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Meanwhile, Kik was experiencing her own drama.Tylerfinally got through to her and explained what had
happened, but she couldn t hear well enough to make out the name of the village closest to us. The phone
connection started breaking up. Kik heard,  We re in (crackling noise), a place called (crackling noise).
Then the phone went dead.
Kik opened a map and stared at the tiny printed names of villages, trying to find one that sounded sort of
like what she had heard. Finally, she saw it, and jabbed a pen at it.
She grabbed her keys and raced to a taxi stand, and found a driver we d gotten to know, and asked if
he would show her the way. He jumped in his car, and they took off, winding through the mountains.
Finally, after about an hour and a half, they found us.
We were still sitting by the side of the road when Kik pulled up. She did a good job of seeming calm as
she surveyed the wreckage, and loaded me and the remnants of my bike into the car.
As we drove down the mountain she asked,  Where does it hurt? I said,  Right where my back meets
my neck.
Kik drove me straight to a local hospital for anX ray but it didn t show anything.  It s just strained,
the doctor told me. I said to Kik,  That can t be right, but I went home and took some aspirin and
waited for the pain to go away. Instead it got worse.
I went to a chiropractor, thinking maybe my back was out of alignment, but as soon as he touched me it
felt like my spine was breaking in half. As I lay on the table, I began to cry. I couldn t remember the last
time I d cried because something hurt I must have been a boy. That did it; I went back to a hospital,
this time a modern clinic inMonaco, for a CT scan.
The doctor said,  You ve got a big problem here. There on the screen was an unmistakable crack, and
he explained that I d fractured the C-7 vertebra of my spine, the link between my back and my neck.
 What s that mean? I said.
 Your neck is broken.
I had no trouble believing it, after all that pain. I asked what it meant for my cycling. I explained that I
planned to ride in the 2000 Olympics and was about to start my most important training. How long
would I be off the bike? Would I be able to ride inSydney?
The doctor looked at me skeptically.  You better think long and hard about that, he said.  I wouldn t
advise it. You just won the Tour, what do you need the Olympics for? And if you fall on this injury again,
it could be devastating.
He explained the risks: it might be weeks before I regained range of motion in my neck and was able to
fully turn my head. Without peripheral vision, all kinds of crashes could occur. It would be a day-to-day
thing whether I d be healthy enough to train, and even then, he didn t think I should risk it. I told him I d
consider what he d said, and went home to rest.
I had a decision to make. To me, it wasn t a hard one: if I could ride, I was going. Crashes were
unavoidable in cycling, and so was bad luck, and if you worried about falling off the bike, you d never get
on. I simply couldn t pass up the Olympics; they were too meaningful. I could win sixTours, and yet if I
lost the Olympic gold medal, people would say,  What s wrong with this guy? I thought he was
supposed to be a good cyclist.
They were personally meaningful, too. So far, the Olympics represented nothing but failure and loss to
me, and I wanted to change that. I hadn t competed well in them in two tries.
I rode miserably as an inexperienced hothead in the 1992 Barcelona Games. I d gone into the Atlanta
Games in 1996 as an American favorite, but I rode disappointingly and finished out of the medals again,
6th in the time trial and 12th in the road race. It felt like I was dragging a manhole cover. I assumed it
was the result of nerves, or because I hadn t trained right, but shortly afterward I was diagnosed: it
turned out I d ridden with a dozen lung tumors. Cancer had cheated me out of a chance to win an
Olympic medal on native soil.
There was an additional motive for going toSydney. The Games would end on October 2, an important
anniversary, four years to the day after the initial cancer diagnosis. To be at the Olympics on that day
would be another way to kick the disease. Also, the coach of theU.S.team was my close friend Jim
Ochowicz, who had sat at my bedside during all of my hospital stays and chemo treatments. It was Jim
who, early in my career, shaped me into a champion cyclist, and he was also Luke s godfather. I wanted [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]