For those privileged and masochistic enough to take it on, the Tour de France offers private agonies in the most public of settings.<\/p>\n
For Lance Armstrong, the price of torture has always been offset by the spoils of victory, as he wheeled an inexorable path toward seven titles and a permanent etching in history.<\/p>\n
Yet as he returns after four years to the scene where his legend was created, Armstrong does so with less in the way of obvious tangible recompense for his muscle-wracking output.<\/p>\n
Incredibly, this man who blitzed the field for so long with his iron spirit and metronomic cadence enters the 2009 Tour \u00e2\u20ac\u201c which starts in the principality of Monaco on Saturday \u00e2\u20ac\u201c without any realistic possibility of …\u00c2\u00a0 Details<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For those privileged and masochistic enough to take it on, the Tour de France offers private agonies in the most public of settings. For Lance Armstrong, the price of torture has always been offset by the spoils of victory, as he wheeled an inexorable path toward seven titles and a permanent etching in history. Yet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cycling","category-road-bike"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15461"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15464,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15461\/revisions\/15464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}