News for February 8, 1998

Lille, Belgium, Cyclo Cross, Cat A, February 7, 1998

 1. Erwin Vervecken (Bel)
 2. Arne Daelmans (Bel)
 3. Sven Nijs (Bel)                                  
 4. Richard Groenendaal (Ned) 		0.18

Pontoni to miss last Super Prestige race in France

The final standings in the Trophy are still open with Richard Groenendaal leading on 116 points from Adri Van der Poel 107 and World Champion, Mario De Clercq from Belgium on 81 points.

Piet Hoekstra resurfaces

In Mallorca

Lance Armstrong Interview

His body, hunched over the handlebars, forms a literal question mark.

No one, including Lance Armstrong himself, knows how he will hold up under the punishment of top-level cycling competition when he goes to the line later this month for the Ruta del Sol race in Spain. He is a full-time professional again for the first time since his siege with the cancer that hopped like a grass fire from his testicles to his abdomen to his lungs to his brain.

"I'm going in with an open mind," Armstrong said last week after a strenuous training camp ride with his new team, which the U.S. Postal Service sponsors. "I don't really have any goals or any expectations. I will give it an entire year and evaluate after a year.

"I wouldn't consider it a successful comeback just to start my first race. I would consider it a successful recovery from cancer. I have the same standards. That might be a mistake, but what's going to keep me in the sport or tell me to leave is whether I return to the standards I had set before. Not immediately, but at some point."

In Europe, perhaps no other sport is considered as macho as cycling, where men work in subservience to the day's anointed one to help him climb a mountain or fly over flatland. Armstrong, 26, was reaching for the top rung when the ladder was kicked out from under him 18 months ago. A world champion and a two-time Tour de France stage winner, the heir apparent to Tour winner and fellow American Greg LeMond, he was celebrated across the continent for his two-wheeled swagger.

What a twist, then, to be stricken with testicular cancer, a disease the ignorant associate with a loss of virility. Who wears lapel ribbons for this cause? It afflicts a part of the body that men find hard to discuss without snickering or discomfited leg-crossing, that is the central metaphor of locker room slang.

Armstrong didn't have a lot of time for irony or squeamishness. Overnight, he found himself fighting for life rather than a place at the front of the pack. Doctors removed one testicle and operated on his brain, then subjected him to radical treatment.

He was one of the fortunate. Armstrong is in Year 2 of recovery now, his X-rays and CAT scans miraculously cloudless, his blood indicators stable at zero. Along with attacking the road again, he is making it his business to attack stereotypes and siphon the fear and embarrassment out of a topic that can save men's lives.

Last year, at a party Armstrong and his fiance, Kristin Richard, attended in his hometown of Austin, Texas, a corporate executive took note of her companion and approached her.

"So, I see you're dating Lance Armstrong," the executive said. "Are you sure he's good enough for you?"

Richard allowed as how she was very happy.

"How's his testicle?" the executive asked.

Armstrong had heard jokes on the street, and even in the barber shop he patronizes, but Richard's account sent him over the edge.

"I didn't go over and kill the guy, like I should have," he said.

Instead, he went home, located the man's E-mail address and began composing a message. His first 20 drafts leaned toward the profane. Eventually, he came up with something he liked.

" 'Dear -----,' " Armstrong said, reciting from memory with a sardonic twang.

" 'It's my understanding that you're concerned about my testicular cancer. Well, if you didn't know, I was given less than a 50 percent chance to live, I survived three months of intense, toxic chemotherapy, I survived two surgeries, one to the brain, and I feel great now. Things are going well. Cancer touches everybody's lives, and hopefully you'll be able to deal with it.' "

The executive didn't respond. Every morning, Armstrong got up and pushed the send button again. For two weeks. Finally, the executive apologized to Richard.

"What a wuss," Armstrong said disgustedly.

He has a whole new outlook on the subject of manhood.

Single-minded

As a training site, Ramona is a coach's dream. Focus is the only option. The U.S.P.S. cyclists bunk at the Ramona Valley Inn, a pleasant, no-frills hotel on the lone commercial strip in this community of 13,000 in the foothills northeast of San Diego. They eat three meals a day at the Sizzler next door. They get $20 per diem to supplement their room and board, and there is a limited number of places to spend it.

What Ramona has in abundance, however, is roads. Miles and miles of smooth, scenic and relatively untrafficked paved roads, snaking through the undulating back country through stands of cactus and eucalyptus, past chicken farms and apple orchards and orange groves. From afar, the riders in their skinsuits and teardrop-shaped helmets look like exotic insects swarming up the long grades.

"Today, we went over to Borrego Springs and climbed out, which is, like, a 12-mile climb, and the second half, we were going race pace," Armstrong said after a six-hour ride. "We were hauling. There were about six or seven of us left, and I was one of 'em.

"I feel as strong as I ever have in January, but I hate to even speculate because I don't want to get in these races and get demoralized."

Armstrong joined the Postal Service team late last year after a bitter rupture with Cofidis, a French team. He had just signed a two-year, $2.5 million contract when his illness was diagnosed in October 1996. The team declared its full support, then sent emissaries to his hospital room to renegotiate the deal.

"These guys are so insensitive and so inhumane, it was sick," Armstrong said.

Armstrong celebrated his return to health with a big bash in Austin last fall, but when he announced he had been cleared to compete again, the reaction was deflating. Few teams showed any interest. One of them was the Postal Service team, an upstart on the world scene that earned a wild-card invitation to the 1997 Tour de France and placed 10th out of 22 teams.

The Postal Service is in the last year of a sponsorship contract with team owner Montgomery Sports, and the team functions on a budget of about $4 million, half of what a top European team has at its disposal. But going there appealed to Armstrong for other reasons. Technical director Johnny Weltz and veteran rider Frankie Andreu of Dearborn, Mich., were compatriots from his heady days with the now-disbanded Motorola team. Armstrong wanted to be with friends who would challenge him but also understood what he had been through.

Weltz, a Danish citizen and former competitor, said he has been pleasantly surprised at Armstrong's fitness. But despite the obvious marketing spark he lends to the team, Weltz said Armstrong will not be pushed unwisely--he will not, for example, compete in the most rigorous race of all, the Tour de France, this summer.

"He has been very nervous because he didn't know where he was," Weltz said. "To see that he has been able to compete on the training rides gave him a lot of confidence. Once you are out of the game for a while, you are burning for the sport. He has an incredibly strong mind, and I know he will do everything to make it."

Armstrong would like nothing better than to mow down the doubters with his results this season and beyond, but he approaches the topic cautiously.

"I know every team that didn't return a phone call, absolutely," Armstrong said. "But I'm dealing with a body that I don't know how it's going to react. I need to know I'm strong and fit and competitive before I start to return favors. If I'm back to the level I was at, I will ride with a vengeance."

A sense of self

Every two months, Armstrong fidgets while a doctor clips his chest X-ray to an illuminated wall. He is always nervous before the light goes on. But while Armstrong may be less secure about his body now, he is more sure of other things.

"I don't need the sport of European cycling to be happy," he said. "I know that. All these other guys on the team, the European guys especially, they don't know that. I didn't know that. I thought that was my life, and without it, I would be devastated.

"My redemption is that I can walk away and be happy and comfortable with myself and stable in all areas of life."

That includes his relationship with Richard, whom he plans to marry in May.

"She's the smartest, most motivated, classiest woman I've ever met--and my Mom loves her," he said.

His comfort level also includes wearing his new identity, not as a lapel pin, but as a whole wardrobe.

"I'm a cancer patient now, much more than I'm a cyclist or an athlete," Armstrong said. "Which is fine. I want to be in the cancer community, and I want to be known as a cancer survivor forever."

Armstrong's willingness to be graphically candid about the details of his disease already may have altered a few lives. Kevin Kuehler, 27, of San Antonio, believes he is one of them.

In October 1996, Kuehler (pronounced Keeler), a competitive mountain biker, read about Armstrong's diagnosis. He decided his symptoms matched up and consulted a physician. He was misdiagnosed that time, but four months later, another doctor confirmed his suspicions and recommended immediate surgery to remove one testicle.

Driving home in shock, trying to decide how to break the news to his pregnant wife, Kuehler happened upon a call-in radio show featuring Armstrong. He got through and was in the midst of spilling out his situation when Armstrong, with typical bluntness, cut him off.

"Did you call for my advice, or did you call just to talk?" Armstrong said.

Run, do not walk, to the operating room, he urged. This is curable. This is beatable.

The cancer since has reappeared in Kuehler's lungs, and he contacted Armstrong again last month to ask his opinion of the course doctors were proposing. Within 45 minutes, Armstrong had his personal physician on the phone with Kuehler, a conversation that would lead Kuehler to choose another treatment option. He followed up with encouragement via E-mail.

Armstrong has established an eponymous foundation in Austin to educate people about the subgroup known as urological cancers: prostate, renal, testicular and bladder. He also shares his phone number or his E-mail address with anyone he thinks he can help.

"It's still a fairly rare cancer, about 7,500 cases a year (in the U.S.), so it's not like I get calls every day," Armstrong said.

He paused.

"I would take one every day, though, from a sick person or a kid," he said.

He doesn't purport to be an expert on every variety of cancer, but he is passionate about what he knows.

"I think it's phenomenal, what he's doing," Kuehler said. "He could be cured and go on with his life, but he has chosen to go the more difficult route and help other people.

"Most guys don't feel comfortable talking about what's going on in their pants. But with this kind of cancer, the more you learn, the more you're comforted. That gives Lance a mission."

It takes something to puncture taboos, to move on without jettisoning unpleasant luggage. It takes ... it takes courage, or what in the past Armstrong might have referred to with another term, the jock's vernacular for a certain part of the anatomy.

"I used to say it all the time: 'That guy's got balls.' I never say it anymore," Armstrong said. "I say, 'He's got guts.' That's a very common, very popular metaphor, but it ain't about balls. it's about heart and guts and soul and pride and determination and fight."

His fight taught him the difference between bravery and bravado.

Adelaide Superdrome, South Australian Track Championships

Junior U/19 Womens Points Race

 1. Alayna Burns
 2. Joanne Robinson
 3. Katrina Bean

Junior Men U/19 Points Race

 1. Matt Green
 2. Gene Bates 		at 1 lap
 3. Cameron Spears	at 1 lap

Women Points Race

 1. Chelsey Zucker
 2. Symeko Johinke
 3. Kerin Bates

Open Men 20k Scratch Race

 1. Keith Felix
 2. Michael Heath
 3. Luke Kuss