THE LONG RIDE.(cyclist Lance Armstrong)

Michael Specter talks about Lance Armstrong and the sport of cycling

A couple of weeks ago, on a sweltering Saturday afternoon, I found myself in the passenger seat of a small Volkswagen, careering so rapidly around the hairpin turns of the French Alps that I could smell the tires burning. Johan Bruyneel, the suave, unflappable director of the United States Postal Service Pro Cycling Team, was behind the wheel. Driving at ninety kilometres an hour occupied half his attention. The rest was devoted to fiddling with a small television mounted in the dashboard, examining a set of complicated topographical maps, and talking into one of two radio transmitters in the car. The first connected Bruyneel to the team's support vehicle, laden with extra bicycles, water bottles, power bars, and other tools and equipment. The second fed into the earpieces of the eight U.S. Postal Service cyclists who were racing along the switchbacks ahead of us. The entire team could hear every word that Bruyneel said, but most of the time he was talking to just one man: Lance Armstrong.

We had been on the road for about three hours and Armstrong was a kilometre in front of us, pedalling so fast that it was hard to keep up. It was the sixth day of the Dauphine Libere, a weeklong race that is run in daily stages. Armstrong doesn't enter races like the Dauphine to win (though often enough he does); he enters to test his legs in preparation for a greater goal--the Tour de France. Since 1998, when he returned to cycling after almost losing his life to testicular cancer, Armstrong has focussed exclusively on dominating the thirty-five-hundred-kilometre, nearly month-long Tour, which, in the world of cycling, matters more than all other races combined. This week, he begins a quest to become the fourth person in the hundred-year-history of the Tour--the world's most gruelling test of human endurance--to win four times in a row. (In 1995, the Spanish cyclist Miguel Indurain became the first to win five consecutively--a record that is clearly on Armstrong's mind.)

The cyclists had covered a hundred and eight kilometres, much of it over mountain passes still capped with snow, despite temperatures edging into the nineties. Now the peloton--the term is French for "platoon," and it describes the pack of riders who make up the main group in every race--was about to start one of the most agonizing climbs in Europe, the pass between Mont Blanc and Lake Geneva, which is known as the Col de Joux Plane. In cycling, climbs are rated according to how long and steep they are: the easiest is category four, the hardest category one. The seventeen-hundred-metre Joux Plane has a special rating, known as hors categorie, or beyond category; for nearly twelve kilometres, it rises so sharply that it seems a man could get to the top only by helicopter.

"We start the Joux Plane with a lot of respect for this mountain," Bruyneel said quietly into his radio. "It is long, it is hard. Take it easy. If people are breaking away, let them go. Do you hear me, Lance?"

"Yes, Johan," Armstrong replied flatly. "I remember the mountain."

With only a few days remaining in the 2000 Tour de France, Armstrong had what most observers agreed was an insurmountable lead when he headed toward this pass. He was riding with his two main rivals of that year: Marco Pantani, the best-known Italian cyclist, and Jan Ullrich, the twenty-eight-year-old German who won the Tour in 1997, and who in the world of cycling plays the role of Joe Frazier to Armstrong's Ali. As they started to climb, Armstrong seemed invincible. Halfway up, though, he slumped over his handlebars, looking as if he had suffered a stroke, and Ullrich blew right by him.