Free Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong Page B

of alignment, but as soon as he touched me it felt like my spine was breaking in half. As I lay on the table, I began to cry. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried because something hurt—I must have been a boy. That did it; I went back to a hospital, this time a modern clinic in Monaco , for a CT scan.
    The doctor said, “You’ve got a big problem here.” There on the screen was an unmistakable crack, and he explained that I’d fractured the C-7 vertebra of my spine, the link between my back and my neck.
    “What’s that mean?” I said.
    “Your neck is broken.”
    I had no trouble believing it, after all that pain. I asked what it meant for my cycling. I explained that I planned to ride in the 2000 Olympics and was about to start my most important training. How long would I be off the bike? Would I be able to ride in Sydney ?
    The doctor looked at me skeptically. “You better think long and hard about that,” he said. “I wouldn’t advise it. You just won the Tour, what do you need the Olympics for? And if you fall on this injury again, it could be devastating.”
    He explained the risks: it might be weeks before I regained range of motion in my neck and was able to fully turn my head. Without peripheral vision, all kinds of crashes could occur. It would be a day-to-day thing whether I’d be healthy enough to train, and even then, he didn’t think I should risk it. I told him I’d consider what he’d said, and went home to rest.
    I had a decision to make. To me, it wasn’t a hard one: if I could ride, I was going. Crashes were unavoidable in cycling, and so was bad luck, and if you worried about falling off the bike, you’d never get on. I simply couldn’t pass up the Olympics; they were too meaningful. I could win six Tours , and yet if I lost the Olympic gold medal, people would say, “What’s wrong with this guy? I thought he was supposed to be a good cyclist.”
    They were personally meaningful, too. So far, the Olympics represented nothing but failure and loss to me, and I wanted to change that. I hadn’t competed well in them in two tries.
    I rode miserably as an inexperienced hothead in the 1992 Barcelona Games. I’d gone into the Atlanta Games in 1996 as an American favorite, but I rode disappointingly and finished out of the medals again, 6th in the time trial and 12th in the road race. It felt like I was dragging a manhole cover. I assumed it was the result of nerves, or because I hadn’t trained right, but shortly afterward I was diagnosed: it turned out I’d ridden with a dozen lung tumors. Cancer had cheated me out of a chance to win an Olympic medal on native soil.
    There was an additional motive for going to Sydney . The Games would end on October 2, an important anniversary, four years to the day after the initial cancer diagnosis. To be at the Olympics on that day would be another way to kick the disease. Also, the coach of the U.S. team was my close friend Jim Ochowicz, who had sat at my bedside during all of my hospital stays and chemo treatments. It was Jim who, early in my career, shaped me into a champion cyclist, and he was also Luke’s godfather. I wanted to ride for him again, and I wanted to celebrate the cancer anniversary at the Olympics, with a gold medal as the centerpiece.
    After a couple of weeks, my neck was still stiff but getting better, and I was able to ride, so I began training. Meanwhile, some prominent track stars dropped out of the Games, and there were suggestions in the press that they’d done so to avoid drug testing. I began to get calls from reporters, wondering if I would show up in Sydney . The implication was clear: a no-show would suggest that I had something to hide. What no one knew was how hectically I was trying to train to get there.
    I arrived in Sydney , thrilled to see Australia for the first time. I felt I was in decent shape, and I still had every expectation of winning: to me, there was no other real reason to be there. I’d