Anyone can crash the way Lance Armstrong did, but it hadn’t happened to him in three years.
On Friday, as he was screaming down a road in the Alps at about 44 m.p.h., Armstrong’s rear wheel tilted and slid out from under him. The four-time Tour de France winner lost control of his bike and briefly became a human toboggan.
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Armstrong was back up in seconds, “taking inventory,” as he put it. Head: present. Legs: intact. Right arm: messed up.
As high-speed crashes go, this one was cake. His gashed right elbow required two stitches and a course of antibiotics to avoid infection. His wiry frame, jolted by the impact, will be sore for a while.
His pristine yellow jersey–representing the overall leader’s position in the eight-day Dauphine Libere, his last race before the Tour starts July 5–was torn.
Photos showed Armstrong up and pedaling again, bloodied and grimacing as a race doctor reached out to swab and bandage him from an open car.
It was a slightly jarring image of an athlete who has seldom been nicked physically since cancer left him bald and emaciated a few years ago. And as he readily admitted, Friday’s near-miss also causes psychological ripples.
“I’ve never had a crash like this so close to the Tour,” he said. “I don’t feel the same on the bike, so I have to recover from that.”
But Armstrong apparently wants to win even when he is feeling less than wonderful.
To keep pace with his closest rival, Iban Mayo of Spain, Armstrong jettisoned the crash file from his mental hard drive and went a full-throttle 50 m.p.h. on the steep descent of the Col du Galibier on Saturday. On Sunday, Armstrong led another downhill chase and preserved his 1-minute-12-second margin over Mayo to claim his second straight Dauphine.
While Armstrong could have done without the drama, it’s not all bad to run the occasional fire drill.
His U.S. Postal Service teammates escorted him back to a slowed-down peleton, handling the simulated emergency with aplomb even though most of them had never seen him grounded.
“It wasn’t a huge ordeal,” said Floyd Landis, the Pennsylvanian who made his Tour debut in 2002 but is on the bubble this year, having lost months of training and racing to a fractured hip in a crash of his own.
“He took a few seconds to collect his thoughts and see if anything major was wrong,” Landis said. “Then he did some more inspecting of his road rash. He just said, `Wait till I see here if I broke anything or if I should keep going.’ Then he said, `OK, let’s go.”‘
But the reason Armstrong picked himself up so quickly wasn’t just machismo or adrenaline. It was obligation.
“It’s good for them to see that the leader of the team is not a guy who’s going to lie by the side of the road and make a show,” Armstrong said. “I felt responsible. We had the [yellow] jersey and they had worked hard for a couple days.
“My first reaction was, oh, my God, new bike, different bike, get back in the race. I can’t leave them sitting in limbo.”
It has been a somewhat pothole-strewn, bone-jarring spring for Armstrong and Postal in general, but things seem to be sorting themselves out. In the Dauphine, his first race in six weeks, he received a warm reception from the French crowds, defying speculation that frosty Franco-American relations would carry over into sport.
He and his wife, Kristin, and their three children are living together again after a short separation. Postal’s most reliable workhorse, George Hincapie, is rounding into shape after enforced time off because of illness earlier this year.
“Perhaps a relaxed spring leads to a very good summer,” Armstrong said of his longtime teammate.
He hasn’t had a stress-free season himself so far, but he’ll have a scar on his elbow to remind himself he can win even when he’s unlucky.