn’t even know who he is. In his teens, he started competing in triathlon events, a combination of swimming, running and biking, with notable success.

“He was a natural on a bike,” said U.S. Postal’s operations director Dan Osipow. “What is it that makes a great bike rider? It’s the ability to suffer, and to make your opponents suffer. As stupid as it may sound, it’s about enjoying the pain.”

In 1991 as an amateur rider just turning 20, Armstrong became U.S. champion. He turned professional after the 1992 Olympics, in which he finished 14th in road racing. In 1993, he won the world cycling championship in Oslo, becoming the youngest person in history given the trademark rainbow jersey and only the second American after Lemond.

Armstrong participated in four previous Tours--in 1993, 1994, 1995 and 1996--but only finished once, in 1995, when he took 36th place. In those earlier races, he says now, he never thought he had a chance of winning. “I took part because my team took part,” he said.

But this year, Armstrong is such a demonstrably different man that Frenchman Bernard Thevenet, a two-time Tour winner, has said the other 154 cyclists remaining in the race aren’t vying for first place but only for second.

Leblanc, the Tour director, even said he believes that cancer, and the therapy to eradicate it, improved Armstrong’s physique by reducing his weight by 20 pounds, to an officially listed 165, and making him fitter for the grueling three-week slog around France.

Armstrong himself allocates a large share of the credit to meticulous planning. U.S. Postal reconnoitered, and rode, all of the mountainous and semi-mountainous stages of the 1999 Tour, including one miserable leg during a blizzard. When Armstrong crushed his competitors in the time trials Sunday in Metz, an impressive showing he says convinced him he could win the Tour, it was on a bicycle that he had tested last winter in a wind tunnel at Texas A&M; University.

Since his cancer ordeal, Armstrong has started a foundation in Austin, Texas, to help others stricken with the disease. Last year, he married a 27-year-old woman from Westlake Village he had met while undergoing chemotherapy in Indianapolis. The Armstrongs, who have homes in Austin and Nice, France, are expecting a child in October.

For somebody on the verge of achieving what everyone in his sport must dream of, Armstrong, unquestionably intense while rolling with the pack, appears detached at times. Facing a life-threatening disease, he explained, forced him to ask a lot of questions--”It just changes you.”

“If you win the Tour de France, your life will be busy for months, then it will die down, and it will get busy again leading up to the next Tour,” Armstrong said. “If you don’t win again, you’re a free man. They’ll never bother you.”

His extraordinary performance in the Tour--some have dubbed it Armstrong’s “Tour de Force”--has made his name a household word in cycling-mad European countries like France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. Interest has also been great in the United States, Armstrong reported. But he’s determined to take it all in stride.

“They’re all calling--Leno, Letterman, all of them,” he said Friday. “And that’s cool. It’s great for the sport, it’s great for cancer, it’s great for my sponsors, but then one day it goes away. And that’ll be fine. I’m not addicted to it.”