The Q Factor

Strange people, bike riders. They imagine a racing bike is made for going quickly. They're wrong. A racing bike is made solely for winning races.

 --Jacques Anquetil, five-time Tour de France winner

Fittingly, every Tour de France contender constructs his race schedule around July, resolutely insisting that every pre-Tour race is strictly for training. This is manifestly untrue. The link between Tour potential and pre-Tour performance, while subtle, is substantial. To claim that the pre-Tour races are merely training for the Tour is akin to a baseball team claiming that the regular-season and playoffs are merely training for the World Series. In fact, all the contenders are shadowboxing; scouting each other all the time, either playing head games or ignoring head games, which is of course another level of head game. But the strictly-for-training fiction serves riders' purposes, so they stick to the story with the numbing tenacity of presidential candidates.

Today, however, was a day whose importance no one can deny. It was March 3, the first significant gathering of Tour contenders at the Tour of Murcia, a week-long stage race in eastern Spain. Armstrong, Ullrich, and Mayo have come to these sunbleached plains to begin their seasons in earnest. On the morning before the race, they take the first steps toward Paris by engaging in the age-old and indispensible early-season ritual of their profession: the belly pinch and the ass check.

The belly pinch usually comes first, and it is often employed under the guise of a handshake delivered by a rival, a teammate, or often a coach. The preferred technique is to smile broadly—hey there,  you old so and so—grasp their hand and tug the subject forward in a teasing manner, twisting their bodies slightly to grant access to their unprotected midsection, on the side, just above the waistline. The French are particularly known for their vigorousness of technique; on encountering Gallic teams, several American cyclists reported finding their midsections covered in red marks, as if they'd been attacked by a pack of lobsters.

The ass-check is a more unobtrusive art. It is practiced from a distance, and requires not only a keen eye but also experience. An ass, properly examined, is one of the best available calibrations of potential. Ass-checking is not a pastime, it is part of the race; as sure a measure of a rival's ability as timing a baseball pitchers' warmup with a radar gun. When most riders reach top form, their asses become small and vaguely feminine, as if grafted from a disciplined teenage gymnast.

"It's not written down, but it may as well be," says former Postal rider and OLN commentator Frankie Andreu. "After a while, you get everybody memorized, what's big for them, what's small for them, what they look like when they're going to tear it up."

"First, you have to know the guy. You have to know the ass," Bruyneel said. "After you know it, it tells as much as (powermeter) numbers."

With the possible exception of supermodels, is there a more body-discerning group on the planet than professional bike racers? Their vocabulary has as many words for "fat" as Eskimos have for "snow": puppy fat, chicken skin, baby fat, cheese, despite the fact that none of them is remotely fat (in fact, 10 percent of men and 30 percent of professional women cyclists are estimated to suffer eating disorders, according to Dr. Arnaud Megret of the French Cycling Federation.)

But the obsession is bent toward strategic purpose, because within the society of riders, fat is not fat, nor is an ass merely an ass—it is time. It's a simple idea: the more you weigh, the slower you go uphill. An extra ounce here or there sounds meaningless, but it can make a huge difference, especially on a long climb. Of course, trainers like Ferrari have figured it out: each kilogram (2.2 pounds) adds about 1.25 percent to a riders' time on a climb. On a typical eight-mile climb, that works out to just over a second per additional ounce.

"Losing weight is the single most important thing you can do," Armstrong said. "You have to train. You have to be strong, of course. But if you're too heavy, it's all over."

At this particular moment in eastern Spain, the peloton was pinching and eyeing one another with carefully disguised abandon. They were gathered on the street in loose circles by nationality, clutching plastic cups of espresso, eyes quick behind sunglasses. There, pixielike in the corner with the Italians, stood Damiano Cunego, the promising 22-year-old Italian. There was Spanish phenom Alejandro Valverde, who'd finished third in the 2003 Vuelta Espana and had been widely consecrated as a future Tour winner. There was Eric Zabel, the elegant German veteran. There, skinny-assed and relaxed, stood Iban Mayo, chatting in indecipherable Basque. Armstrong was nowhere to be seen—according to custom, he'd signed in early and retreated to the team bus, to avoid the crowd. But what of the ass everybody wanted to see? What of Ullrich? The clock ticked forward: Five minutes to go before the start. Four minutes. The crowd, which included a sizeable contingent of Germany's sporting press, shifted anxiously.

With two minutes to go before the start, a T-Mobile sedan pulled up, the door swung open, and out stepped Der Jan himself, striding purposefully toward the stage in his pink racing kit, hat pulled low.  

The crowd pressed forward, craning its collective neck. It saw the slightly rounded face, the giant Duran Duran sunglasses, the hoop earring, the muscular thighs heaving beneath black Lycra, the gently amused smile. It was all there, along with—yes—a big ass. Not the biggest anyone had ever seen, no, that would have to be 2000, when he showed up 25 pounds overweight. No, the 04 vintage was looking decidedly mid-range. Not huge. But not small either. Depending on how you looked at it, he was either a little bit fat, or a little bit more powerful.

Then, as their eyes roved eagerly over the rest of his body, the lookers saw something else. Ullrich appeared to be walking stiffly, his abdomen unnaturally rigid beneath an arch of rib. It was a subtle adjustment which would not have garnered any attention, except for the fact that dozens of eyes were staring at that precise spot, a spot which, as he strode to sign in, revealed the truth: Ullrich was holding his belly in. Not just a little, either. He was hoovering that baby, sucking his bellybutton spineward, expanding his upper chest in the ageless, hopeless Charles-Atlas-wannabe manner of suburban dads at the beach. Reporters scribbled; photographers fumbled for zoom lenses as the old Ullrich equation began to crystallize: Ass plus belly equalled Jan was big again.

In the days afterward, Ullrich and his cortege would go to some lengths to enlighten the media on the subtle yet vital distinction between being big and being powerful. The training he had done had added some muscle, yes. But not fat. This subtlety was apparently lost on the marketing department for team sponsor Giant bicycles, which postponed a planned photo shoot until such time as their star could look a little less, well, fat.

Ullrich took his place in the rear of the start area amid the mostly Spanish riders, standing out like a bull in a pen of greyhounds. Armstrong (whose ass, while not near its Tour conformation, was looking pretty standard for this time of year, everyone agreed) emerged from his bus and proceeded directly to the front row of riders. Then the photographers alertly spotted Ullrich and started baying for him to come up front so they could get the money shot: Armstrong and Ullrich, the two rivals together.

"Jan! Jan!" the photogs screamed, and after pretending not to hear them for a moment Ullrich gave a resigned smile and began to pick his way up to the front, parting a mentholated sea of skinny bodies. Wheeling his bike, Ullrich moved in the manner of a businessman on a crowded train—pardon me, excuse me, sorry about that. Armstrong turned to watch. Ullrich might have been embarrassed, but he did not show it one iota. He smiled that gently amused smile behind his sunglasses. Armstrong, meanwhile, adjusted his helmet, checked his earpiece radio, adjusted his sleeve. As Ullrich approached, Armstrong exchanged a word with Valverde, who stood to Armstrong's left

The photographers readied themselves. When Ullrich finally arrived next to Valverde, he smiled and stuck his hand out toward the American—except that Armstrong didn't seem to notice, still engrossed in conversation with Valverde—so engrossed, in fact, that he seemingly failed to notice the large man dressed in pink standing six inches further away. An awkward second or two passed, Ullrich smiled patiently and waited, hanging in the breeze. The photographers waited. Then Armstrong looked up—hey, who's there?

"Hey, Jan!" he said, flashing his big-weekend grin.

"Hullo, Lance," Ullrich said

Ullrich nodded his head slightly, his smile remaining fixed. It's the German's answer to Lance's squint, a look of pleasant impassiveness, letting us know that this—all this, the gamesmanship with the handshake—didn't bother him in the least.

The handshake lasted about two seconds before it was broken up by a highly excited red-faced man: Maximo, the race director. Maximo was nervous because the race should start.

"VENGA VENGA VENGA!" Maximo screamed, and the photographers yowled in protest. They hadn't gotten their shot yet! But Maximo was insistent—the race shall begin on time—and so he stepped in and purposely blocked the shot, sending the photographers into operatic paroxysms of rage. Ullrich looked around nervously—what to do? Armstrong surveyed the chaos and raised his palm. 

"TREINTE SEGUNDOS!" he announced. At the sound of his voice, Maximo turned.

"Treinte segundos," Armstrong repeated, with a smile of perfect American cool. It worked. Maximo stepped back and simmered down. Armstrong reached over and grasped Ullrich's hand again, and the photographers snapped the image that would go around the world, of Lance smiling confidently—he's got all the time in the world!--and Ullrich (who's fat again!) smiling a tad uneasily, with Valverde back one step and in between, his eyes shifting between two Tour-winning asses as if he were watching a tennis match.

The Tour of Murcia's opening stage followed a similar pattern. Armstrong asserted, Ullrich impassively went his own way. At kilometer 90, when the race reached its first climbs, Armstrong and Bruyneel had Postal push the pace, leaving Ullrich behind
as the peloton passed a golf resort.

Copyright 2005, Daniel Coyle from Lance Armstrong's War
Reprinted with  permission from HarperCollins

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