“Ride of the Valkyries” blared from the loudspeaker. A helicopter hovered a hundred feet overhead, its low thunka-thunka echoing off the side of Brasstown Bald. The pavement baked under a 90-degree Georgia sun. The crowd simmered with anticipation.
“Two hundred meters to go!” cried the announcer.
I jockeyed with the other photographers for a clear shot. I would never get this chance again: front row center at the finish line, stage six, the second annual Dodge Tour de Georgia. Within the minute, the world’s greatest living athlete would grace my presence. The five-time winner of the Tour de France. The man Time had recently named one of the world’s 100 most influential people. One of those people who only needs to go by one name: Lance.
The checkered flag waved. Security pushed us aside to make way for the pace car. It whipped around the corner. A woman in a pink tank top and mirrored shades thrust her head and shoulders out the back of the car. Was that Sheryl Crow? No time to wonder. Here came Lance.
The roar of the crowd went up. The first biker crossed the finish line. We snapped away. I couldn’t hear the announcer above the cheers. Lance? No, wrong jersey. And Lance isn’t South American.
The next two riders crossed the line. A yellow jersey. A red-and-white jersey. Is that. . .? It doesn’t look like. . . . Where’s the red, white, and blue Postal Service shirt? In the din, I don’t know who I just saw. And then they’re gone.
More riders came across. The photographers started to thin out. What did I miss? My heart sank. Oh great. I climbed all the way to the top of the highest mountain in Georgia to see just one person, and I missed him. Every time I go to the Post Office I see Lance’s picture. And now I didn’t even recognize him.
For a modern athlete, Lance Armstrong earns a unique kind of reverence among fans. Barry Bonds is a great ballplayer, but no one will ever talk about him in the same hushed tones they reserve for Willie Mays. Kids love Shaq, but he’s no Wilt. Lance’s appeal hearkens back to the golden age of American sports. Like those other late greats, he has fundamentally changed the paradigm of his sport. Not just cyclists but all athletes now must measure their own accomplishments against what Lance has achieved. Plus, with his triumphant battle against cancer and his unprecedented comeback, he’s got a great backstory. Bret Favre, Mariano Rivera, Kobie Bryant, David Beckham: all great at what they do. But among athletes in their prime today, only Lance’s greatness will survive to attain the status of myth.
The unique sizzle of Lance’s charisma electrified the air along the three-and-a-half-mile climb to the finish line at the summit of Brasstown Bald. I had planned to take the shuttle van race organizers had provided to ferry fans to the top of the mountain, but with only about ten people between me and the van, the door slammed shut and a green-shirted Forest Service officer told us that that would be the last shuttle of the day.
“The top of the mountain is full,” he pitilessly announced.
But such is the pull of Lance that the hundred or so folks still waiting in line didn’t just plop down in the grass in despair. Instead we started walking—a 1500-foot climb under the Georgia noonday sun.
“It was hard to drive to the top,” said Paige Price of Atlanta. Yet she and her friend, Julie Gibbons, kept walking.
Price and Gibbons had followed the race since it started four days earlier. They said Lance’s crowd skills left something to be desired. Crowd skills or no, the “Lance Fan” signs printed on yellow cardboard fans waving everywhere and the “Go Lance” exhortations spray-painted on the road every hundred yards or so left little doubt about who race fans from New York to Florida had come to this remote pocket of the Blue Ridge to see.
Not to say that defending champion Chris Horner didn’t have his cheering section. Or the Italian great Cippolini. Cesar Grajales, a 30-year-old rider from Colombia who bikes for the Jittery Joe’s team out of Athens, Ga., actually won the stage and shared the podium with Lance.
But only one man kept me trudging up that mountain in my sweat-soaked Carhartts. Does that make me a whore for celebrity? I don’t know. If it does, then between me and the thousands of other fans making their sweaty pilgrimage to the top of Brasstown Bald that day, I was in the best little whorehouse in Georgia.
After the winning riders had finished, I followed the press herd into a little theater in the Brasstown Bald visitor’s center, the kind of place the Forest Service usually uses to show achingly wholesome movies about the natural wonders of the southern Appalachians.
I’d gathered from the murmurings of other reporters that Lance had taken third in the stage. I scrolled back through the photos on my digital camera. The yellow jersey—of course! Because Lance was the overall leader of the Tour after the previous five stages.
But I didn’t even have time to smack myself in the head, because at that moment the man himself came striding up the center aisle. It felt anticlimactic. Neither tall nor broad, he wore a little cyclist’s flip-up cap that made his face seem long and narrow. A legend in his own time though he is, at that moment he looked like anybody else would who’d just ridden 128 miles through some of the steepest terrain in these mountains: He looked beat.
I asked him how it felt to be back in the Blue Ridge. (In his first book, Lance writes at length about how he became inspired while training around Boone to pursue his comeback).
“It’s not a fair question right now ‘cause I really suffered,” he said. Then his expression grew thoughtful. He talked about how the hills are different here than in Europe because of how the roads were built (steeper). He described riding over the bridges across north Georgia’s many lakes that day and seeing “people out on those boats drinking cold beer.”
For a moment I could see a look of longing in the eyes of a man who when he trains literally weighs every ounce of food he eats to ensure he neither puts on extra weight or consumes too few calories.
“This is really an amazing area.”
After the press conference, things got weird. Lance left the room to head to the VIP area that had been set up in the main visitor’s center building, the place with the taxidermy black bear diorama and the life-sized Forest Service audio-animatronic dummy (think the Hall of Presidents at Disney World) explaining sustainable forestry practices.
Though it was only about ten yards from one building to the other, Lance got mobbed like a rock star before he could even take five steps. Someone in a Smoky the Bear costume muscled in for pictures with Lance. Kids and parents alike waved pens, jerseys, race programs, anything you could write an autograph on, yelling “Lance! Lance!”
Amid the crush of bodies, you could feel fandom cross the line from adoration into ugliness. We clearly hoped for something more than human from a man who up to that point had existed for most of us only in that immortal realm of television and glossy magazines. Now we found ourselves mere feet from becoming incorporated into that magic circle of celebrity, a shinier place where money, beauty, security, and most of all attention come with the price of admission. All we needed was that autograph, that handshake, and we’d have our ticket. We’d have Lance’s blessing, the laying on of hands. And since we’d gotten this close, we weren’t above trampling our neighbor to get it. Besides, we’d come all the way up here just for him. Didn’t he owe us?
Security ultimately fended us off. The door slammed, and the mass delusion subsided, at least temporarily. It started up again when Lance came down for the awards ceremony at the finish. It turned out that the woman in the pace car had indeed been Sheryl Crow, the rock star, Lance’s current girlfriend. She stood beside him, and the crowd shouted her name, too.
After Lance re-donned his yellow jersey and threw his flowers to the crowd, he and Sheryl made for the exit. The crowd squeezed in again, more voracious than the last time. Lance and Sheryl both signed autographs as best as anyone might do when surrounded by hundreds of people who seem ready to eat you alive. In the distance, the blades of a helicopter whirred. The two climbed on board and quickly rose up above us all, back into that otherworldly realm of entourages and endorsements, where whatever you do prints money just because you’re you.
Afterwards, I went up to the observation deck on top of the visitor’s center to try to regain my sense of proportion. I looked out at the Blue Ridge—you could just about see from Springer all the way to Clingman’s—and thought sentimental thoughts about how honesty, hard work, good manners, and an easy laugh are the measure of a person in these mountains, not fortune and certainly not fame.
I trudged back down the summit on a rhododendron-lined trail. Two German journalists in front of me joked and smoked. Two ladies in a monstrous S.U.V. offered me a ride down the mountain, but we sat in traffic for an hour before we moved an inch. Apparently a car had hit a pedestrian somewhere up ahead.
As we sat, the sun began to set. The mountains always look beautiful in spring.
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