The Mind Behind the Motor

The question was asked in French. The answer came quickly and loudly in English.

Johan Bruyneel, a poker-faced Belgian who drives with his knees and speaks five languages, was asked this: would Lance Armstrong have won a single Tour de France title without him?

“No,” Bruyneel said, “I don’t think so.”

Bruyneel, 40, most noted for taking a wrong turn off a cliff in the Alps during cycling’s greatest race, has lived in the shadow of Armstrong since the two joined forces in 1998. Bruyneel calls himself “the man without the engine but the mind to win,” and in Armstrong he found the engine.

Armstrong is pointed toward an unprecedented seventh consecutive Tour de France title when the 2005 race ends Sunday in Paris. After staying even with or gaining time on his top rivals last weekend in the Pyrenees, even five-time runner-up and 1997 champion Jan Ullrich, who is fourth overall, said Monday that, “I’m only racing for the podium now.”

In other words, Ullrich is hoping to finish second or third. Defeating Armstrong would only come, he said, if something unexpected happened to the 33-year-old Texan, who has a 2-minute 46-second lead on second-place Ivan Basso and a 5:58 lead on Ullrich.

One of the few losses Armstrong’s Discovery Channel team has suffered this year came Monday when Basso, a talented 27-year-old Italian, announced he had signed a three-year contract extension with CSC. Without knowing Basso had re-upped, Bruyneel said he would like to see Basso inherit Armstrong’s role as leader for Discovery next year.

“Too bad,” Bruyneel said.

It sounded as if Bruyneel felt it was too bad for Basso.

Bruyneel, the son of jewelry store owners, was a bike racer from a small town near Brugges who started the sport late after getting his marketing degree. After finishing his competitive career at the end of the 1997 season, he thought he would move into the field of public relations.

“It happened that Lance called me in the fall after I retired,” Bruyneel said. “We were talking and he said he wasn’t happy with the leadership on his team. As we continued to talk he asked me if I wanted to work with him. I am a man of impulse and on impulse, I said yes.”

Armstrong was still feeling his way back to the sport after spending nearly two years recovering from the testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and brain. His French team, Cofidis, had ended its contract with the American rider and Armstrong had signed with the U.S. Postal Service team (Discovery Channel took over sponsorship this year).

Bruyneel had competed against Armstrong before the Texan had become ill.

“An immense talent with an immense engine,” was Bruyneel’s impression. But Bruyneel also thought Armstrong was undisciplined, impetuous and headstrong.

As a racer Bruyneel was meticulous in his preparation. He won a Tour stage in 1995 when he rode the wheel of five-time champion Miguel Indurain into Liege, Belgium, and passed Indurain at the end. Bruyneel’s 1996 crash, where he tumbled 20 feet off a cliff, then climbed back up and continued on to finish the stage, is passed on as a Tour legend.

In the post-cancer Armstrong, Bruyneel found a young man willing to listen to his ideas. It was Bruyneel who thought the racer should scout each Tour stage himself instead of dispatching a coach to drive the route. It was Bruyneel who urged Armstrong to establish a training base in Europe and do testing in a wind tunnel to learn how to ride faster.

“It’s a remarkable relationship we have,” Bruyneel said, “and it worked from the beginning. I met him and passed through his life at the right moment. I didn’t have a lot of experience and neither did he. I just had a vision and he believed it.”

The story goes that when Bruyneel met Armstrong for the first time, he told Armstrong, “I’ll see you on the podium in Paris.”

That story is true, Armstrong said. “That’s why, when I retire, I’d love for Johan to win a Tour without me.”

Every day for six years Bruyneel and Armstrong have spoken by phone seven or eight times a day. They finish each other’s sentences. They trust each other.

“If Johan tells me something,” Armstrong has said, “that’s what we’ll do.”

Now Armstrong has won six straight Tours. Bruyneel is still undefeated as a team sports director in the race. Yet he still passes through each day almost unnoticed.

As fans mob the team van each morning looking for Armstrong or his girlfriend, Sheryl Crow, Bruyneel walks among them to slip into a car. During the stage Bruyneel steers with his knees while he speaks to each of the nine team members constantly in a handful of languages. He monitors the race on a small television mounted on the dashboard.

And at the end of the stage, as Armstrong slips on another yellow jersey, as media members and town mayors, teenage girls and old men beg for autographs, Bruyneel walks unnoticed again to look ahead to the next stage.

“Johan doesn’t get as much credit as he should,” Discovery member George Hincapie said. “He’s really a great technical mind. He understands racing.”

Bruyneel also knows what the best racing minds think. Can he win without Armstrong?

“I start from the idea that we can’t replace Lance,” Bruyneel said. “There’s no one who can do what Lance has been doing for years. But I think this team can win another Tour.

“I think we can find and develop good racers.”

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OVERALL STANDINGS (THROUGH 15 STAGES)

1. Lance Armstrong, U.S. 62:09:596.

2. Ivan Basso, Italy 2:46 behind

3. M. Rasmussen, Denmark 3:09 behind

4. Jan Ullrich, Germany 5:58 behind

5. Francisco Mancebo, Spain 6:31 behind

6. Levi Leipheimer, U.S. 7:35 behind

7. Floyd Landis, U.S. 9:33 behind

8. A. Vinokourov, Kazakhstan 9:38 behind

9. Christophe Moreau, France 11:47 behind

10. Andreas Kloden, Germany 12:01 behind

* On the web: For more information on the Tour de France, including Diane Pucin’s blog, photo galleries and up-to-the-minute standings, please visit latimes.com/tour.