Every Second Counts

"[Editor’s note, this interview was published in 2011 before the Lance Armstrong doping scandal] Every Second Counts is his second book. The first was about his cancer. In a sense this one, although it’s his story and very personal, it is also about the team building. Because it describes how he took himself, post-cancer, having already won the Tour de France once by then, how he then built himself and the team around him. Most people would just see him and say, ‘Oh yeah, there’s Lance Armstrong on a bike and he cycles faster than the rest of them.’ But around that there is an extraordinary team thing going on. The second book obviously also relates to his life – he’s been through cancer, it’s about his family, his making the most of it – you know Every Second Counts means you want to live longer. It also relates obviously to on the bike – the Tour de France is usually won by a just a very short time even though there has been a month and hundreds of hours on the bike. But it is also about the attention to detail. I have got to know him a bit because I’ve interviewed him a few times and he is an extraordinary bloke: he has got this absolutely driven thing that you need to win in the modern age. He said to me when I interviewed him the first time: ‘Dying and losing are the same thing.’ Now he has lost since then, he’s lost the Tour de France. But back then I think I saw him when he was about to win his fifth, and I think he really meant that, that he was so obsessed with it, that the will to live that he had when he had cancer was easily matched by the will to win that he had. There’s a lot about the drugs in there too. It’s co-written, which is annoying, but I’ll forgive him that. Having met him, the book gives you a real sense of why he is like he is and why that makes him special, but then around him he has this whole satellite of people and organisation that make up his team. I think understanding that is important even in a great individual sport with a great individual. The Bodyline book is a story about leadership in a team sport and Lance’s book is about a great individual in a sport that is, although not obviously a team sport, also about the team. Again, there are lessons from it for other works of life. I can remember in some of the campaigns or in some of the crises we had having a feeling deep, deep, deep in the pit of your stomach that said, ‘We have to do something about this. This is critical.’ And there is a link there to the basic will to live – a combination of fear, hope, power, impotence, it’s all in there. But I can remember, often in the key moments when we would suddenly crank through the gears and get into a different level of operation, it was when we felt fear. Yes, but the leaders will be the ones who felt it deepest and used it to act most. If you go through my diaries it is interesting the number of times both in campaigns and in crises in government, there is a moment when the key people are all feeling this thing in their gut – it’s not panic, but they are all feeling this thing, and it’s really powerful and really strong and you have to make change to deal with it or you go under. So I get that, that losing is like dying. I think that sometimes fear of losing, fear of defeat, whether in sport, in politics, in business, is what forces you to go really deep into yourself and find the reserves that you need. In a boxing match, sometimes you can see where the guy who is losing summons up reserves of energy and skill and power, and he overturns the other. “I think that sometimes fear of losing, fear of defeat, whether in sport, in politics, in business, is what forces you to go really deep into yourself and find the reserves that you need.” It doesn’t always happen but it happens quite a lot. And that then is about a stronger mentality. A lot of them have – cyclists have notoriously low pulse rates, for example. But in Every Second Counts it’s that they analyse everything, there is no detail so small that it’s not worth studying whether you can change it slightly to improve performance. And the thing about the cancer is that it made him more conscious of the limitations of his body but it also made him conscious, because he recovered, of the power of the human body. The other thing that he said in my interview was that the reason he wins is because he can endure more pain than the others. When you see those guys going flat out for 12 hours…they are pretty amazing."