George Hincapie - The Loyal Lieutenant: Leading Out Lance and Pushing Through the Pain on the Rocky Road to Paris

To my mom and dad. For the endless supportI can only hope to be as good as a parent to my children as you have been to me.

To Melanie, Julia, Enzo, and baby on the way. You are my raison dtreI love you each more than words can say.

GH

To my wife, Jennifer, who usually makes me laugh and always dares me to dream.

CH

CONTENTS

I SET OUT TO write a story with a man who just happened to be a cyclist.

George is many things to many peopleson, sibling, friend, teammate, rival, cheater, mentor, and hero. The last moniker is the tricky onerarely can heroes live up to the hype. Their status is a projection of perfection, which for 99.99 percent of athletes is an unattainable illusion, created by a fan base that chooses to be blind to the faults that make ANY hero, at his or her core, human.

What made George such a great subject of study for me was that his passion for everything he does is matched by his fans fervor. His unique path through the labyrinth of life provides a motivational, and at times cautionary, tale of what can be attained through dedication, through an almost surreal singular focus.

We now know that George, like so many other cyclists of his generation, succumbed to the temptation of performance-enhancing drugs. Some people who read this book will be unable to look past that transgression. But what I would hope, and what George and I have tried in these pages to show, is that Georges story is much more than that decision.

The sum of any of us is more than just one event, one choice, one path. George has ridden on many roads, and as divergent, varied, smooth, or troublesome as they have been, they have all led here. In that sense, hes no different than you, the reader.

For all of us, each moment is a chance for greatness.

BY LANCE ARMSTRONG

GEORGE AND I GO back a long way: weve been friends for over twenty-five years now. Domestique was a word thrown around cycling a lot, referring to someone who operated as a helper or worker. I dont even know how much that term is really used anymore in cycling, but I do know it should never be used to describe George Hincapie. He was always so much more than that. George was always capable of being a champion in any race he entered. In the tours we raced together, George put all personal ambition aside in the interest of the team. He was always the most consistent ally, dependable teammate, and loyal friend you could ever have. It wasnt in his character to ever flinch or budge an inch on that. Im proud that hes been one of my closest friends for twenty-five years. George was a little bit like cyclings answer to Scottie Pippen. Like Pippen in basketball, while George may always be remembered in a supporting role on championship teams, everyone in his sport knew he was one of the best men in history to ever compete.

The first time we met, George and I were just kids training at the Olympic Training Center. He was fifteen, while my seventeenth birthday was just around the corner. Before I even had a chance to meet George, Id heard about him. Back then there were weekly and monthly cycling magazines out therepretty primitive little things that came in the mailand George was already being written about with a buzz around him. He was living outside New York City and they had these weekly races inside Central Park where George made a name for himself kicking everybodys ass. He had heard of me and I had heard of him. I saw this huge goofy kid with even bigger hair after I showed up from Plano, Texas, driving my IROC-Z with my bike on top. We immediately hit it off. Looking back, that was unusual for me. At that time, being the punk sixteen-year-old kid that I was, whenever I heard about another young, hotshot kid to look out for, I usually didnt warm to them all that quickly. I was already feuding with a few other hotshots. But something about George was different, not only for me but for everybody. He puts you at ease. We went from that Olympic Training Center to the Olympic team and then basically spent our entire professional careers together. I turned pro a little earlier and went to Motorola, and when he was available we recruited him to come to Motorola. I won the world championships in 1993 and he turned pro in 1994. We spent all the next few years together. We really got to know each other living in Como, Italy, with the rest of the team.

And then, of course, you cant not talk about that decision that we were all forced to make, when the majority of the peloton was in the process of going from low-octane to high-octane doping. There it was. When we as a group made that decision to play ball, George and I, along with the others on the team, crossed over that threshold together. But none of those kids who threw their legs over those bikes and made that decision were savages or robots or machines; all of us made that decision as human beings. Drugs were so prevalent in that era that the decision itself, as our team saw it, was either play ball with everyone else or go home. And now the world knows what George and I chose and we have to live with the consequences for the rest of our lives.

I got my diagnosis in the fall of 1996. Up until then, competition for me had always been about winning or losing, but suddenly it was about survival or death. Motorola went away that same year. George switched over to the U.S. Postal team in 1997. I took that year off to focus on my health and recovery, but George continued to be a constant force in my life and a great friend to me through that difficult time. I reunited with George on the Postal team in 1998 after I decided to return to racing. That year was a mixed bag for me, and I wasnt entirely sure I was even ready to race again. George and I werent racing much together that year. After a couple races, one day I was getting my ass kicked in some frigid crosswinds and found myself thinking, What the fuck am I doing here? I pulled off to the side of the road, got in the team car, went back to the hotel, and told everybody I was going home. It was a hard time, but I ended up getting my shit together and finishing the season. I decided to race the 1999 season, which was where George and I were truly reunited. We won the tour seven times after that year.

The last two years for George and me have obviously been the most difficult, with everything thats happened and gone on around us. Nothing ever tested our friendship like whats gone on for both of us over that time. I wasnt sure we would get it back, but Im very fortunate that we did and that George is still a very close friend of mine. We talk weekly, do fund-raisers together, ride our bikes together, and talk about our children. He makes fun of my newfound passion for golf as much as I make fun of his newfound passion for tennis.

A big problem with me is that Ive always taken things too far. It helped me immensely on the bike and it badly hurt me off the bike. After I was diagnosed with cancer, competition for me literally became existential. I take responsibility for my mistakes. I realize them now, but I didnt then. For too long I viewed any confrontation in cycling as an attempt to steal my yellow jersey. Bottom line: I could have used a lot more of George Hincapies DNA at that time.

Im sure this book was not easy for George to write. George, unlike some, has never looked for attention or to cash in. George was always content being George Hincapie, a great friend and teammate, veteran of the most tours ever ridden and finished, a good husband and loving father of two (soon to be three) children, living a quiet life in Greenville, South Carolina. Im aware there have been a lot of attempts to explore the time George and I shared together, to examine my own story, and to get to the bottom of what did and didnt happen during that period. There have been a lot of attempts at that. One man was there for all of it and knows the story better than anyone. That man was the best teammate I ever knew. That man is George Hincapie.