The gallic home crowd may not like the idea, but a lanky, courageous cancer survivor from Texas may just cause the world’s most arduous 82 hours to be unofficially renamed the Tour de Lance. Will this be his seventh consecutive victory?
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He’s disliked by many French cycling fans, so Lance Armstrong’s announcement that he intends concentrating on the Tour de France for the rest of his career is likely to have many red (and white and blue) in the face.
Armstrong may be on his way to his seventh consecutive victory - a tribute to the tough-mindedness that helped him survive cancer.
In his acclaimed autobiography It’s Not About The Bike, Armstrong recounts how he went from being the “indestructible 25-year-old, bulletproof” world cycling champion to a gravely ill has-been, with cancer in his testicles, lungs and brain. Armstrong underwent surgery and chemotherapy, which left him a fragile and in no shape to walk, let alone ride.
In chapter one he writes: “Put aside your ideas about heroes and miracles, because I'm not storybook material. This is not Disneyland, or Hollywood. I'll give you an example: I've read that I flew up the hills and mountains of France. But you don't fly up a hill. You struggle slowly and painfully up a hill, and maybe, if you work very hard, you get to the top ahead of everybody else. Cancer is like that, too. Good, strong people get cancer, and they do all the right things to beat it, and they still die.
Human moments “People die. That truth is so disheartening that at times I can't bear to articulate it. Why should we go on, you might ask? Why don't we all just stop and lie down where we are? But there is another truth, too. People live. It's an equal and opposing truth. People live, and in the most remarkable ways.
”When I was sick, I saw more beauty and triumph and truth in a single day than I ever did in a bike race — but they were human moments, not miraculous ones. I saw children with no eyelashes or eyebrows, their hair burned away by chemo, who fought with the hearts of Indurains. I still don't completely understand it.”
So, would Armstrong have been a six-time Tour de France winner had he not been through the ordeal of cancer? Certainly he says he’s a better person for the experience.
In the candid, often visceral memoir, he retains a little irreverence that may help him being saddle sore on the pretty but punishing 3 462 km clockwise route around France: “I've got marbled scars on both arms and discoloured marks up and down my legs, which I keep clean-shaven. Maybe that's why trucks are always trying to run me over; they see my sissy-boy calves and decide not to brake.” - (William Smook, Health24)
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