Lance Armstrong: The rise, fall, and growth of a cycling legend | The Peter Attia Drive, Ep. 178

hey everyone welcome to the drive podcast i'm your host peter etia all right lance thank you for uh for making time today today absolutely how does it feel to be back in austin it is uh it's pretty surreal i mean having been here or having lived here for 30 years the the you know i've seen the city change and i saw it change as a cyclist so i think cyclists see um more stuff than most people and you're always you know you're covering ground you're finding back roads you're you're you get a sense for um a town growing you see you know uh obviously the roads get more crowded but you see more construction trucks and you figure you're like wait this is this place is getting built out and so and then if you go down the rabbit hole of hearing these offers in the real estate market it's just this is a different city well before we get into a great city though yeah no look the only thing my wife and i could say after moving here is what took us so long so ah before we get into kind of the details of of all the stuff i want to talk about i i think it's just sometimes easier if we can get into some hard yes and no questions just so that there's no ambiguity about some of the really important stuff okay so i've been here before yeah i i think this is going to be familiar to you but i i want you to really limit yourself to a yes or no only lance this is these are important questions is dura ace better than campy super record yes is the greatest innovation in time trialling the aerodynamic water bottle no is edgar allan poe the greatest poet of the 19th century sure are today's clinchers as high performing as tubulars yes is alberto contador the greatest cyclist of all time absolutely not can you still ride up alp duez in under 45 minutes probably not is the 1985 oakley pilot big ass sunglass the greatest shades of all time um [Music] no but just yes or no no thank you is pinnarello the best bike on the market no is george hincapie the best lieutenant you've ever had absolutely was your grandfather the first man to ride his bike on the moon in 1969 no all right now that we've got that out of the way talk me about plano north east suburb of dallas pretty much straight north plano is um you know it is uh it lives up to its name right plano is is spanish for flat plano very flat very windy um [Music] growing you know that's another community like austin uh that's drastically changed when i was a kid growing up in plano you know i would you know leave the house and be out in the in the fields and i would head up into allen and go around lake lavon or i would um out to frisco i mean now frisco is one of the fastest growing communities in america um there was only one building out there and that was the global headquarters for eds people thought ross pro was nuts to build you know the eds headquarters there and and now it's you know mom's still there so i just going back is crazy a lot of times i'll when i visit my mom i always take my bike everywhere but i'll i'll just kind of ride around and you know go past dooley elementary where i went to middle school and i'll go to i actually went to sorry elementary school and middle school was armstrong i'll just go by these places and just and look at them through a 50 year old's eyes it's crazy so it's uh um is it bittersweet by the way because like i i hate seeing where i grew up i hate it with a passion i the last time i went back to look at my elementary school i mean it just upset me so much i don't know i mean i could no explore no no no i mean i think i think most people have a some level of that in their lives you're allowed to sort of hate where you grew up uh i think um i don't want to live there but you know it's it's it's fine to go back see mom so your birth father is is eddie gunderson right he left you guys when you were two did you ever see him again after that never saw him again do you ever want to well he's now passed away yeah maybe around there um and from what i hear he died of a spider bite maybe that led to some other complications but um i never had a desire um to sort of reconnect with him um for most of my life and even you know of course now it would be too late but i might have a different view of that now did he ever reach out to you he uh not directly you know when when after the first tour when in 99 um people reached out to him so a lot of the press and journalists they wanted this story um and his i mean his interviews were just yeah they were totally inappropriate you know the comments about my mom that you know that far down the road um but like i mean they were meaning he had disparaging things to say about your mom or yeah yeah and so you know but i mean i don't think eddie was uh i was a rhodes scholar so how long after or how old were you when she met and or married terry armstrong so i would have been or four yeah right and so that's where the name comes from right that's that wasn't born lance armstrong um funny thing is my initials would have been leg if i would have stayed lance edward gunderson but yeah she became obviously glenn armstrong and i became lance armstrong you've told me stories in the past and i know you've spoken a bit publicly about terry and kind of how strict he was and did you ever think of him as a father did he feel that way to you in any way shape or form oh sure yeah yeah i didn't uh you know as a five six seven year old kid you don't know you know you you you have your mother and and i knew he wasn't my biological father but you know we had a roof over our heads and and my mom seemed happy and and so yeah at a young age um and he wasn't uh when you say violent i mean he he was just strict i mean it was every little thing got you in trouble and i mean [ __ ] if i did if i look at my kids lives and you know if they leave their drawer open i walk by and i'm like first of all i don't care if they leave their drawer open that would have been a big deal to him um so i know you've told the story before about hey you know playing every texas sport every kid does you didn't shine in any of those things and you're 12 years old mom throws you into swimming which you didn't really know how to do but she obviously picked it up super fast huh yeah i mean i caught it early you're right i didn't know how to swim and and uh and she didn't necessarily suggest swimming she just she knew that she had a high energy kid that if that wasn't applied somewhere or directed somewhere it was going to go somewhere toxic and so she was right about that but uh and i sucked i mean at sort of mainstream sports um i've had an issue with balls my whole life as well but you didn't have an issue with your phone a second ago that phone came falling out and you that was one of the most impressive one-handed catches i've seen in a long couch i was i was yeah um but uh i had a few friends on the swim team so i thought well i'll try that and um problem is i was you know they i was 12 they were all 12. and was this an age group team this was an age group team so very different you know enough about swimming to be dangerous and so it's it's uh swimming is really kind of there's different categories so to speak right the most serious is age group swimming that's where everybody that's where michael phelps grew up swimming that's where everybody grew up so um then you have sort of country club setups where it's a summer league and you swim some laps and you have some meats and all the parents are there um then yeah kind of high school right which most the time at least for us age group was the the serious training for high school swimming um but yeah i was i was 12 and and i didn't know how to swim and i certainly didn't know how to swim i mean i could have faked freestyle but i couldn't have i didn't know any strokes so you know i showed up and man the coach that kind of watched you for a while and i mean they stuck me in the six-year-old lane six seven-year-old lane and i still don't when i think back and i never even questioned it i just stayed i stayed swimming with these little little kids meanwhile all my buddies are over at the other end of the pool you know doing 3100s on whatever and i'm like but i just hung in there and i and i swam the kids and then after you know a month of that then i moved over a lane and i was with the eight-year-olds and then a month later i just kind of kept going across the pool until you know probably you know less than a year later i was uh i was a legit swimmer still still one of my great loves so by the time you get into high school you're swimming both for the high school team and the age group league yes yes and no because i turned pro in triathlon when i was 15. so i was i was already my swim coach at the time who was just a total hard ass but an amazing coach and chris mccurdy wonderful coach one of the best coaches i've ever had but man he was tough and it was i mean you don't you did not miss a workout you didn't skip a workout there were no excuses i mean holidays family it doesn't matter like and we were our age group team was caught was called cops city of plano swimmers which was at the time one of the best age group teams in the country and that was because mccurdy and you know i started traveling to triathlons and and skipping workouts because i was on a ride or a run and he was just he wasn't having it at all so you gravitated to the mile in swimming right well yeah i mean that was um i mean i'm an endurance guy so you know my i have no other than catching that phone i don't have great fast twitch muscle you know my hundred free i mean i could i could have you know whereas the you know the miles 16 and a half of those yep you know mine yeah what's your best mile uh i'd have to go back and look it was decent i mean at state championships one year i got third um it was decent but not uh i wasn't going to the olympics do you think if you'd stayed with swimming and that was the only thing you'd you could have pursued you would have at least you know you would have sworn in college presumably i would have swam in college and if you ask mccurdy he he thinks i could have gone far but i just you know i was 15 there was prize money there was travel i was like hey this is way cooler when did you realize you also had a knack to run and bike i i actually was was running right around the same time so at the same time i was swimming i was running track and cross country in high school so i was and i was a decent you know and plano a city champ in the um and it wouldn't have been the my was i was young enough that we ran the 1200 city champ and that and uh remember you know back then the timing was primitive these timers per athlete and you had stop watches and you come across the lions funny story and they'd ask you uh your name and so i came across the line and the timer says what's your name and i was going to armstrong middle school and i said armstrong and he said i didn't ask you what what school you went to i said what's your name and i said finally i was like after three or four go rounds i was like i'm armstrong from armstrong but i was i was you know that's a decent runner how much did you enjoy training at that age uh i love i loved you know i loved it i mean the most structured thing i had was swimming i mean mccurdy was i mean you should have seen the board i mean this dude i don't know i mean he must have laid awake every night and dreamed up these workouts it was so detailed and like i loved that um and that was the most structure i had running i would train a little with the with the cross country team that had structure we had another great coach in track and cross country named james mays so james mays was a world-class 800 meter runner uh he was actually the rabbit for uh for the dream mile and this guy ended up being our high school track and cross country coach and he was awesome he'd run with us and he like drove a porsche and we're like holy [ __ ] our teacher who's this dude um he was awesome and then cycling was more you know i just go pedal around no structure group rides when did it become clear to you that you had a knack for this at the level of i mean was it that one race that everybody talks about where you were right at the front with mark allen and you're 15 years old and at the time you know mark allen must have been one of the top three professional triathletes in the world that far well that was my first pro race that was the president's triathlon uh in dallas that was 80 that would have been 87 87 87 because i did the president's in 86 which was out at lake lavon it was a longer format or longer distance and then they moved it over to las colinas where the old cowboys facility was in 87 and they made it an olympic distance and i was training with some guys and and they said well you should just turn pro and go try it i was 15 years old and so and but i was swimming my ass i mean i was a great swimmer so i came out i knew i was going to come out of the water with the leaders so this is olympic distance so you're coming out of the water under 20 minutes oh easy yeah yeah and then you hop on the bike up on the bike you're going under an hour you're going what 50 yeah this is uh well this is pre-aero bars although actually that might have been the year andrew mcnaughton flew away on the bike he had the bars the original scott aero bars and then i rode with alan the whole time on the bike and i'm sure he was you know those they all raised each other every week and they know was dave scott there too uh i don't know if dave was there mike pig would have been there pig might have been there um the big kiwi um anyways it was it was like i i rode with alan but i'm sure he's looking at me going who the [ __ ] is this person this guy this kid and then uh you know guy like mark allen get off and run 32. and you would run what i thought after that no no probably more right 38 or 39 and so i think i ended up fifth or six and uh that was i was like okay i can do this was the bike different compared to swimming and running for you like was there a gear that you felt you had there that you didn't have in the other two i don't know about a gear but it was a the experience was certainly different i mean how so i mean i know it is but what did you feel that was different well it's it's uh just like as i said at the top you know being outside i mean think about the life of a of a full-time essentially professional swimmer you you spend and yeah you're like i don't think people really appreciate how much time swimmers devote to their sport and how much distance they cover i mean when we were 13 14 15 we were swimming um you know there'd be days we'd swim 10 miles a day like if somebody said they run 10 miles a day i would say you're a [ __ ] badass swimming that's two a day so 5 30 a.m morning practice for an hour and two hours in the afternoon you're covering some ground and you're staring at a black line the whole time that's why swimmers are crazy well the funny thing is most people don't appreciate that the swim to run ratio is about four to one so when you say somebody swims 10 miles a day that's comparable metabolically to running 40 miles a day i mean it's there's no impact yeah which is what makes it a great sport for you know as you get to be my age or even older i mean the thing i love about swimming is you can you can swim your whole life right you can't necessarily ride your whole life you certainly can't run your whole life like swimming if if you put a gun to my head and said okay dude you got one sport to choose for the rest of your life there is no question it would be swimming no question so i've heard you say in a previous interview that triathlons were awesome but at some point you got this you got this desire to go to the olympics and you realize that what kid doesn't want to go to the olympics yeah well at some point you realize look my quickest path there is probably going to be on the bike yep and i'm guessing that was the late 80s you kind of had that realization um well i yeah i i started to transition to full-time cycling in 89 still doing tri so i did them also in 89 and 90. um went to the junior world championships in moscow in 1989. um but in my mind i just assumed triathlon would be an olympic sport it is the ultimate i mean the best sports in the olympics are swimming and cycling and running like why wouldn't we combine them and make this an olympic sport well this is in the late 80s early 90s right it wouldn't be till 2000. 2000 in sydney was the first time nobody knew that but um yeah so i switched over basically full-time in uh in 1991 1990 or 91 which is kind of amazing to now fast forward to 93. um what expectations did you have going into oslo into that road race for the world championship well the the one thing that did happen is i i went to the olympics actually fulfilled that dream going to the barcelona games you did road race or time trial what did you do no they didn't have the time trial back then they had uh and i want to say i think we had team time trail i did the road race i don't think i did the ttt how many cyclists went for the us boy you're making me think a lot i mean this is a long time ago peter this is 30 years ago so i don't know three or four but this was back in the day when you couldn't you didn't have pros there right no pros yeah they added the pros in 96 you had pro and that was the so who were the best amateurs then bobby julick you yeah and then um you know the international guy the italians were amazing cassertelli uh who we lost uh 95. he won he won the games david uh david a rebellion was on the italian team but you know a lot of you know eric decker was on the dutch team zabo was on the german team so what was that like there competing against the best amateur cyclists in the world um it was i mean it was great i didn't i didn't race very well i didn't um tactically tactically i was still not i was still trying to figure out cycling um i didn't know how to move through the peloton and and sort of gauge and judge the peloton and the tactics and the flow of the race uh then that's very hard for people who watch cycling to understand it's funny and i mean i you take it for granted now yeah now you could throw me in any bike race and i i could absolutely find my way around but that's not i don't nobody's born with that skill right i mean that strikes me as fair i mean i'm sure there are some people who'd have a better feel for it than brothers when they start young i mean you get a guy george he started he was racing in central park against adult men when he was you know 12 years old i mean but to go from because in triathlon you can't even could you draft at the time in 90 91 right so yeah so you go from a sport where you should never be able to draft triathlon i've got this pisses off all the uh yeah all the purists well no all the you know the the uh sort of the itu guys the the olympic guys because they that's you know i got a bunch of a bunch of grief once because i called you know the that kind or that part of triathlon a a shampoo a blow dry and a 10k and i mean it was it was people were oh but anyways i just it's an individual sport but that's amazing that you basically your cycling career as a cyclist begins two years or a year two years before the olympics because all of the stuff you're doing as a triathlete is preparing your cardiovascular system and your fitness but not your bike handling skills not your tactics not any of those other things no the handling i had down i mean it was i wrote enough that i was comfortable in the peloton but just understanding the movements of the race and uh positioning and you know just the the you know the peloton it's a it's just a big organism and you've got to be at the right place at the right time and yeah it took me a few years what metrics were you guys looking at then were you mostly just relying on heart rate not even i mean going back then we heart rate monitors and we were when i got on motorola we were sponsored by polar and so we had some of the earliest heart rate monitors these things were i as i'm sure you could still find them and they were massive these things were they look like bricks legitimately component and that was it i mean that was sort of the first you know obviously no power meters no no testing i mean we just yeah he just looked at the heart rate so did you have any metrics or insights into your physiology being unique at the time i mean did you figure out what your maximum heart rate was i mean we'll get to it later but i remember you telling me during i don't remember which time trial it was you were telling me about in one of one of your tours that you were able to hold a heart rate of 200 beats per minute for the entire tt yeah that was that was later um i think the first time i really um thought i i had an engine so to speak and maybe because they told me that is i i they were doing a study at the cooper clinic in dallas of course i was living in plano so and it was a treadmill test and they wanted me to and they were i forget what the original study was but it's got a funny ending to the story it was all about core temp and so i went down and did a running vo2 test and the guy was like oh i mean it was i killed this thing and then then they and uh do you remember what your vo2 max was now no but the guy was like okay this this kid's special and and then they said look we'd like you to come back next week because we're doing this whole core temp study and but this time you're going to have to do it with some sort of probe in the exactly and i'm 15. and this guy says he's going to shove something up my ass and i am terrified i'm like uh i never went back so to that resource to this day we have no idea what your core temperature response would have been under that aerobic load well you want to do that test we can do it again you know i know enough to know that i run hot so that i'm gonna leave it at that um so so motorola was 93 i went i i went to motorola in uh actually in 92. i was the only amateur on the team steve bauer was on that team bauer was there phil anderson andy hamston so so by the way steve bauer is why a kid growing up in canada like me was obsessed with cycling growing up right so i was one of like 12 people in north america that loved cycling followed it because bauer won a silver in 84 at the olympics so basically i'm 10 11 years old that puts cycling on the map as something that's like awesome and and then of course lamonde was i mean forget about it like the most exciting thing in all of sports in 1989 was the the 89 coming back unbelievable uh some would argue the greatest ending to a tour you could argue maybe second greatest after what happened last year then let the scholars debate that um but i want to talk about the 93 season because you've got a guy named miguel induran who's come along and dethroned um greg who's dethroned greg right and at this point indurant has now won three consecutive tours he there's no sign he's going to slow down right he wins 91 92 93 he looks like an absolute machine this is one of the guys you're now racing against for the world championship in the road race yep what's your thought going into that race um well the way the season was structured then and i actually much preferred it the worlds was much earlier it was it was you know four or five weeks after the tours before the vuelta yep okay yep well no the back then the vuelta was in uh early in the season wait wait the developer was before the giro yeah okay so you had and the vuelta was was minimized uh which it should have been because it's it's it just anyways uh but we had a true world cup so you had all the the monuments all the big spring classics and then every week after the tour we went san sebastian we went zurich we went leeds in england you know it was like boom boom boom and so it was just this i loved the rhythm of that calendar and i was after the 293 which you won a stage i won a stage uh into verdun um in the national champions jersey and then they pulled me out because i was young and but my form just kept coming up and up and up and um in all the world cups i was i was i was right there all the prep races i was i knew i was gonna be in the front group but and i was [ __ ] i didn't i mean i looked around in that group i mean you had olaf ludwig get indoran you had kia pucci you had shmeel museum you had rhys i mean i was looking around going yeah of course i'm here and of course it was absolutely the worst day i've ever seen people crashing i mean i crashed twice uh people crashing everywhere how cold was it uh it was it's funny i never really felt that cold it was it but it was cold it looked cold yeah yeah it was it was it was probably in the 50s i mean northern europe yeah with weather like that it's gonna be cold no matter what time here explain to people what it means to win that race to be the world champion what you know you get to wear a special jersey that nobody else gets to wear for a year you wear the rainbow jersey for a year and then for the rest of your career you you have some representation on your jerseys or shorts so rainbows on the sleeves the collar uh it's it's a cool win to win thinking back to that year in the tour we're going to talk a lot about obviously performance-enhancing drugs you've in the past said you know that was in the era where you and your team were still in the low octane phase of things right the the cortisones things like that but it was the pre-epo era even though ipo was around it was around yeah um this was but this was before the the real shootout what were you aware of in that year's tour uh i mean there was buzz of uh of ipo but it was not um you know it wasn't a dinner table conversation like it became i mean there was i mean there was obviously speculation but there was scientific articles about it people knew that that substance um as great as as it is to treat certain disorders or issues it could also be hugely beneficial for endurance sport um but in in 9293 it was it was not it wasn't an obsession you know at the time obviously when i was just a kid following cycling i was always surprised in the 91 tour how quickly greg fell off um and years later of course we would all speculate was that the was that not just the passing of the torch between two great cyclists lamonde and induran but was it also the passing of the torch of an era right was it yeah do you believe that that was when high octane products became the mainstay in 91 or do you think that no it would not be probably until either the end of induran or because clearly by the time reese came along in 96 i mean that might have been the most um people people most that really have a deep understanding will tell you that i mean it was in the peloton in the late 80s um but that's really going far back and and and nobody from back then is talking for sure um but honestly yeah pedro delgado i think there were definitely rumors that that um because he won in what didn't he win the year that lamonde was out which was 87. you know way too much about the sport yeah this is you know a lot more than me but i peg it to the jerseys i had as a kid and great i had the pdk and honestly greg uh greg still could have he towards the end of his career and it was well documented i'm not i'm not saying this as a as a knock on him but he he's he was starting to let himself go in the offseason i mean he would show up to the overseas races and i mean you could see it you're like dude has this guy been training or not and and enduring was a machine indorian was a beast i mean this guy trained 365 days a year so um so it's not clear what that transition was yeah but into ryan was he could do it all so i think another thing that most people don't understand about cycling is or certainly about the about the tour is that because of how grueling it is which again i can't tell you i understand because i've never done it but as much as somebody who's never understood it or has never done it i feel like i at least have some appreciation for it because i understand physiology there's nothing about it that's reasonable right like there's nothing about doing that that is physiologically appropriate or in any way shape or form promotes a person's health right like a rider at the end of the tour is probably the least healthy they could ever be um and as a result of that there's no era in the history of this bike race where cyclists haven't turned to substances and whether they're banned or not banned is really a semantic point right but you know in the earliest renditions of this race writers were using alcohol to numb pain or traditional killers cocaine more sophisticated amphetamines or hopping on trains yeah exactly grabbing cars literally just getting yanked up mountains um what was the environment like not that you were there but you wrote you overlapped with guys that were there in the 80s yeah was there an environment of testing of anything like were people looking at hematocrit to see if people like actually blood doped let alone using epo were they testing for cortisone or testosterone or other hormones um i don't i have to go back and i mean like for example in in 93 when i won a stage in the store and won the world's i was tested you were tested okay um and but that's not you know now you acknowledge that back then you were using things like cortisone were you worried that those things would show up or were you just making sure that they were out of your system by the time you were racing well you know the the um what the what the uh the way to go about that in the day was just a tu e so a therapeutic use exemption and and you know a lot of these compounds come in different forms and different uh form factors and different administrations and so you know you could say well you know i've got tendonitis in the knee and so that's how they the tue was sort of which i think they've cut back on a lot of that but in competition testing for certainly for something like epo which has a five-hour half-life no way not gonna work yeah that's where that's where they you know they started doing the out-of-competition testing and the whereabouts and the but you know the the biggest hammers that have dropped in cycling in and around drugs like that were not through testing they were through the police like look at this nobody got nobody tested positive positive in the festina affair right the police shut up dumbass one year crossing a border gets pulled over lo and behold a car full of stuff that's how that happened like the agencies had nothing to do with that so coming into the 94 season you've got to be optimistic right you've just won you're the world champion mm-hmm um what do you remember what your expectations and your goals were for that season with respect to either single day classics or grand tours yeah i mean i thought um that that that was an interesting period in time though because that is when yeah no i know you you basically got your ass kicked yeah that year but i want to know what you thought coming in oh i thought i would i mean i thought i'd be yeah competitive in every one day race i started and did you think like i'm gonna be on the podium in the tour in the next three years no no at that time i was fully resigned or or committed to the fact that i was i was a classic writer i was one day right what did you weigh at that point i probably weighed i was big you know yeah i was my whole career i was big just because i a as a swimmer you you never a swimmer never loses the swimmer's body uh the back the chest the shoulders i mean you can lean it out but you're going to be big so that was probably 175 yeah which is tough to be a climber at 175 but i was one when in the tours i was you know between 160 165 still so big yeah racing pentane was 125. so when do you realize in 94 like something's wrong well i i i think we realized that something had changed um and i mean it was it was overnight i mean that that between 93 and 94 even though i'm sure of 93 there was um and that's the great thing about a one-day race is it is in a way a race a chance you can play your cards you can play tactics you can you obviously have to be fit enough to be in the front group but when i made my move in 93 i mean that was a that was a bit of a hail mary i went early i got a gap they were just putting you behind and and you stay away so you know the big tours were you know the race of truth and the time trial or the hardest climbs like there was no those are individual competitions and so but there was a tectonic shift from 93-94 and how long did it take you to understand this is exactly what's happening this is not about more cortisone this is not about more testosterone well it was all over it was all over the press i mean you know you had in 1994 you had in flesh alone you had three gwest riders go up the road and then the the press went crazy after that because here we have an italian team um ferrari's the trainer you know the the press also back then was more uh they were more uh sort of beat riders so they were friends with the writers they were uh they were beat right turns right and they were friends with the writers they were friends with the director so they were all kind of buddies and but they wouldn't write about what they would hear um until then and then they started and then they got on it and so uh and then people got the ferrari and and he made you know of course the famous quote about trying to compare ippo to orange juice and at least that's the way that it was printed but after that every yeah it was everywhere in the press and in the palette did you remind me what happened in the 94 tour for you 94 i got sick halfway through and dropped out okay and then in the 95 tour finished you finished and that's a tragic tour right yeah so fabio is killed yep yep he was on our team he was on your team the same guy that won the olympia he won the olympics in 92 is that is that a wake-up call to you in any way do you realize how dangerous your sport is when you watch your teammate's head smashed open on the side of the road yep yeah that was uh um you know of course the the helmets were not certainly not required and very few people wore them um i'm not sure what it helped fabio he hit really hit his face um and basically died right there but um and just surreal to it it was a tough mountain day and and we were in the groupeto and i mean we were out there forever and we actually got news of his death in the race and so it was just you know that's so rare but to have so to have it happen to us on our team you know you have breakfast with the guy but he's not at the dinner table you know and the whole the the the the whole story is tragic right young wife new baby boy i mean it and he was you know fabio was interesting he wasn't your normal italian he was uh they were all super serious not really jokesters he was a jokester like and he came to our uh he obviously had huge uh talent and potential won the olympic gold um but he didn't he wasn't adjusting to to pro cycling and so we picked him up in 95 um and ironically the uh the the for that last or for the ninth spot it was down it was down to him and george and george was actually there at the start because we would always take ten guys and then literally the day before the team would decide who the ninth guy was and they decided george was young but they decided to take cassertelli um you know yeah i was it was it was bad it was the 18th stage that you won in his honor three days later when did you realize you were going to win that race that stage rather well you know that's those those stages at the end of the tour they're they're just custom made for breakaways right the gc is set it's it's those days are for the opportunist and i went away in a group and it was huge ironically johann berniel was in that group too but it was a huge group and and that group stays away they never get caught and then you know they basically race amongst themselves and and and i you know i just took a huge flyer i think it was 30 40k to go just just went away and and you know they'll let you go um but you're playing you're betting that they you know like a lot of times they can't get organized and but i when i went man i was [ __ ] flying it was it was i knew i was i mean in fact our director at the time henny kuiper who's a legendary dutch cyclist he kept coming up you know this is uh he kept coming up and giving me time splits and you were gapping you were gaining on the gap yeah and finally i said henny don't come up here anymore i said i'm not getting caught just stay back there and i was i knew it and i was just just flying and you did you feel a sense of like this was for fabio you felt a little extra strength that day i mean i've heard sure i've heard so many athletes talk about that when they're damon hill talking about racing after senna died later in that season feeling like he he couldn't do he couldn't just make that car go fast enough and it's almost like he looked up to the skies and just asked for some bit of help from yeah you're just floating and and you know i don't want to oversell our relationship our friendship because we i didn't really know fabio we were on our team together he didn't speak english i didn't speak italian um but it's nonetheless i mean he died in our colors and and uh you know it's it just it just doesn't happen so for i mean it's extraordinary that it that it happened to us and i mean at that day i mean i was just possessed so going into the 96 season that's the year you decided it was time to to start moving into the high octane world correct actually no we we we made that decision 95. oh you did yeah okay 96 i was i i joined ferrari so that was so you so in 95 you were sort of doing freestyle epo um managing it on your own yeah i mean the the we had you know there was there was medical care there was guidance i mean this isn't you know i think that would be a bad idea to just go off and do that on your own but there were there was some oversight and would you manage it to a certain hematocrit is that effectively what was being they weren't testing they didn't start testing for him adequate until i want to say 98 or 90 they started testing doing the sort of morning hematocrit tests while i was out of the sport um so but in 95 and 96 they didn't no no i don't mean the race organizers i mean were the doctors using hematocrit as a way to get guide your epo level and your human and hemoglobin yeah yeah so what is your normal hemoglobin like like what is it today low well you know that's a good question yeah since we live in aspen now i'm sure it's it's it's probably 45 or 46 but you know if i lived here in austin it would be in the low 40s and so do you remember when you started doing epo in 95 presumably they gave you enough ippo to bring your hematocrit up to 50 i would guess is where they kind of wanted you well there was 50 was not um i know that there was no ceiling right do they have concern about blood clotting and things like that um not at 50. and maybe not even at 60. i mean there are people on everest that you know you know better than me that have a hematocrit of 70. so do you know how high they were pushing your crit back in 95 not specific i mean not that it was uh the answer is no but i mean it would it i would remember if it had been 60 or you know sort of the stories you hear from from some folks but and and also just um you know enough is enough right at some point you're you're you're competitive you're at the front of the well you need to do more did you feel a difference did you notice a difference from 94 oh yeah i mean let's not get ourselves that's that's a very effective substance and do you have the sense that it was being used as often in the one day races as it was in the grand tour absolutely yeah again there's no reason it wouldn't help you in perry ruby just as much as it helps you on absolutely lots or lots i mean if you're getting 10 more hemoglobin or hematocrit whatever however you want to describe it you are also getting at threshold 10 percent more power do you were you using a power meter yet at that point my no i didn't i i 98 was when i first started using the srm yeah sorry yeah it was so good yeah well i do you remember off the top of your head what your functional threshold power was in 98 um i remember what it was in 99 what was it i mean in 99 i could before the tour in 99 i tested on uh on the madone and which was your go-to test that was yeah it was well it was i wasn't the first to use it tony romager used it he had the fastest time and you know how many kilometers is madone it's uh what's about 30 minutes 30 minutes and what's the grade it's roughly it's about seven eight percent so it's a straight in the saddle pound away for 30 minutes yep what did you average for 30 minutes and 99 500 watts are you freaking kidding me 500 watts for 30 minutes yeah and at that point you were 165 pounds yep yeah 7 watts kilo all right we got it we got a few things to cover before we get to 7 watts per kilo um 96 you should be in top form and you're sick as hell in the tour you pull out yep bro yeah i thought i was just sick and i was certain and i was definitely sick of being there it was just was [ __ ] weather that year and i wasn't riding that well and i was ready to go home when did you notice the testicular pain certainly then um but i just you know soreness uh that was the first symptom right just just enlarged testicle sore um on every level sore to the touch or to sit on a seat you know if you've crossed your legs in an awkward way it would hurt and i just thought i thought it had to do with sitting on a bike seat all the time which is you know i've heard you say that before and i've always thought it's kind of funny because you've been sitting on a bike for 10 years at that point i know but then you also i mean you're rationalizing it right so and i you know nobody i was growing up and just even to this day i just rarely get sick like i you know i i just didn't have and i certainly didn't think that i would ever be in that position but um and i just i just it was ignore after ignore even as the symptoms sort of became more and more drastically significant i just i just kept going i had an excuse for all of did you have any headaches i had one big episode uh that was right before diagnosis yeah a massive headache massive headache massive any visual changes the next day yeah so the visual um so i i it was here in austin actually i would there used to having a venue um south of town uh was it called i forget but i went to a jimmy buffett concert and i got a huge headache at the concert and uh next day woke up blurry vision and even then i'm pushing through i'm like okay headache because i was at a concert have maybe had a couple beers now you're not supposed to have the headache while you're having the beers it's supposed to be the next day and the blurry vision well i'm you know i might need to get some glasses uh and then probably a week after that was the you know was the one that sent me to the doc just the coughing up blood everywhere everywhere that's october 2nd that was um uh no no because the the um i mean it would have been maybe october 1st because the blood episode happened you know coughing up the blood spitting it out and and um called my buddy who was a neighbor as a doctor and said hey i know where you're coughing up blood can you come look at it and you know um cosmetic surgeon not a not an oncologist not a you know sort of looked in my nose and my down my throat and you know he thought and i had rinsed out the sink so he didn't see how much he didn't see how much blood there was there did it scare you oh yeah yeah and i i obviously didn't do a good enough job telling him how much blood was in the sink um so he thought it was a sinus thing your science just dried the crack you cough and you weren't putting two and two together of course this thing in my testes the headache the blood there's no way in your mind these are all related nope and then and then the next day which was october 2nd i called him back because this pain at this point was so bad and the testicle was so swollen i said listen there's just one other thing that that you know i'm just embarrassed or i just you know i haven't talked about that this is going on and that's when he said okay this we got to get that checked out and then that's when i drove to jim reeves office on the second what do you remember people talk often about when a diagnosis like this is levied on them they're not even able to process what's being said like you hear some things but you don't hear other things like i i remember experiencing this as the one delivering this news where you sort of try to talk as slowly as possible you pause as much as possible but you realize at the end of that they probably heard a tenth of what you said what is your recollection of the very first time this news was because by this point they probably had a chest x-ray um well it's one of the first things jim reeves did they also did another little shot i'll never forget this they did they they gave me a little shot under the skin where they were going to test the reactions i said what the what are you doing what's what's this for and they said oh we want to um we just want to rule out tuberculosis and i remember thinking god please give me tuberculosis and then he wanted a chest x-ray and i'm like why are you what do you need a chest x-ray for and then they sent me to the ultrasound uh and it took the they had a young lady in there it was the tech she just took forever and i thought does she not know what she's doing then the actual doctor came in and repeated the test um this was an ultrasound of your testes and your abdomen i'm guessing yeah yep and um and then and then they walked in and they they handed me the uh the file which uh had the chest x-ray had the the scan report and they said you know go back to dr reeve's office he's waiting for you i'm at this point it's like i don't know 6 or 7 pm i'm like this is not good and so that's i mean he didn't i can remember most of what he said because he didn't say very much i mean he just straight in now at the time did they know that it was not seminomatous so they there was still a window of opportunity that this was going to be a very curable form of testicular cancer i think with the chest i mean the chest x-ray was was riddled i mean it was it was more white than it was gray so you had a pretty good indication how long until you had the orchiectomy how many next morning you know because that's what i said to reeves i said i feel like i should get a second opinion and he said you have surgery at 7 am tomorrow morning and you know keep in mind this is in 1996 so this the way people would process this news today they would they would say okay i'm gonna go home i'm gonna open my computer i'm gonna i'm gonna google everything i can about whatever my doctor just told me and i'm gonna start to learn and get a bunch of information and figure out options and and none of that existed we did not have the internet in 1996. when did you call your mom oh right away yeah right when i got home how was she my mom's always uh you know on this and this is you know i think what makes her great and strong if she would never show weakness so it although i know she had moments where um she would be sad and upset and worried um on the surface she just she just had this shield like let's let's [ __ ] go we got this you could do this um so she she yeah what for anything that i ever saw she was totally confident did you understand what the prognosis was at that time um not really uh and and who does right i mean it's it's uh i mean i know it was it was as advanced as it was well it wasn't just that it was advanced right it was the histology of it it was not a seminomatous tumor which is at that point really the only testicular cancer that's curable right you had you had a much more histologically advanced cancer that choreocarcinoma which was which was wildly metastatic what was your alpha feta protein level well that was that was elevated the one we monitored um the the closest was uh beta-hcg so how high was that 100 000. so you were pregnant i know well anything yeah i was very pregnant um yeah that was uh you know i mean if you come in with 500 you got a problem anything above two you have a problem so you had the orchiectomy they also took out lymph nodes they didn't we didn't do it no didn't touch the lymph nodes didn't touch the lungs when did you know you had brain mats when did they do the ctc um when i got to indiana so you mean you went through all of this and they still didn't know you had right metastatic i originally was treated my i did my first cycle of chemotherapy here in austin what was the chemo you did here that was traditional bep so i did i did do one we were talking one with leo yeah i did one cycle with bleo could have won eight if i didn't do that one cycle yeah so bleomycin is a really really toxic chemo and we'll talk about it in a second when we get to indiana why they decided to have a little faith and play the long game um what led you to indiana because again in a pre-internet era it wouldn't have been as clear that um that that was a place that was really on the cusp of doing something yeah but even even i mean they had done the work yeah like the local my local oncologist knew i mean maybe even even pre-internet they still knew where the centers of excellence in other words it came from the docs here you didn't have to go and make that decision well he he had mentioned that that dr larry einhorn in indianapolis was uh you know it was sort of the the king when it came to testicular cancer in fact a lot of his work really led to um platinum-based therapies really being as effective as they are so i immediately and he was in australia at the time he was lecturing in australia you know when i heard his name i said i gotta find this guy and then we tried to call him and he was off in australia um but i did do that one that you know i did four cycles in total the first cycle was done here in austin um and then i had started you go one week on two weeks off one week on two weeks so i had two weeks and that's when i first went to houston to visit md anderson and then i ended up did md anderson also remain uh recommend bleo well they had a whole different approach it was a much more um it was it was not traditional therapy which is interesting i mean they much more chemotherapy a lot more compounds um i didn't it just didn't didn't feel right i left so when you got to indiana did they do the ct scan first they figure out you've got brain mets as well yeah is that another what the hell is going on here how much worse can this get moment well it was kind of a i mean yes the answer is yes but also a bit of a relief you're like okay that's this is this has got to be the worst part of it so like now that this is my line in the sand i'm not it's not getting worse it's really really bad but you know it's not going to get worse right so i'm just trying to understand lance like at what point were you thinking i might not live here um god i didn't i didn't have i mean certainly crossed my mind but i didn't have days where i would sit there and go i am going to like i just kept and we were doing so much you know with the with the blood work like we were measuring the hcg it was coming down they expected you know i said look what what do you want to see like what's what's this is the scoreboard right what's my metric yeah what is my metric that says i'm a head in this game and they set a log drop off every every cycle and man we were hitting it bam bam it just kept coming down and i was like i'm kicking this thing's ass like yeah i can turn around and the body can and the cancer can pivot and and the chemo doesn't work whatever work whatever happens but i just i just felt like i got on top of it and i didn't consider they went with this other protocol right they went with they went with what yeah instead of well that was first thing they asked me they said okay you're a professional cyclist i said do you ever want to race bikes again and i said i mean if i can live yeah they prefer to live but that's that would be cool um and they said well you we can't you can't keep doing bleo and so yeah it's just it's so pulmonary toxic it's so cardio and and people ask like why why wouldn't everybody be treated the way you were treated with with the protocol called vip which is doesn't indicate that you're a vip it's just the yeah it's been christine and says platinum and but the the downside to being treated with vip is you have to stay as an inpatient so bleo you can go home like you go into the chemo clinic for three or four hours get your chemo and you go home uh vip one of those and i forget which one is so toxic not on the lungs but on the body that you have to have 24 7 hydration so you have to be in the hospital and so they just you know just don't people want to go home chemo was bad for you chemo was bad at the end chemo is uh and i still talk to people about this because they if they're gonna about to start chemo they ask me and you know cycle one i was like you sure you did this right like i don't feel anything cycle two get sick a few times like oh okay i think they got it right this time cycle three just sick of [ __ ] cycle four you just you just wanna sleep like you just it it just compounds and compounds it got it got much much worse what was the recovery like from the neurosurgery um you know that was those are they were big cuts i mean they were you know they're probably you know tennis ball size um the easiest way to describe it for people listening or have never been there is it's it's it's like you know cutting doing the pumpkin for halloween like you literally just cut the hole pull off the thing take out the seeds and put the thing back on like that's what and there were two of them there was one on the top one on the back um right on the surface so dr shapiro was my neurosurgeon he saw him and he pulled that skull off and right there and they were dead oh this was done after most of the chemo uh no it was done before halfway wow but you know the response was amazing i don't know how you know the blood-brain barrier you know this barrier that prevents super toxic stuff from getting to the brain they should not have been dead that's why they go in there and take them out and you know they i i'm not a surgeon or a scientist but they take them out and they walk them over and you know look at them immediately in the microscope and they were dead at that point in time is there anybody you remember meeting in the hospital that kind of made you feel like you were having a shared experience with another patient was there any patient that sticks out to you no i was kept pretty uh isolated i did i never shared a room um i did chemo in my room i didn't you know a lot of hospitals or centers you know it's like a big room yeah boys everywhere and you sit beside the you know i'm lance with testicular cancer and you're you know gina with breast cancer and joe with colon and you're all just kind of talking watching i never i was always alone in my room which is interesting because it seems like very early on you you you sort of latched on to an important idea right which was um people need help navigating this system and you obviously felt moved at a very early point in your disease and recovery to create a foundation that you ultimately would what do you think was part of the impetus for that in your experience it just it it just you know even as modest as the expectations were it was like let's just do like and you could think about a lot of different ways it wasn't so much about navigation at the time it was more about here you have a disease or type of cancer with a huge stigma around it you have young men that you know like me that are if they have swelling or pain they're not going to go out and and like advertise that and and seek most likely not seek help until it's a problem so just trying to bring awareness to that and you know we thought we we started a bike ride here in austin we thought we'd maybe get a few people out there donate some money we had no plan i mean it was but it just felt like the time to do something was it sort of a pay it forward thing like you were just so happy to be alive that you were like i just have to share some of this well we start yeah well we started it before i mean we started or i should say we started during so that wasn't entirely sure that there was going to be a forward but it's interesting obviously the foundation would grow to over half a billion dollar in um in in money raised and i think what a lot of people don't appreciate um but i always appreciated was that that money was very specific and that it wasn't directed towards research and you might say well god that doesn't make sense shouldn't all money and cancer be towards research but i always thought it was a really great thing that the money wasn't directed towards research because there are a lot of dollars directed towards research and there are not a lot of dollars directed towards the other things research is imperative it must be and it should be by far the largest allocation of resources within a portfolio that's trying to address cancer but it's this other stuff this softer stuff of how do you help a family that can't afford the travel for you know the child with cancer how do you provide the resources for somebody and then of course you know you inspired a lot of other people like fertility hope and other people to come along and address other problems that um just probably didn't get enough attention and on the advocacy side yeah i mean my answer to i agree with everything you said uh you have to raise you know billions and billions maybe even trillions to to properly i mean there's only one person that can fund that and that's you know those are federal governments and um and so but on the advocacy side because we ended up gaining so much power uh just with the story and and the brand of live strong i mean we advocated here in the state of texas for for a a bond initiative that that created the what we called separate the cancer prevention research institute of texas it's a three billion dollar bond initiative we you know at the time livestrong spent about 600 grand on that initiative so picking the best lobbyists you know all the strategy right well you know i i see the 600 but i view that as we just funded that's an archimedes lever right like we funded three billion dollars in in in research and prevention so otherwise you you could never go out and you can't sell enough yellow bands to to do that so when did you decide yeah like not only am i well enough to to come back but um and remind me where did you already did you already have the contract with kofitis prior to getting sick yeah motorola had already motorola folded okay so you're already origi you're already officially on on confidence and then you come back and what are they thinking well they they they were i mean before they even there was no com i mean they they sent a representative over and it's crazy that they're still in the sport um they sent somebody to uh to the u.s to basically say listen this is probably best he just they sent somebody to evaluate you to come and lay eyes on you lay eyes on me but then have a conversation with my agent and say look you know we feel like we should probably just part ways and your contract was a big contract right i mean there's like a million dollar contract yep yep yeah we didn't let them part ways so you you were officially with with that team for a year for yeah yes at 1997. did you ride nope okay so they don't renew your contract obviously at the end of 97. so and i had a the other interesting thing which i don't think has been talked about much i had a disability policy which typically is for you know injuries crashes anything that you know makes you disabled enough you can't uh turn the crank and but cancer you know you know in a way fell under that so i i took the disability policy or started to take it and the deal was if you go back and race again then it avoids it yeah and so and i think it was a three-year payout and i thought god this might be a good off-ramp right i'll just and so uh until it wasn't until it wasn't then i decided to stay on the highway but but it wasn't easy right because it wasn't like anyone was clamoring at your door in 98. no no nobody was yeah i mean that when we went back out to uh to sort of shop me to teams um zero zero interest right even not even i mean postal was really not that interested what do you think changed their mind well the only reason i mean i was you have to go you have to go back follow it backwards but i mean postal the team postal which was owned by tom weisel had been around i was on weizel's team before motorola so i had history there i had relationships i had obviously a relationship with him um so you know maybe it was that but it wasn't it wasn't a cold call like i was essentially going back to weizel's team because i left subaru montgomery to go to motorola now you're they gave you 200k or something like that as a base yeah and then a bunch of performance bonuses right well i i uh yeah i negotiated like uh like a thousand bucks back then again i loved the and i really did i loved the way the sport was structured the world cups uci points you had a number one ranked rider in the world like that's a [ __ ] cool deal like when i watch golf or tennis or right you know who's the best yeah wait djokovic is the number one player well yeah duh you should have who is the number lewis hamilton is the number one driver in f1 because he has the most points and wins no [ __ ] we had that in cycle they don't have that anymore um so i i i pinned it to a thousand bucks per point and and realistically back then how many points would the top rider have thousands okay so it's a million millions of dollars potentially and that's what i went out and did yeah in 98. in 98 because you did perry nice right then then i quit came home said [ __ ] this i'm out of here i'm not cut out for this i'm not yeah i want to talk about that race yeah what what went wrong oh just terry you know the weather and and and i sort of had this idea in my mind that if okay if i i did the olympics in 1996 i was and i was but you were you didn't know it at the time but you were riddled with tumors one flesh alone and then looking back on it i was like wait if i was that good then and i was that sick like all this shit's gone now i'm gonna be like 10 times as strong which of course i wasn't i'm strong and it was good to have it out of my body but um you know it just and it just caught me on a day man it was [ __ ] crosswind it was freezing i was i got i was in the back of the peloton the peloton split and i'm just like i'm going home literally pulled over got in the car went to hotel called kristen i said we're going home what did she say she you know she was supportive um she didn't support it she she necessarily agreed but she was supportive it's been so long since i read your book i mean i read it when it came out it's not about the bike which probably came out in 2000 so yeah i i vaguely remember in that era you kind of vacillated back and forth between i want to ride i don't want to ride i want to sit around and eat tacos all day and tex-mex and yet somewhere in there didn't you when didn't you come in 4th in the vuelta that year well that was at the end of the year so so was the tex-mex beer drinking in the spring that was that would have been you know perenesis in march um april that was probably you know those six weeks around the april time frame uh and then and then and you know it wasn't it was almost like a an intervention yeah a group of friends that were like look man like i get it like you don't do anymore but just just go back and finish the season like just start riding start training just just don't don't go out like that like just finished the season i said okay i'll uh i'll do that so i just started riding but no no no no structure just riding i'd go out here in austin i just and i rode a lot like four or five six hours every day just just riding no this is the season so what are your teammates doing at this point they're outraged they're racing yeah they're racing and the team doesn't care that you're not there because they're not paying you anything anyway basically yeah yeah and i and i i believe i went to i went to the u.s pro uh the core states in philly and then uh and then i flew to europe and did my first race back was a tour luxembourg you win that won that then i went to germany did another race and won that these are stage races short stage races and you've reintroduced ipo at this point yep do you by the way i forgot to ask you this post-orchectomy wouldn't you have needed a wouldn't you have had a medical exemption for testosterone at that point i don't think you could in any sport could you get that yeah but i never i never but didn't you have to start taking more testosterone after you had your testicle removed um not necessarily were you do you know if you were producing normal amounts always always on the lower end but nothing that was you know problematic or something you said listen this is going to cause further issues down the line but not obviously not on the and the other thing i meant to ask you lance did you at some point during the period of your cancer recovery think man did that growth hormone amplify this in any way shape or form or any of the other anabolic agents particularly there's no way but but what was your thought on some of the other drugs you'd used um well you know that certainly crosses your mind and and uh hgh you know there was just very pre-diagnosis there was very little of that anyways only in 96 which is of course the year that i got sick but by the way seems to me the least performance enhancing drug for a second we never we and by the way we never went back i mean ferrari was like don't need it yeah i yeah never never went back so really the mainstay of drug when you came back was epo yep um cortisone and yeah it's amazing that cortisone helped that much huh um yeah you know i'm surprised you haven't it's it's it it's how would you guys administer it intramuscularly yeah it's helpful to shed weight primarily and especially as a as a bulkier guy um trying to shed upper body muscle yeah very helpful unbelievable mm-hmm um so 98 comes to an end you you finish unbelievably right fourth in the well i was fourth in everything fourth at the welter fourth at the world's tt fourth at the world's road race i just was like [ __ ] i'm fourth and everything but i got a thousand plus uci points that tom weisel had to pay well not only that but you've done it kind of not at your best right like you're only you know you you really only came back into shape for nine months so you decide at the end of 98 no i'm coming back in 99. like now it's i'm all in yep at that point okay the big that was that was the big you know the team was who was the uh director johnny welts was the director sportif in 98. and this peter when i say this team was unorganized like you cannot you cannot believe it it was such a [ __ ] show i remember 98 so i remember because i was in my second year of medical school and i just remember there was a group of guys we would go riding every saturday and sunday morning and we would first of all i was so excited that you were back but we would joke about like go postal having the two meanings like you're cheering for postal team and you're going crazy because it's just so disheveled and yeah well we had and i'll never forget this i mean johnny was so disorganized and he would like you know he wouldn't pay this one yours and then that that vuelta that i ended up getting fourth and we'll walk down one day a breakfast table and everybody's go there's no no swan yours i said where's i said where's the [ __ ] swan yours and i said they walked out i said wait a minute we we're in the middle of a grand tour we have to have mechanics swan yours like what the [ __ ] is going on they just walked out because they weren't getting paid so sketchy and i'm sitting there going okay i think i'm back i said but i'm not gonna put up with this [ __ ] like this is this is ridiculous this is just amateur hour and johan was retiring and uh i got his number uh marshall marcel lucille german guy gave me his number he wore the yellow jersey for a day back in maybe he's those trainers they win the early stages they get the jersey but uh i just called him i said what do you it's funny we you know we didn't really like each other when we raced he was we always just sort of butted heads and but he was always at the front of the race like he [ __ ] going back to what i was saying earlier about knowing the race like knowing where to be knowing uh just the the energy of this thing he knew it and he spoke all these languages and i thought that would be good and i just called him and i said what are you what are you going to do now now that you're retiring and he was actually either wanting to start or somebody asked him to to be a part of a cycling union which he would have been that would have been a great use of his time and i said listen you know i got an idea like why don't you come be the director he was like are you kidding me no and i said because the travel like it's basically just it's not retiring i mean that's just not what he thought he would be doing um but i convinced him so people this is a topic that gets it's such a controversial topic but i just i really want to understand this right people consistently say look yes we know everybody doped during that era but u.s postal was different because they did it at an industrial level it was much more systemic um so let's let's kind of unpack what that means right so this so you had already been working with ferrari and i've never met ferrari he's actually a guy i would always want to meet because i think despite how much he's been demonized i just think he's probably a very smart physiologic wizard he's incredibly smart and um like how much of your training was he actually guiding all of it so did carmichael who gained fame being associated with you and being your coach did he do anything he not not at that stage yeah he was you know as an amateur i mean he was the olympic coach in 92 and and but but once i went you know started seeing ferrari you know chris was just a you know advisor friend uh no but that we we are talking about two very different skill sets here yeah and i'm not talking about doping i mean just in term i mean mikely ferrari you can say what you want and and you you and i calling him intelligent or bright or smart or even genius you know just drives people crazy no but i but i've heard him in interviews no he's talk about the nuanced level of physiology i mean he's he's top three of all time and so so we're talking about two different types of yeah um so you said earlier look you had no aspiration of winning the tour right did that change when you placed fourth in the course was that the first aha moment that says i could win this thing yep and then and and when johan finally decided to come you know take take me up on my offer he said it he said you're gonna he he he and i'll never forget he said you are going to finish on the podium in 99 and 99. i said you're crazy there's no way but you didn't think so with your confidence yeah i mean that's the first of all the welter is not the tour i understand but so getting forwards in the welter yeah to me that that sort of equates to maybe top 10 which by the way would have been a great result um but he was 100 sure he said you're gonna at that point in time so in 98 pantani had won in 97 ulrich had won how much time had you spent riding alongside those two well in the grand scheme not much so did you have a sense of how you'd stack up against them um no because i didn't i had never been in a grand tour at my peak form their peak form i mean i was you know just guessing and i don't remember why were they not there in 99 well pantani had the tony had the he got the thing at the gyro got yeah that's traumatic and and i want to say yan he also had of course you know we you and i offline have talked a lot about uh john ulrich but yeah i think he had another thing right maybe he tested positive for him something happened like he just he wasn't there so you show up at 99 and the two best tour riders are not there that's right the previous two winners the previous two winners i i still remember my couch where i sat and watched the prologue yeah that july day and explain to people why the prologue matters like it's not a long stage it's like an eight and a half kilometer timer yeah but you can what's the importance of it well it's a it's it's first of all first and foremost it and and they don't always do it anymore which i completely disagree with i think it's the baddest thing in the world of course it's the only way to start a tour it allows the rider especially the the gc guys to really test their condition not just their own but against the guys and you can you know if it's you put 30 seconds in a climber 30 seconds to 30 seconds so it's it's uh and that was a tough one i mean that was that was a not a it had a a serious climb sort of halfway through it was enough that you could make some separation so um but it's there's there's certain things that the twitter friends should always have it should always have a prologue it should always have a team time trial it should always and they've really gone away from that for some reason but thankfully not then you win the prologue when the prologue easily your first yellow jersey yeah yeah i mean never even i mean it was just uh i mean we we thought we were in a dream now remind me in that tour you were not using blood transfusions it was all epo right and it was you didn't micro dose you were just giving straight regular doses you didn't this is before they had a test for epo yeah starting to yeah the only thing they had was the hematocrit test and do you remember where you kept your hematocrit at that tour was that you this is when you were having to stay at about 50. no 50 would be too close because if you you had to stay around 46 47 because if even you know this i mean 40 years yeah you get dehydrated hydrated and or you get sick or and they show up like you're you're done i don't think so something people don't realize is in 1996 reese won the tour so finally unseeds in duran his hematocrit was somewhere between 60 and 66 during that race that's what they say i mean we were yeah we weren't there with the spinner but um yeah the nickname mr 60 yeah his nickname is mr 60. so what changed so much was it fistina in 98 basically brought the hammer down and said we're done with these guys walking around with hematocrits in the 60s yep so is it that much of a difference with your walk if you're walking around hematocrit is 4244 and you're racing 4647 or is it because this has always been my take on it it's not so much how you're functioning on the beginning of the tour it's that at the end of the tour you could keep your hematocrit there when ordinarily it would really start to dwindle as you break down yeah but when when the test came around then yeah you just knew that you would deal with drop but obviously ever you know the the gc guys at least found ways around that and that's where you know the transfusions came in and which is effectively the same thing yeah right um was there anybody on the postal team that year that was not doing epo not that i'm aware of and how how much were you guys co-mingling information so you were seeing ferrari but i assume everyone wasn't seeing ferrari right now a lot of them were a lot of them were um but the team also had trainers and doctors and you know had its own setup was that the year a moto man was going around yeah it was 99 it was 99 yeah i thought that was a great idea it's uh and do you think looking back on it it's like it's just like well it's a movie i mean it's [ __ ] crazy like what oh god yeah that was 99. i i don't know if this is still the case but i believe at the time you won in 99 you were the only person to not only win the tour but win each of the three individual time tile time trials as well yep well you have the prologue and the two prologue and then there's a long time trial special yeah 60k yep at least right 55 yeah yeah and so if you're the best and it's that long you're going to win you win that year do you think to yourself you know ulrich wasn't here pentani wasn't here of course can i win this thing when they're both there and not to mention i mean it it it um you know with that big crash early in the race i mean zula lost seven minutes i mean zula was close in the race if you if you if you back out that accident or the huge crash he was within about a minute right yeah it would have been close and he was a i mean zula's i mean even if by saying pantani and ulric aren't there i mean you still had zula escartin olano uh i mean yeah you know you can't minimize those guys what was the we almost take it for granted now but at the time how much scrutiny was there over your performance that year a lot yeah that was the year of the cortisone yep yeah yeah you know it started and it was the year after festina i mean so this pope could have won the tour and they would have they would have questioned it yeah so what you know prior to this you've never really been on the hot seat right so you'd been using the drug but nobody really cared because you weren't winning the race so now you're winning the race i wasn't in the crosshairs so where do you think the posture came of this is how my denial is going to be and and was in retrospect was there another way to deny without attacking because i i got to be honest with you i don't really remember what the attack mode was like in 99 versus 05 like that's a there's a spectrum of it you would have to be in them and you'd had to be in the in the press conferences you know that you'd have questions about the race and questions about whatever and then somebody in the corner would holler one of the and just you know they were just asking a question felt like an attack at the time felt like an attack on me i said said excuse me what the [ __ ] are you talking about i mean literally like that like just let's go um you know what did your teammate say did anybody pull you aside and say lance you got to back this down man no no but they wouldn't have done that it would there there are others and man you know maybe yeah johann no no but johanza he we are we are like brothers i mean he would answer he would do the same thing you know it might have been better somebody you know here locally where my whole operation was run out of to go you know what feels like we may want to back this down a little bit just just let it go and anyways how many other people in your life knew at the time obviously your wife must have known mm-hmm oh i think yeah i think uh that's a good question i mean it wasn't something that i offered up but did your mom know no did she ever ask nope and what did what did your wife say um very little i mean i think she just assumed i mean look it was at that level of the sport and that level of of doping you you cannot keep that if you live with a person yeah that is not going to be a secret but did she ever say something like lance is this worth it you know like if i play in the long game i've never had this conversation with her but um i i and this is my point is that if you have no ability to keep this a secret from your spouse or whoever you're living with um we're in europe there's i have my teammates they have the wives clubs i think i think the wives the conversation was like this is just part of the job because they certainly all knew so in 2000 you come back i want to ask you about vantu what was going on between you and pantani there were you guys talking what was i was trying to tell him that he yeah i thought i was going to give him the win which is one of the biggest regrets in my career why because you don't uh and it's you know not on the von 2 and that's why i mean mercs called me when i was on the car right down he said you don't ever gift the von tube ever why did you want to gift it to him i i was just i mean i was going to win the tour i knew i was going to win the tour i was just you know i was actually trying to be gracious and be sort of the the patron of the peloton like look you know i don't need to win everything here you go win the volunteer and you go and but in hindsight god and may he rest in peace i mean i i'm i'm not talking about puntani i'm just talking about um i'm talking about the vaughn too right which is just you just don't give that one away and merc's called you on the car ride yeah don't ever you never it's a huge mistake you never gift the von 2 um is merc's the greatest cyclist of all time of course if different sports different sports different sports different sport but if mercs were riding today with the sport being so much more specialized where would he choose to focus his energy would he be on the grand tour yeah for sure yeah very different sport now though i mean half man half bike is a biography of mercs that i love and you you gave me one of the most amazing gifts ever which is that book that's on my coffee table i was psyched i saw it and i was like oh peter has one of those too and i was like wait you dumbass you you gave it to him yeah yeah it's a cool book it's it's unbelievable um i would recommend anybody who's interested in cycling reading half man half bike because you can't really understand what he did like what does it mean to win five giros five tours every single day classic the one hour record like it just doesn't make any sense and to and yeah so um now in that who was um who was second that year was that piloki was he or was that ulrich that year no in 2000 young young got second i believe is that when you guys began you've said before that of all the guys you've ever raced you've never respected anyone more than you obviously we're going to talk about jan a little later your your respect and your love for yon post cycling is he's a brother to you yep did it begin in that tour in 2000 it was more intense i mean he was i i didn't you know uh i viewed him as a real enemy and a rival and and [ __ ] this guy and i'm like you know but and when i say i i mean when i talk about yon and what he drove in me was just i had um i was fully convinced that he was the most talented that he was the biggest fear that like if if anything every morning got you up and it was pissing rain outside and you had five hours on the schedule like you better get out there it was january none of these other guys they're all good they're all i'm sure nice guys but none of them inspired me like him yeah you probably didn't know it at the time but how much you guys had in common right in terms of your upbringing yeah yeah and john's had a complicated upbringing what's your biggest memory from o1 and o2 which was the year you begin having suffered a broken collarbone um in um didn't you didn't you fall and no in dolphin a that was three so going into oh three oh one was you know 01 was probably physically my best tour i mean 01 it was you know that's everybody refers to it as the look and and you know what was your um what was your time or what was your wattage up madone you know one all those jars were 500 watts 500 watts for 30 minutes yeah and loving it and what do you think what do you think your wattage would have been without epo oh it would have been 450. instead of telling you it is 10 you think it's a full 10 percent yeah yeah 10 percent seven watts per q 450 is still pretty good by the way yeah i mean look bradley wiggins probably put out 450 440 to 450 during his one-hour record which that's more impressive that's flat yeah and and you're kinked yeah so it's really hard because you're bent over um the look yeah how deliberate was that i wasn't looking at yon what were you looking at i was looking i knew i was about to send it and i thought man i feel good but if this doesn't work i'm gonna need somebody to bail me out so i'm a new teammate and chechu was the last guy with me and so i was looking back just to make sure that chechu and it was just the angle of the photo but i was looking back to make sure that he was that he was going to come with you well that he was close yeah that i could still it still had him in sight and so but just the way the photo was captured it looked like i was looking directly at yan which i wasn't um oh three you've got to be a little worried going into that right because you're you're pretty depleted on red blood cells aren't you oh three was that's when i had a pretty big crash in the dolphin a right before huge crash actually and that's when you couldn't just give yourself ippo willy-nilly um i think by then we had an epo test right yeah but not i mean out of competition you could yes but i think what was your hematocrit at the beginning of o3 didn't you come in at like a 42 or something 38. hey start so you came free raise check 38. 38. how many we didn't do we didn't do just just just so you know and so we're clear we didn't do after 99 we never did epo on the tour in c you mean you did it out of season i mean you did it out of competition still and then just and then we then you know ferrari had to switch to transfusion oh i didn't realize that i thought that happened in o2 so you're saying but from 2000 on it was two bags during the race no two thousand the first year was two thousand we had one bank one bag at what stage so that halfway through so that first day at hattacom were that was with nothing that was before the bag how are they not catching the jump in hematocrit that comes i don't know you were not worried about hey one day my hematocrit's 41 and the next day it's 47 right yeah um how close were you to understanding the uci's algorithm for testing i mean at this point you're becoming i mean one of the things that people have always said is hey lance had the uci in his pocketbook yeah that's not listen we can go down all these rabbit holes all the stuff that's i mean and i'm not uh i'm sort of done with that part of my life where i have to contest everything it's like but in in its totality if i if if we just put them all on a whiteboard and say they said this then this i mean you cannot believe and i'm not and i this is where i just don't need to to go one by one but if you look at it in total you cannot believe how much [ __ ] was out there i mean yes the the the pillars are true but most of it yeah is just total [ __ ] i mean i think the point is by the way it's turning a blind eye by the way peter a month ago they had a 30 minute program on french tv convincing themselves that they had figured out that i had an engine in my bike and that they figured out this is i'm not kidding they figured out where the switch was are you joking i'm not joking i'm i am dead serious i'm like what are you people what are you doing like and i don't know if you ever noticed this but i would always sort of grab my chamois okay like i would always like kind of adjust it adjust my chamois i had this whole theory that you know that the ass and the chamois and the seat have to line up that's peak power like it's perfect perfect balance and all this [ __ ] and so i would always and i am this is on network television this was the there's the switch the switch was in the shorts of course i mean this is but this is a really dumb example although it's a true story that they that they aired this um but most of it just i'm just like and fortunately i've gotten myself to a point in life where it's like so going into that last time trial in 0 3 you and yon were really close well yeah i mean it was you were not that far ahead of him right you were inside a minute maybe yeah inside a minute talk to me about that time truck i've heard you two might have been less but that wasn't the the the the fear or the stress around it was not so much no it was the checkpoint right it was he gained how much did he take out of you well but the bigger the bigger stressor was how much he took out of me in the first time trial i think he took two minutes out of me so you're going you're thinking okay you got 45 seconds what stage was that that was uh the first one yeah i don't know it was a really captain covert it was right so that's when your hematocrit's 38. yeah so you're you're you're you're going well you're got 45 second lead he took two minutes out of you in the first i mean everybody said it's over he's gonna he's gonna catch him i remember that like it was yesterday and it's raining pouring rain he put six seconds on me in the first kilometer how many k was the time trial long 50 50ish so what went through your mind at that point johan didn't tell me that he didn't tell you that how much okay six seconds and one question that's unbelievable if i can get off the bike yeah like i'm done did you feel you were redlined oh yeah that was terrible and were you using your power meter at that point or mostly heart rate uh but most of the we didn't race with power meters trained you know 100 of the time with them but not in the races so it wasn't just heart rate yeah um when did they tell you that he fell away i mean john's watching the race on tv and the car as he's driving um yeah right away and then i knew and it was over the other thing about oath of three was uh was boloki right buloki i i still don't i still don't understand how you avoided that well of all the things that ever happened to me in the tour i get asked about that i mean it's not even close i mean that that the ride through the field that's the one i mean every even people that don't follow it like man remember that one time like you [ __ ] rode across that field i was like yeah i do remember but you know incredibly lucky i mean he uh very unlucky for uh josepha but um you know if you go back and re-watch and it's of course there's 100 versions of it on youtube but if you go back and re-watch exactly what happened right so he's leading flying downhill it's a 100 degree day it's you know these these bad roads would that they would you know patch the whatever with tar the heart was literally boiling and he just you know his tire caught some hot tar and just he just high-sided him and ruined his career ended his career and i had i mean i had a choice i said i either lay this thing down right or go left how many miles an hour were you going oh we were going 40 miles an hour and i said i'm gonna go left well now you know keep in mind the the story ends with me not just riding through the field but having to get off my bike and jump down on the road well that whole field you can go back and watch it on youtube so there are massive ditches all this the split second that i said i'm going left there was a path what are the chances there was a path into the field where the farmer would go in and out with his tractor what are the chances i mean five feet to the right five feet to the left at 40 miles an hour it's like that yeah and i go straight into the side of the ditch so what are the chances that that path is there and i get in this field and it's just dry i don't i'm no farmer but it was like dry crop sharp and i get that i was like i was like man this [ __ ] is sharp like i better not get a flat and i'm just like looking down going come on man and i got to the other side and i could see that it was way down i was like i was like i better get off this thing and just just what are the chances well the other one that you must get asked about a lot and i don't remember which year it was was when your handlebar got caught same year was that also 03 i mean a comedy of errors i know and by that point clearly you and yan had established an amazing respect because that's when he waited yep yep yeah yeah yeah yeah you listen john is a he's a total gentleman so yeah that was yeah hit the you know hit the i i hit the kids uh bag and just straight down bike was broken which we didn't know at the time but that's the whole um chainstay was snapped but yeah jan waited up so let's fast forward to the end of o5 right you've won seven you at the time said um look i want to spend more time on the foundation i spend more time with the family i assume those were the real reasons you wanted to retire i think that's right yeah i mean when you came back the w was it leblanc wrote an open letter basically telling you not to right what was that about he uh you know um jean-marie leblanc was was an icon i mean he was a he was the the you know the director director general of the tour all the you know he was and i think and he'll go down as being viewed as one of the greatest directors um ever and and a very very tough guy you know it was his way or the highway and you you just didn't cross jean-marie and and but the sport had started to uh you know i retire landis wins landis test positive so it was a festina-esque moment in time and cycling and and yet another shift to like guys looking around going wait a minute all right we might be extinct here if we don't [ __ ] clean this up and so the sport was was shifting to a better place yeah and john's uh jean-marie's point was um look you you are a bridge to the past right so this sport has evolved you are part of the old old culture and it's not good for this and you know what he's exactly right so i remember uh i remember when he wrote it and i think they printed it and uh the two big political papers or le monde and le figaro i think it was in uh figaro and i just thought it was interesting because i was in i was in west texas with anna on a marfa one of my favorite places and uh where you just went recently yep and we had just gotten together she had just gotten or she just got pregnant we you know but she didn't she wasn't with me when i raised before and we were out there and we went to this car this is so crazy we were in fort davis outside martha i went to this uh lunch spot and i said this is a mistake coming back yeah i said i can't i i shouldn't do this by the way did leblanc actually call you as well to follow up not that i remember do you think he would have been more persuasive no so why did you why did you do it well it was you know i mean it it the wheels were in motion like it was all i felt a ton of um responsibility or you know to the foundation yeah all of it i mean all the all the sponsors were excited the foundation was excited that that and you know it would have been so easy just it felt like quitting like you can call me a lot of things you cannot call me a quitter i don't quit at anything and and but it would have been easy to say you know routine he shot on some [ __ ] and just got out and you would have been three days of press where it's like oh what happened and your view at that point is the sport's clean so yeah there's no risk to me because i don't need to use anything because no one else is using anything was that kind of your view um that's that was uh the best i could tell yeah i mean i knew i wasn't that so that sort of phase two or phase whatever the comeback years was clean absolutely and ironically ferrari was the one who was adamant he's like they are coming for you and so he was you know we just didn't cross the line so oh nine is kind of close right your third and then ten because it wasn't close i mean it wasn't it wasn't close at all but third i mean meaning you're on the podium yeah yeah um i remember reading an article in the fall of 2009 and i think it was like an espn magazine that was comparing your 09 tour to jordan's comeback his second comeback but the year they didn't win right because remember he came back for the last part of the season in 95 and then they're like well wait till you see lance in 10 because that's going to be the like that's going to be jordan's 96 or whatever it was when they went um so what did you think after 2009 do you ever think you know what i gave this a great go it would be totally respectable to just retire right now you know to be off the sport for three years four years come back be on the podium now i can retire what made you come back and what made you stay back especially when it meant building a new team yeah well that was that was a big part of it i mean being able to not be on a team from kazakhstan literally borat yeah and and build a whole new team i mean that was but at this point lance you're i know 30 you know i'm old i mean i was old and children that was 34 years old when i won yeah like wasn't it getting a bit old in terms of training but again this machine was was rolling like i wasn't going to be the guy to say i'm getting off the wave here like i just but what part of the machine at this point because from a personal wealth standpoint at that point yep you you're going to get those sponsors even if you're not riding aren't you i don't know i mean it it it seems it's like how much of this what i'm trying to get at is how much of this was filling a void that said i don't like sitting around and not being an athlete right but but that's that's not the point the point is i mean i every day of that comeback i was like what the [ __ ] am i doing like it wasn't i had ann and i had this conversation the other night i was like because some somebody asked or came up and i was like god it's like i'm never in l in my life i am never going back to that place where you're looking around going what are you doing like what are you doing you're not gonna win the tour and you're you're not like what the [ __ ] you doing and then as of course as it led you know down all the investigations started and then you're trying to do both you're trying to defend your reputation defend your livelihood defend everything and having to do one of the hardest sports in the world it was i was just like get me out of here when did you realize that you had to tell the truth um i think when i knew that that they they uh either interviewed george or george went to the grand jury i knew that was so fall of 12 basically i don't know it might have been earlier yeah you know what's funny i this is going to sound incredibly naive i actually believed you guys were not on peds at the time so my view was either you all are or you are not right like you know meaning the gc contenders i don't necessarily mean everybody in the race but my view was either all the gc contenders are or they are not and i truly believed that post 98 but you guys were off right um well you were wrong i was absolutely wrong but the moment i realized how wrong i was was not with landis it was actually with tyler landis didn't come across as very believable tyler did and so when did i'm trying i've lost track of time but tyler's book that he wrote with dan coyle did that come out in like 2011 does that sound about right some yeah maybe 2010. yeah yeah it was when i read tyler's book that i was like this guy is way too freaking believable um and if he's saying this and he's saying that this is what they were all doing like i believe it um and then it was kind of a question he had a different version in his deposition in the postal case but oh see i don't i don't know what his deposition said yeah i mean it was it was you know when anybody's deposed and they've written a book i mean that they're just going to read you the book yeah did you say this and did this yeah they just read they go page by page yeah yeah i'm sure and uh you know some of it was he agree he said he said but then if he if it was in any way sort of contradictory towards him or his somebody he cared about then he would blame dan i will never forgive you oh that's right because he had a co-author yeah he said that's a danism he's like wait a minute anyways so it's late yeah it's late 11 or whatever and you're basically like i got to come clean uh yeah 12 11 12 or 12 12 yeah um you've talked about your reasons for doing the interview with oprah which i i think make a lot of sense right which is if you're going to give a deposition you might as well do it on your terms right yeah uh yeah and even that i mean looking back well you can look back all you want right i did what i did i was convinced that it was the right thing to do the lawyers hated it um you know whether it was oprah or or tom brokaw who was my other option it wasn't gonna i wasn't gonna help what was that period like when you went do you think you went to hawaii right after right mm-hmm well i went to we still traveled a lot just to kind of get away and did any of the sponsors call you to quietly thank you for what you had done over the past 15 years no i know they can't publicly but did you know someone at trek say hey lance i hope you understand we've got to dump you like a hot potato but you did turn us into a billion dollar company no no none of that no sponsor in any one of your relationships ever thanked you for the for what you've done um no i mean i mean i think there is a a general i mean ironically i mean use tracks as an example so the answer is no but if you asked mike senyard from specialized he would say thank you because you you raised the title all the ships rose um luke was obviously old enough to know what was going on were the twins they were yeah they were yeah i mean they were young but they were yeah so what was the discussion like with them um you know i i just took a uh my conversation was i i know um basically just an open door policy if you ever if certainly if anything comes up at school but if you ever have any questions about my life and the decisions i've made and or you hear something like the we're not going to have one conversation about this we're going to have as many as you want to have like it is just totally open door and what have they asked you about not very much yeah i mean but they also they're like what are they gonna ask like uh they're gonna ask questions like you're asking because you know the sport so well and you're you know the the good the bad the ugly right they they you know and and and i feel like um we stayed all of us and and you know certainly um a lot of credit to kristin as well i mean we we've stayed very close as a family when i say family i mean you know myself my kids anna and kristen and now anna and ice kids like it's it is if you can imagine that brady bunch set up we are a very close family so after the oprah interview which i guess is early 2013 who was the first person you reached out to apologize to well there was some well i mean actually before the interview was you know i reached out because i knew that it would it would you know they would see it you know so d'andreas lamonde and kathy and greg wouldn't wouldn't take my call have they to this day we did meet up you met with greg and kathy yep how long ago oh god it's been years how did how was that meeting i thought the meeting went um i went better than i thought it would would uh would go their version of the of the media i mean it's that we we don't have enough time in this day to time it was you know i was sincere i said but i i felt like i needed to say they accepted the apology but what about emma emma emma emma and i met up in florida emma's great man she's you know emma's emma's mission all along was not to get me her mission was to try to fix to talk about the sport to fix the sport tell me maybe not everybody listening knows who emma is emma was our swan year was my senior 99 um and left the team and and uh you know you know was a person that i went after um and she got mixed up in this because of the la confidential book she was quoted in it yeah as you said it ended up being really about you but the only reason i my understanding is the reason she agreed to talk with david walsh was really to make a broader statement about how corrupt the sport was yeah and i tell you we've that's that's uh i've enjoyed sort of reforming that friendship and i wrote the forward for her book and uh she's she's a she's a cool lady what about any of your former teammates have you reconnected with tyler i know you have strong feelings about floyd mm-hmm no no i mean it's those are the two names that stick out and the the reality is uh 95 of that former what was known as the blue train we'd still all go i mean we'd go all jump back into war together like we [ __ ] we're like like brothers floyd and tyler they they were never they were never our brothers um and so yeah there won't be any won't be any future dinners you know i remember a while ago your twitter bio um was different than it is now do you remember what it used to say no you don't even know what it says now today it says like i don't know something boring like everybody else's but it used to say um there's a reason the uh the windshield's bigger than the rear view right [Laughter] yeah um i'll tell you i've always found that i don't know who that quote is attributed to i'm sure i'm sure it appears in many formats but i always found it to be very poignant because it's not saying you should only have a windshield and no rear view mirror right and it's not saying you should have no windshield and only a rear view mirror it's saying you need both but one's bigger than the other yeah but in my own life i've always felt like i have to have a rear-view mirror yeah like i i never want to lose sight of my sins right because they kind of ground me of course um when i think of all of the again you've lived you've had the both the luxury and the inconvenience of living all of your sins on the world's most public stage so most of us make all of our mistakes behind closed doors and nobody really gets to see the horrible things we've done i remember when i hit the one-year anniversary of doing something so awful i couldn't stand my existence for it and i remember talking to my therapist about it and she said i actually don't want you to ever forget this like i want you to remember what you did because this is you have to remember that the monster that did that thing he's never going to die right he'll sit in the corner he'll be small but he's never going to die but if you have the tools in place to you can keep them in them in the corner right are there moments that you look back at like do you look at that sca deposition in october of 05 and think like i need that video playing over and over again just quietly yeah it's totally embarrassing i mean a lot of that [ __ ] and and i was forced to to re-watch a ton of that not not not because i wanted to or i thought it would be a good idea but i mean in legal settings and depositions and trials and like they just hammer you with this but it's yeah you look at that and you're like that is that is a pathetic person like that i ain't never going back there and um i mean those sort of things as unfortunate and as embarrassing and as tough as they are to watch they're actually for me they're those are those are good i mean i don't want to do it every day but it's like that guy needed to die right and then and a new guy needed to come around and um yeah that's where you get stuck you know you wouldn't change a thing and all these things that that i would i would say that would you actually i mean you would change things right i mean it would i mean i love the spot that i've been able to get to so you sort of think in your mind like well these were all events that shaped the person sitting here today but there would have been a better way to go about it yeah it's funny i was um watching a video of an interview you did a while ago and i normally don't read comments on youtube because they're so incredibly uninteresting and ridiculous and i don't know why but for some reason i read a couple and and i came across one that i thought was so interesting i actually copied it down i want to read it to you so it was an interview i don't even remember what interview it was but not surprisingly a lot of the comments were like this guy's a horrible human being like you know what a what a ridiculous person oh i know it must have been the interview where you said and you tried to offer a nuanced explanation for why you wish you didn't have to hurt people but you also wouldn't have done it different in the sense that you needed to learn the lessons you learned you remember this interview was on nbc these were all the ones that yeah so not surprisingly every commenter is like ripping you apart of course and this one guy writes something i'm just gonna read to you verbatim and i was i was i was really moved by it he says i was not a good person and it took losing everything to realize it i'm not yet at the point where i would not change a thing but i do get the i can't change a thing so it's useless to feel as much regret and shame as i do i really believe him when he says that he values the lessons he learned because i do too i might not be a good person yet i'm learning but i'm no longer a bad one yeah those are few and far between i mean it takes a lot of you know most yeah i mean it's amazing but you know comment i mean i don't read comments yeah you yeah i just can't mean it and it's and it's you know i used to read comments but i don't i something about the last line of this yeah i might not be a good person yet but i'm no longer a bad one i mean i i remember feeling like when i went through that transition of okay like you're not the worst human in the world um you're not perfect and you're never going to be but um i still don't understand a couple of things about the sport now we could we we could explain all day long why why you ended up where you ended up right everybody will say well it's not you know it went from once it became clear how widespread epo use was in the peloton and blood transfusing all that stuff it became very difficult to say well lance is a bad guy because he did these performance-enhancing drugs because to a first order you did them no more or no less than anybody else so then it turned into well he treated people so badly and that's why lance is the worst person but that doesn't explain to me why you know oh yvonne boso who did everything that pantani did is loved and pantani was completely vilified and i mean effectively killed himself it doesn't explain why well pick your favorite german writer who's loved and and ulrich was rejected yep um why vatters is loved and you know tyler gets rejected or whomever right so so if we take lance out of it for a moment right because you're you know you're radioactive what explains that difference between those other guys because jan wasn't beating anybody up pentane wasn't screaming at anybody no but these yeah i mean they they're they're um yeah and say insane in spain with jiminez all right so you you have a handful of examples here with with characters who were uh had problems so they could not handle you know that the you know this is and i speak i've talked about this before but this nothing looking at the whole situation nothing infuriates me more than that right if you've and it's it's it has more to do with society and the press and just in in the organizers and the politicians in the sport how they will embrace you know the yano rick is not welcome at the start of the tour i mean while eric zobel's up there shaking hands with the the guy in the yellow chair you know it's like wait a minute like this is [ __ ] stupid i i i don't understand you have any idea why that hypocrisy exists um i mean only then you know the ones the ones who rose the highest i mean obviously i mean pantani was the biggest athlete in italy at the time no soccer whatever sport f1 pentane was the biggest athlete in italy john was the biggest athlete in germany i was the biggest athlete here and and you know on and on and so you know maybe it has to do with those heights and the only the only place you can end up is is the complete opposite like just at the bottom of the pool um but it doesn't i don't think it excuses it that that just and and and we're talking about we're not talking about me again but with these stories i mean panthani dead hemona is dead uh you know vandenbrook did belgium um gamonte and france i mean all guys that were at the top of the game and then and they just could they couldn't handle just with their own demons they couldn't handle that fall from grace so they turned to other things and but nobody reached out you know you know in many ways the press just sort of chased that story i mean look at vandenbrook i mean frank vanderbrook was arguably one of the most talented of all time he was the next mercs he was the next and the press just just let it go and just hammered this guy and he you know died in the hotel room in senegal pentani dies at a dirty hotel room in milan almost dies i mean it's like you know when did you realize jan was in trouble i know it was i remember you and i talking about this in the summer of 18 yep you sent me a picture and i'll never forget it i was like that can't be on well you know john was always uh jan has always liked to have fun i mean we talked to you but this didn't look like heaven no no no this is but you know it it um you know i guess uh you know because the other interesting thing is is you know one of yon's closest lieutenants when when we were competing head-to-head was was andreas cloden yes who ended up being on astana with us and radio shack and and so i ended up getting to know cloden and really really getting to love him um so i had heard that a lot of these guys so cloden sabol danilo hondo they had tried to reach out to him and you know and it was in the press he got in a fight with his neighbor like these are no secrets this [ __ ] was out there um [Music] and then uh you know he has he has uh and he but he he turned everybody away and and not just turn them away but just just flat out erase them from his life because he didn't want to hear it but he had two guys frank and mike baldinger so the german brothers from from where he's from they're normal guys like they're not professional cyclists they're not rich they're not famous they're just regular dudes they're good dudes and uh they contacted me and they said we he's told everybody else to to just leave him alone and then he's turned on they said you're our last call like and so and i didn't know these guys and so that's when i made the the trip um to uh was in switzerland german place and that was you know it was a mess yeah what was that like to see him like that unrecognizable he was like an alien had entered his body it was it was i've never i have never i've seen some crazy [ __ ] i have never seen anything like this um but you know john guy's two years sober he's got his kids back in his life he's on the bike it's [ __ ] uh [ __ ] love that guy it is amazing to me how our society some we i again i i can't understand it why we sometimes lift people up and then find such joy in watching them crash yeah we we're not gonna figure that out you know and i i don't i don't spend any time i mean i i get very frustrated and straight up mad when i see you know the the the differences between ulrich and zabal and pentani and baso and on and on and on but you know and and guys that were just not equipped to handle that downfall like it that was the one the man i was the one thing i said to myself i said just whatever you do just do not i mean you can go have fun and do some crazies but don't you ever lose lose contact with your health your wellness your fitness your family like don't ever lose sight of that did you go through a period in 2013 where you were pretty reclusive and so this is meaning right after kind of the whole confession um because you didn't i'm trying to think like when did you start your podcast in 1617 i'd have to go back and look it's been uh like there was a period of time when you were really off the radar yeah i mean no choice radar didn't pick you up either i mean there was no nothing to do what was it like when you walked into a restaurant did people i mean you've told one story a number of times about you know you walking across the street in a bunch of yeah yeah what was what was the normal reaction like perfectly fine indifference yeah just yeah i mean i i people people are and again it goes to this comment thing like i just think about that's why i don't read comments because i walked in my day you know i see guys on the golf course i see people on bike rides i see people in restaurants i see you know i go to meeting like it's it's that is not a a an accurate snapshot of what my life is like at all you know even in 13. so because remember the other thing that was going on at that point in time is the foundation is crumbling right and you're getting kicked out yep and you know you've told me before that that hurt as much as anything else yeah i mean it was it was surreal and and just sad and what did the people at the foundation tell you unofficially not the not the board but the people who worked there the people who were doing the actual heavy lifting well i mean now those folks i have a ton of um regret about because they they were doing the lord's work and they were not privy yeah they weren't decision makers yeah but and they believed the dream they believed the story and so that's and as a byproduct of that you know they in many ways felt uh complicit in in the scheme and so for that it that's that's tough for me to to hear and to and and i'll spend the rest of my days trying to make that okay for them um you know at the at the top you know and i wasn't part of these discussions so i don't know what the board room discussions were like or or or who which consultants were hired or i don't know how it all went down but um and i just knew it was the wrong thing i knew it i knew that that that time out yes space but some agreement here that we will both re-emerge that was the right thing to do i mean and i don't need somebody to sit here and say well you're right like but if i look at where liv strong has ultimately ended up and i look at you know you brought up a pie i mean if i look at my audience now well they're very different yeah and one of them is is not doing very well and the other one's is back so to speak what what interaction do you have these days with a cancer community very little just one just one-on-one just with and and by the way that's fine like i don't you know i don't need to be asked to speak at a gala or get some award or all the stuff i did in the past somebody's got a friend that's just been diagnosed and hey lance can you reach out to him 100 let's go right now um and that's that's enough for me i don't know if you've been asked this question before i'm sure you have um and so i apologize in advance but um when the story's done what do you think your legacy is going to be well you don't do there's um well yeah that that's that's that's harder to what do i think it will be or what do i want it to be because you don't get to write your own no what do you think too early to say too early i mean if if i know what it would have said in you know january of 2013 yeah but you know i don't and i don't i don't like to brag about myself but i gotta say i'm really [ __ ] proud what are you most proud of well i'm i'm proud of the fact that i didn't quit which time because you had a number of times well just just through this whole through the whole thing that that i was able to keep it together and you know without really any support and thank god we live in 2021 20 whatever where you can people can re you can re reinvent yourself on your own you don't need network television you don't need you know the new york times you don't need any of that like what we're doing right here right now you did this on your own you bought the cameras you got the mics you're asking the questions you're the smart guy all the millions of people are listening you did that on your own you couldn't have done that 10 years ago 20 years ago right so that's i've chosen to go that path and and and and i'm proud of that honestly um so who knows what what to to your original question like i i um i'm 50 years old i think i i'll live another 40 or 50 years so there's uh there's a lot left to be told yeah yeah that's that's the amazing part here right yeah and i don't i don't need um i don't i don't i don't need a uh any more puff pieces in my life like you know i i'm i'm really beholden to a few things one my family so that's my that's my the first checkpoint and that's amazing right and then i really feel uh beholden and loyal to the audience of our podcast and then as as a byproduct of the success of the podcast the fund right so the the lp base the people that have entrusted me right that the the guy that the whole world thought could never be trusted again have trusted me with their hard-earned money um i'm beholden to them and so those are all and that's all i care about right so that's and and you know but again i don't need a i don't need to be on the cover of forbes because they're you know it's just i'm totally cool to keep that private um but look i mean also at the end of the day it is going to contain a lot of of the rear view mirror that's just that's just the way but i'm okay with that that's the way society is that's the way legacies are mine especially it will it will mostly be that if you can go back in time to 15 year old lance oh god you've got you've got a you've got a week with him yeah what kind of lessons would you try to impart on him um you know that's because 15 was a an interesting age so uh there would there would have been a lot i mean that was a very yeah you're good enough that you you you know i i picked 50 15 was when my was you're a pro traveler well i was a pro athlete and it was when my mom kicked out terry armstrong okay so i didn't know that was 15. yeah that was 15 so that was that was a point in time where it was her and i against the world like [ __ ] everybody else we're gonna we're gonna get these people like he's gone we're together like let's go and so that was a very important um so the chip on your shoulder which i'm guessing exists subconsciously now became pretty conscious yeah absolutely and that chip on your shoulder did a lot of good for you and obviously a lot of bad for you yeah so do you think that again in this thought experiment right if you had a week to coach that kid could you have figured out a way to extract the value from that complex and soften some of the damage that it was going to ultimately cause you via the damage it would cause to others yeah i mean i i i didn't real nobody i mean 15 year olds don't realize that but but the amount of trauma that that i had already had in my life which you know just got actually worse and worse and worse i mean cancer was hugely dramatic and then the fall was traumatic like there is there is there's a lot to unpack there and so and then you know never meeting your father and having somebody around it was just in never having that that that figure in your life um and the in the figure that was there was wildly defective you know you you've it would have been in and around that you know whether that was through even therapy at the time then you know i mean if i was by the way if if somebody would have come up to me when i was 15 and said you know i feel like you've had some crazy [ __ ] in or 15 years you should just do a little bit once a month i would have said you know what why don't you go [ __ ] yourself i ain't doing therapy for nothing like i embrace that stuff now but um there would have been a lot of work to do even then what could you have told them though like again if he's not willing to go to therapy which i can understand that's a pretty hard sell to a really really cocky 15 year old you know what else can you tell him i'm i'm just or was he too far gone at that point like you know i it's one of the things i've learned about myself over time is that so many of the character traits that were both positive and negative and they tend to go they tend to cluster like right on top of each other right it's like it's like two genes that sit right next to each other in the chromosome one good one bad um a lot of those traits come about long before we're consciously aware of what led to them yeah and um i think your your case is really obvious sometimes like some of those traumas are so obvious right like the dad the step dad the growing up without this the the growing up in a place that [ __ ] like and then of course that says nothing about cancer which i don't know like do you feel you've gone back and unpacked that ptsd through all of those layers now as an adult well i don't know that we can ever any of us can ever unpack it all but i've in the last you know year i've certainly done more unpacking than in the previous 49 yeah yeah like way more you know and that's but uh you know and i should have done i should have started that process a lot earlier um but you know i guess going back to the question though on the you know i was just every you know even then at 15 everything was you know i had drove a fast car and every every green light was a competition and every uh everything was like slow down kid like it was just everything was um everything was a fight not even a competition it was a fight and just but you said it i mean it would have been impossible to get through just like that 15 year old the 25 year old the 35 year old even the 45 vote you would not have gotten through i i i think that's something that very few people can understand i can relate to at lance because i've had my own total total destruction i've i've played the game in my head 100 times god i just wish i could take that all back i wish i could undo all of that stuff but i realized if i were to undo all of that stuff i wouldn't have fallen down right and if i didn't fall down and lose it all right but this is we talked this is when this is this is when you say well i wouldn't change a thing because these series of events happened and boom it caused you know whether it's deep work or introspection or or realignment whatever you want to call it then that would happen like that that's that's just hard to that's a hard answer i mean that answers never worked for me but because you know people but they they analyze so much of the stuff but i mean in many ways it's true yeah so how do you keep fit these days i mean you talked about swimming is that the mainstay of your training no i i i would now we're in the summer so now i get aspen is completely thought out the mountain bike trails are open what's your fastest time at mount evans i've only done mount evans once like in 80 no in 90. i did it in 1990 that's your doorstep no no that's that's not that close it's close to aspen isn't it's like a couple hours away well that's that's not close i don't get in a car to ride my bike that's kind of a rule all right was your fastest time at palomar don't know that was a long time ago do you care anymore do you still care how fast you can ride up the mountain no i i find myself being happier and happier just riding do you use a power meter still nope no heart rate no power meter none of that [ __ ] do you have any idea what your what you would ride up uh madone in today how many watts you could average if we stuck a power meter on you i have no idea like 350 no i doubt i could do that i bet you could you give me you give me a week or two to train i could i could i don't know but it's i i find myself just when i'm out it's like i i i write easier as opposed to harder i mean do you do you enjoy a group ride or do you still enjoy just kind of going out on your own doing a four-hour ride i like it i like being all alone how much on a mountain bike versus road bike mostly mountain bike just because of the risk of cars i like stan and it's been where we live you get out in the mountains on a mountain bike all by yourself come on you running much i haven't run i keep getting hurt running i think i'm too old to run i don't i don't do at this age you know if if i did yoga three days a week or was serious about stretching and pliability and things that i should be thinking about at 50 i could run but my dumb ass is just like put the shoes on don't stretch a bit let's go like that that doesn't work when you're 50. and i mean if if i were to give you what's the tightest interval you'd swim ten one hundreds on what would be your touch and go interval for ten one hundreds uh with sea level yeah so you're on season like if i went right now yeah would you do would you be 105 touch and go no i couldn't do that right now i could do one 110 to 110. i'd i'd be really touching and going at the end but so 115 you could you could bring him in at 110. no problem yeah so you're still a fit guy i'm i'm fitter than most people what's your what's your biggest uh what's the biggest liability to your fitness what's your biggest advice food alcohol what gets in the way of because what do you weigh right now 180 okay so you're 15 pounds above your tour weight which is actually not a lot given most retired cyclists so is that is that a struggle to maintain your weight no i don't try i mean i i i seem to have a balance between consumption and we you whether you're consuming food or alcohol or whatever that's consumption and and and exercise i i never i have to exercise not not because i want to stay a certain weight or yeah you need it for yourself my own sanity like it's the only reason um that's interesting by the way isn't it there are a lot of former pro athletes that i know who once it's no longer their job they just do not want to do it anymore i will do i will ride for as long as this body will allow it to ride absolutely yeah well man it has been it's been great sitting down yeah um been a long time coming i know and i've got an amazing salmon and okra dish waiting oh god did you gotta tell that story right quick you can't tease them out with that this is i'll tell the story i'll tell the story so there's there's and every people that like anna who cooks for me all the time she knows that i just i don't like salmon and like growing up we would eat okra and i just don't like okra so i come over this has been six seven months ago and i walk in i'm like that smells like salmon i'm like hey what's for dinner peter he's like oh god i'm grilling this amazing salmon i was like oh i was on the traeger my special meringue i was like oh okay and then i was like what are we having with it and you're like oh i got some fresh okra and i was like this is couldn't make this isn't this isn't happening this is a [ __ ] joke like somebody's i'm getting punked it's like anna called me to tell me this before and and i was like sitting there just like getting to the meal and we were we had a wonderful time and then i when i don't know why i was but when i was stepping out i was like i was like i have to be honest with you guys like there are two things in this world that i just really can't stand to eat salmon and okra it was but you had a brave face man i wouldn't have known you you put it down as far as salmon and okra go i hope it was good salmon and good okra so we had the japanese whiskey too ah that that that definitely lubricated it all right my friend oh man are you ready to go get your butt kicked in the sim yeah well i wouldn't you don't you don't know that i'm gonna get my butt kicked so it's not fair for you to say that but i'm ready to uh i'm ready to go see what happens okay very well i can drive i'm sure you can but i just think i i'm excited to see this okay good let's do it let's do it thank you for listening to this week's episode of the drive if you're interested in diving deeper into any topics we discuss we've created a membership program that allows us to bring you more in-depth exclusive content without 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Channel: Peter Attia MD

Views: 795,572

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Id: NaGLfau1tRs

Length: 155min 4sec (9304 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021