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Bicyclist Lance Armstrong is viewed a modern-day superhero. He survived testicular cancer and returned to win the Tour de France five times. But, as Jack Kerouac once quipped, "Walking on water wasn't built in a day." In Armstrong's case, his race to triumph requires an almost pathological fervent commitment and a large supportive cast that, according to author Daniel Coyle, includes "Belgian tough-guys, controversial Italian sports doctors, New Age healers, attack-dog lawyer, obsessed fans, and jittery corporations; not to mention his girlfriend, the rock star Sheryl Crow." Lance Armstrong's War takes you inside the tumultuous 2004 cycling season and inside the head of a world-class athlete.

From the Publisher

Lance Armstrong's War is the extraordinary story of greatness pushed to its limits, a vivid, behind-the-scenes portrait of Armstrong -- perhaps the most accomplished athlete of our time -- as he faces his biggest test: the quest for a historic sixth straight victory in the Tour de France, the toughest sporting event on the planet.

Made newly vulnerable by age, fate, fame, doping allegations, and an unprecedented army of challengers, Armstrong fights on all fronts to do what he does like no one else: exert his will to win. That will, which has famously lifted him beyond his humble Texas roots, beyond cancer, and to unparalleled heights of success, is revealed by acclaimed journalist Daniel Coyle in new and startling dimensions. We see how Armstrong rebuilds after his near-loss in the 2003 Tour, discovering new strategies to cope with his aging body. How he fills the holes in his life after his painful divorce from his wife, Kristin, and the ensuing time apart from his three young children. How he manages the exceedingly difficult trick of being Lance Armstrong -- a combination of world-class athlete, celebrity, regular guy, and, for many Americans, secular saint.

But a saint's life it's not. To function at his peak, Armstrong requires what his friends artfully call "stimulus" -- and if it's lacking, he won't hesitate to create some. We see Armstrong operating at the turbulent center of a fast-orbiting cast of swaggering Belgian tough guys, controversial Italian sports doctors, piranha-toothed lawyers, and jittery corporations, not to mention a certain female rock star. We see the subtle mind games he plays with himself and with rivals Tyler Hamilton, Jan Ullrich, and Iban Mayo. We see him through the eyes of his teammates, competitors, and friends, and explore his powerful relationship with his mother, Linda. We see what happens three weeks before the Tour, when he's faced with a double challenge: a blowout defeat in an important race and the release of a controversial book seeking to link him to performance-enhancing drugs. And finally we see it all culminate in the Tour de France, where Armstrong will rise to new and unexpected levels of domination. Along the way, Lance Armstrong's War journeys through the little-known landscape of professional bike racing, a Darwinian world of unsurpassed beauty and brutality, a world teeming with underdogs, gurus, groupies, and wholly original characters, where athletes do not so much choose the sport as the sport chooses them.

Over the season, Armstrong and these characters collide in raw and sometimes violent theater. From the first training camps to the triumphal ride into Paris, Lance Armstrong's War provides a hugely insightful look into the often-inspiring, always surprising core of this remarkable man and the world that shapes him.

The Washington Post - Allen St. John

Lance Armstrong's War is a fascinating book about a complex guy who sees the world in a simple way. In the world of Team Armstrong, people are quickly divided into friends and foes -- the latter being "trolls" in Lance-speak. Every experience counts as a win or a loss. And the only time that matters is right now.

Publishers Weekly

When an athlete is as celebrated as Lance Armstrong, journalists tend to approach either with staggering awe or malicious schadenfreude. Refreshingly, Coyle (Hardball) displays neither. The journalist moved to Armstrong's training base in Spain to cover the months leading up to the cyclist's sixth Tour de France victory in 2004, and the resulting comfort level of Coyle with his subject is palpable. Armstrong emerges from these pages as neither the cancer-surviving saint his American fans admire, nor the soulless, imperialist machine his European detractors hate. Instead, he comes across as a preternaturally gifted athlete barely removed from the death-defying hellion he was as a teenager, fanatically disciplined, gregarious and generous but with a legendarily icy temper. Coyle sweeps over the basics of Armstrong's Texas childhood and fight with cancer, concentrating on his obsessive training-this is a sport where results are measured in ounces and microseconds. He's sometimes too loose with his writing, digressing as though he had all the time in the world, but he tightens up for the grand finale: the Tour. This work is honest, personal and passionate, with plenty to chew on for fans and novices alike. Agent, David Black. (June 14) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0060734981
  
• ISBN-13: 9780060734985
• Format: Paperback, 368pp
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Pub. Date: June 2006
• Edition Description: Reprint
• Sales Rank: 67,450

• Read an Excerpt

Read an Excerpt

Lance Armstrong's War

HarperCollins

Chapter One

FEBRUARY 2004

Each morning, even in winter, the European continent looks as if it is simmering over a cookfire. Not one big fire, but a thousand tiny blazes exhaling threads of smoke and steam until everything is bathed in a white-gray haze. The haze rolls over the countryside, concealing borders, filling hollows, flowing over the steeples of the thousand sleepy villages that float in and out of view like so many ghost towns, half-dissolved in the heat of the modern world.

Over the simmering haze, screaming eastward at five hundred miles an hour, came a silvery white Gulfstream aircraft, with its wings turned up at their tips like a fighter jet. Inside its sleek cocoon, Lance Armstrong was peering down into the mist, trying to spot the trolls.

That's what Armstrong called them, the sneaky lowlifes who tried to snare him, to pull him down into the muck. The landscape was crawling with them. A month ago, a troll had swiped his Visa card and gone on a spree at JC Penney's ("They must not have known which Armstrong they had," he said). Then, a couple days later, some troll had jimmied his way into a cabin on one of his properties outside Austin, and had set up camp there. Dozens of media trolls were whispering that Armstrong was too old, too distracted, washed up. An Italian troll named Filippo Simeoni - a cyclist, no less - was suing him for libel. The biggest trolls were David Walsh and Pierre Ballester, journalists who were writing a book claiming that Armstrong may have used performance-enhancing drugs. Trolls were down there in the mist, creeping around, grasping at him with hairy fingers, daring him to fight. All of which made Armstrong happy.

"Fucking trolls!" he said when he watched Walsh, Simeoni, or any of the others on the liquid-crystal display of his handheld personal organizer, which sent him constant updates on their activities. "Little fucking goddamn trolls!"

Well, perhaps "happy" is the wrong word. "Enlivened" is more like it. Others might have been tempted to ignore the trolls, or at least pretend to ignore them, but not Armstrong. He watched them obsessively, getting ready to fight, to go to battle, to take the bastards on. Armstrong is fascinating for many reasons, but mostly because he's our purest embodiment of the fundamental human act - to impose the will on the uncaring world - an act that compels our attention because it seems so simple and yet is secretly magical. Because at its core, will is about belief, and with Armstrong we can see the belief happening.

It's etched on his face, in that narrow-eyed expression Armstrong's friends warily refer to as The Look. His is the latest rendition of the gunfighter's squint, a look made more powerful because the weapon Armstrong brandishes is no more or less than himself. He is a living fable, the man who had cancer and who came back to win the hardest athletic event on the planet five times. He's been fighting from the start, starting out as Lance Edward Gunderson, the willful son of a seventeen-year-old mother in Plano, Texas. He fights to survive, to win, and also to show us his force, and he has been successful enough that his face, like that of Joe DiMaggio in the forties or the Mercury astronauts in the sixties, has become America's face, a hero who embodies many people's best idea of what they want to be.

What Armstrong wants to be? That's a tougher question.

You can attempt to find out by asking him, to which he'll respond that he wants to (1) be a good dad, (2) fight cancer, and (3) ride his bike. Or you can examine the causes into which he channels his energy: the tens of millions of dollars raised by the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Or you can add up his business interests: the $19 million in annual endorsements and his part-ownership of his cycling team. Or you can peruse the family drama: his fatherless childhood, his intense bond with his mother, his refusal to meet his birth father. Or you can look at the topography of his relationships; the walled kingdom of close friends and business associates; the warm, endless expanse of acquaintances; the icy archipelagoes filled with former friends who have been, as one puts it, excommunicated. Or you can look at the range of emotion he inspires. There are not many people whose mailbox regularly receives both death threats and calls for his beatification.

"People find this hard to believe, but he's not a happy-go-lucky, Mr. Smiley, save-the-world-from-cancer type of person," said John Korioth, nicknamed College, who is one of Armstrong's closest friends. "I look on it as almost an animalistic thing. In sports or business or anywhere there's always the question of who's the alpha, who's the meanest, who's the toughest? And it's Lance. Always Lance."

"It is simple, no?" said Armstrong's longtime trainer, Dr. Ferrari, smiling. "Lance wishes to swallow the world."

Two thousand years ago, Greek storytellers told of young commoners who ventured alive into the kingdom of the dead. They survived with the aid of magical helpers, then returned in a kind of second birth to perform a triumphant act, bringing their teaching to the rest of humanity. One was called Dithyrambos, or "He of the Double Door."

Funny thing is, the Greeks were a little fuzzier about endings. Without the escape hatch of "happily ever after," their death-venturing heroes tended to fade into obscurity, or sulk as the world refused to hear their teachings. Now, flying to Spain, Armstrong was embarking on his attempt to break one of the more legendary marks in sport. His first step, as it happened, was also one of the trickiest. He had to be calm ...

(Continues...)

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