BARCELONA, Spain – If he hadn’t made the most significant decision in recent cycling history, Lance Armstrong would probably have been relaxing in Texas on Thursday, a smattering of pudge around his middle and his family by his side.
Despite the creature comforts his comeback has forced him to forsake, and even with a broken collarbone in his preparation for the Tour de France, there haven’t been many days when Armstrong has pined for home while on his bike.
An intensity of focus has been the constant thread through Armstrong’s career, the refusal to take as much as … Details
Since the first American cyclist made his way to the European pro circuit in the mid-’70s, enough gaffes, misunderstandings and flashpoints have taken place to keep a U.N. peacekeeping force busy — from Greg LeMond’s spending the Tour de France rest day playing golf, to the conversion of La Taverne Zimmer, the Montmartre bar in which the Tour was hatched at the turn of the century, into a TGI Friday’s. Among the lowlights:
1981
Sizing up the first American ever to ride the Tour de France, legendary French racing director Cyrille Guimard calls Jonathan Boyer un marginal, or weirdo — a reference to Boyer being, among other things, a Seventh-Day Adventist, a vegetarian, and a believer in acupuncture.
1984
After the World Championship road race in Barcelona, Greg LeMond publicly gripes that during the race Italy’s Moreno Argentin had offered to help him win for $10,000.
With Queen’s rock anthem “Bicycle Race†blaring from loudspeakers, the Tour de France sets off for another day, the riders a blaze of color in their lurid shirts. This, undoubtedly, is one of sport’s most spectacular sights.
But is it believable?
A decade ago, when Lance Armstrong won the first of his record seven Tour titles, the answer to that question was largely “no.â€
Doping had rotted cycling to the core. At least 80 percent of riders in the grand tours of France, Spain and Italy were doping, anti-doping scientists in Switzerland now calculate using blood tests from that time. Back then, researchers in Paris who were working on a method to catch one of the most common forms of cheating struggled to find clean samples to try out their new test…Â Details