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Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong. Juliet Macur
Читать онлайн.Название Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007520657
Автор произведения Juliet Macur
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
On the far side of the room is Armstrong’s office, dimly lit, built of dark shades of wood: a spot to brood. Sitting at his desk in a corner, Armstrong has a direct view of his Tour de France trophies—seven deep purple porcelain cups with delicate gold designs—perched high on the wall atop bookshelves, each in its own spotlight, each luminescent.
To the left of his desk is artwork that may speak to his broken relationships with family, friends, lovers, teammates. A sepia-hued photograph by Luis González Palma shows a man and a woman in an embrace, dancing. Or are they really? A second look and I see spikes protruding from their backs. Armstrong would admit only that the piece is gloomy.
And then there is the Jesus art.
To the right of his desk is a seventeenth-century Spanish painting of the crucifixion that takes up nearly the entire wall. Four women pray at the feet of Christ, his head slung and crowned by a glowing gold halo. Years ago, the painting hung inside the chapel Armstrong had built for his ex-wife, a Catholic, inside their home in Girona, Spain. He himself is not a religious man. He says he considers organized religion to be gatherings of hypocrites.
Around the corner from his office, overlooking a stairwell, there is another vision of the crucifixion. The piece’s full effect is apparent only from certain angles, where an image of Christ nailed to the cross comes into view.
“One man has taken the blame for a thousand sins,” Armstrong says. But even in the presence of these crucifixes, he is talking about himself. Like he wants me to write that he has been made a martyr for cycling’s century of dopers and this is the way to make sure I do.
He walks over to a coffee table in his office and picks up a sculpture—an arm from hand to elbow. The sculpture, by Japanese artist Haroshi, is made with many layers of pressed skateboards. The sculpture’s middle finger is sticking up.
“This is pretty much the story of my life,” he says. Then he shoves the sculpture in my face. I notice Armstrong’s hands. On each palm, there is a small wound where he’ll tell me a doctor burned away a couple of cysts. I think of the stigmata.
“Fuck you,” he says, laughing.
Seven years ago, he told his three oldest children from his failed marriage—Luke, Grace and Isabelle—that they would graduate from high school while living in the house by the big oak tree. He owed them that. They had followed him from Texas to France to Spain countless times. At last they could plant some roots. “I promise,” he said. “Dad’s not moving again.” They would live six minutes from their mother, Kristin, and could count on the familiarities of the giant kitchen table surrounded by black-and-white photos of their family. They knew where Dad would be on most weeknights—on a couch in front of the TV, watching CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360°. In the summer of 2012, Armstrong built an addition onto the first floor so his growing family would have a seventh bedroom. Already, the house was his headquarters. He lived there with his girlfriend, the willowy blonde Anna Hansen, and their two children, four-year-old Max and two-year-old Olivia, a Shirley Temple lookalike. Armstrong and his clan had planned to stay here, safe and happy, for a long time.
But now the movers are coming. It’s June 6, 2013, five years before Luke’s expected graduation. In the morning, a line of black trucks will pull into his driveway and out will spill workers in black short-sleeved shirts. Already, the atmosphere is funereal. The movers have already emptied out the 1,633-square-foot guesthouse, a mini-mansion, with its matching tan façade and burnt orange roof.
On June 7, I return to see those workers clear the main house. They take Armstrong’s Tour trophies from their illuminated shelves, cover them with green bubble wrap and place them in blue boxes. In a moving box marked #64, one mover places a silver frame containing a 5×7 photograph of Armstrong’s 2005 Discovery Channel team sitting at a dinner table after his seventh and final Tour victory. He, his teammates and longtime team manager Johan Bruyneel are holding up seven fingers. A yellow rubber Livestrong bracelet hangs from each man’s wrist. A table is littered with half-empty wineglasses. A former life.
Box #64 goes onto the truck with the rest. I follow the movers into the media room. Wearing white cotton gloves, they take down the seven yellow Tour leader’s jerseys framed above the couch. The day before, as Armstrong and I sat in this room, he had an idea. He asked if I wanted to lie on the couch, if I wanted to pose for a photograph under the jerseys that were still left.
“It’ll be funny,” he said.
I didn’t get the joke.
In the dark before dawn, Armstrong left the big house for good. At 4:15 a.m. on June 7, 2013, with Hansen and his five children, he drove to Austin/Bergstrom International Airport for a commercial flight to the Big Island in Hawaii, where they would remain for the first part of the summer.
Armstrong tells me he didn’t look back at the house he had built. He says sentiment has never been his thing. The move means only that part of his life has ended and another will begin. That’s all it is, he says. Maybe he believes the words coming out of his mouth. Maybe he doesn’t.
Several days later, only two of his possessions remained on his estate. One couldn’t fit in the moving truck: a 1970 black Pontiac GTO convertible given him by the singer Sheryl Crow, with whom he had a very public romance that ended when he pedaled away just before she got cancer. The car, with its evocations of another Armstrong failure, carries a price tag of $70,000.
And, finally, left over in the living room of the guesthouse was a fully assembled drum kit. Just another piece of the man’s discarded life. Oh beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly, I thought while I looked at the set, words of a song I know from my time working in Texas,
Take me to the valley, and lay the sod o’er me,
For I’m a young cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong.
Lance Armstrong’s mother, Linda, is always the hero of her own story. As she tells it, the two of them—she and Lance—struggled to survive in Dallas’s Oak Cliff neighborhood in the hardscrabble projects on the wrong side of the Trinity River. They had only each other. The boy never met his father; she raised him alone. She said she taught him to ride a bike, encouraged him as an athlete, paid for his equipment, bought their home, traveled to all his races, secured his sponsorships and was out the door with him at 7 a.m. every Saturday so he could administer a beating to yet another set of, say, prepubescent middle-distance runners.
In her autobiography, No Mountain High Enough: Raising Lance, Raising Me, she revels in the constant question, “How did a single teenage mom manage to raise a real live superhero?” In the author’s note, before the story unfolds, she warns of her “totally biased, subjective, slanted, rationalized, and confabulated” account. She even says, “Someone else might have a different perspective.” She dared those people to write their own book.
She used pseudonyms for her three ex-husbands: Eddie Gunderson, Terry Armstrong and John Walling. She calls Lance’s father “Eddie Haskell” after the sweet, conniving character in the 1950–’60s television show Leave It to Beaver. The Gundersons were Lance Armstrong’s first family. Eddie Gunderson and Linda Mooneyham married while they were in high school. The baby came seven months later.
The shotgun wedding united two troubled families. Both of Armstrong’s grandfathers had been heavy drinkers whose wives fled with their children after