by Marcus Wohlsen

“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-trés Apocalypse Now. The pavement baked under a 90-degree Georgia sun. The crowd simmered with anticipation.

“Two hundred meters to go!” the announcer cried.

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 need 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, Lance’s team jersey?

More riders came across. The photographers started to thin out. My heart sank.

I had 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 went to the Post Office I saw Lance’s picture on the wall. And now I didn’t even recognize him.

Among modern athletes, Lance Armstrong enjoys a unique kind of reverence. His appeal hearkens back to the golden age of American sports. 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. Out of all the superstars in their prime today, only Lance will enter the pantheon of the mythically great.

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 ride in the shuttle race organizers had provided to ferry fans to the top of the mountain, but with only about ten people between me and a seat in 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 said without pity. But such is the pull of Lance that the hundred or so of us folks still waiting in line didn’t just sit down in the grass in despair. Instead we started walking-a 1500-foot climb under the Georgia noonday sun.

Some spectators who’d seen earlier stages of the six-day race said Lance’s crowd skills left something to be desired. Crowd skills or no, the “Lance Fan” signs printed on ubiquitous yellow cardboard fans 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.

Sure, defending Tour de Georgia champion Chris Horner had his cheering section. Or the Italian great Cippolini. Local favorite 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 center, the kind of place the Forest Service usually uses to show painfully 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, he wore the traditional yellow leader’s jersey instead of his U.S. Postal Service team’s star-spangled uniform.

But I didn’t have time to dwell on my stupidity. At that moment the man himself came striding up the center aisle. Neither tall nor broad, he wore a little cyclist’s flip-up cap. His face looked longer and narrower than on television. A legend in his own time though he may be, 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.

In his first book, Lance writes about how he became inspired to pursue his comeback while training in the Blue Ridge on Beech Mountain near Boone, N.C. I asked him how it felt to be back in the Blue Ridge.

“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 here). 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 a look of longing appeared in the eyes of a man who, while in training, weighs literally every ounce of food he eats to ensure he neither puts on extra weight or consumes too few calories.

He sighed. “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 center building, the place with the black bear diorama and the life-sized Forest Service android explaining sustainable forestry practices.

Though it was only about ten yards in the open air from one building to the other, Lance got mobbed like a rock star before he could take a step. Someone in a Smoky the Bear costume muscled in for pictures with the champion. Kids and parents alike waved pens, jerseys, race programs, anything you could write an autograph on, yelling “Lance! Lance!”

Amid the crush of bodies, I felt fandom cross the line from adoration into ugliness. We fans clearly hoped for something more than human from a man who up to that point had existed for most of us only in the immortaizingl realm of television and glossy magazines. We felt ourselves now mere feet from becoming incorporated into celebrity’s magic circle, a shinier place than where the rest of us live, where money, beauty, security, and attention come straight out of the tap. 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 to the summit of Brasstown Bald 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 line. The woman in the pace car had indeed been Sheryl Crow, the rock star and 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 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.•