Well, well, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a sight you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see every day at the Tour de France: Lance Armstrong on the podium in Paris without\u00e2\u20ac\u201dhold the presses\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe race winner\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s garish yellow jersey on his back.<\/p>\n
Third. Not a result, in pure sporting terms, that ranks up there with the seven consecutive times he claimed the victor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s laurels on the crowd-lined Champs-Elysees, framed by the Arc de Triomphe in the background.<\/p>\n
But how much more human.<\/p>\n
Armstrong suffered on this Tour, the pain and effort etched into his craggy face. Like a wily fox, he used years of accumulated race smarts to compensate for what his 37-year-old body has lost in speed and resilience; a few seconds saved here, a few more clawed back there…\u00c2\u00a0 Details<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, well, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a sight you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see every day at the Tour de France: Lance Armstrong on the podium in Paris without\u00e2\u20ac\u201dhold the presses\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe race winner\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s garish yellow jersey on his back. Third. Not a result, in pure sporting terms, that ranks up there with the seven consecutive times he claimed the victor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s laurels […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17510","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\/17510","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=17510"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":156503,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17510\/revisions\/156503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}