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Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong, American cyclist, Winner Tour de France 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005.

Stage 17, 2004 Tour de France

Lance Armstrong: How bad do you want to win a stage in the Tour de France?
Floyd Landis: Real bad.
Lance Armstrong: How fast can you go down hill?
Floyd Landis: I go downhill real fast. Can I do it?
Lance Armstrong: Sure you can do it ... run like you stole something Floyd.

http://velonews.com/article/6638

Press conference October 8, 1996


  • I want to finish by saying that I intend to be an avid spokesperson for testicular cancer once I have beaten the disease... I want this to be a positive experience and I want to take this opportunity to help others who might someday suffer from the same circumstance I face today.

http://www.cyclingnews.com/results/archives/oct96/lance.html

It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life

  • I want to die at a hundred years old with an American flag on my back and the star of Texas on my helmet, after screaming down an Alpine descent on a bicycle at 75 miles per hour. I want to cross one last finish line as my wife and my ten children applaud, and then I want to lie down in a field of those famous French sunflowers and gracefully expire, the perfect contradiction to my once anticipated poignant early demise.

Every second counts

  • You know when I need to die? When I'm done living. When I can't walk, can't eat, can't see, when I'm a crotchety old man, mad at the world. Then I can die.
  • The Tour (de France) is essentially a math problem, a 2,000-mile race over three weeks that's sometimes won by a margin of a minute or less. How do you propel yourself through space on a bicycle, sometimes steeply uphill, at a speed sustainable for three weeks? Every second counts.

Podium farewell speech, Tour de France, July 24, 2005

  • But finally the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics. I'm sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles. But this is one hell of a race. This is a great sporting event and you should stand around and believe it. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I'll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets - this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/europe/4713283.stm

2003 Tour de France


Miscellaneous

  • Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.

  • At the recent ESPY Awards, addressing Jake Gyllenhaal, who has been recently nominated for an Oscar for "Brokeback Mountain": "Jake, why are you sitting in the front? I thought you liked it in the rear."

  • On the Champs-Élysées podium for the last time, after winning his seventh tour: "Finally the last thing I'll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the skeptics. I'm sorry for you. I'm sorry that you can’t dream big. I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles. But this is one hell of a race. This is a great sporting event and you should stand around and believe it. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I'll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets — this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it. So Vive le Tour forever. Thank you!"
  • About the French 2006 FIFA World Cup team during his speech of gratitude at the ESPY Awards: "All their players tested positive... for being assholes."
  • "Pain is temporary, it may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever."
  • "Anything is possible. You can be told that you have a 90-percent chance or a 50-percent chance or a 1-percent chance, but you have to believe, and you have to fight."
  • "A boo is a lot louder than a cheer, if you have 10 people cheering and one person booing all you hear is the booing."
  • "At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, "But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven." If so, I was going to reply, "You know what? You're right. Fine."
  • "Without cancer, I never would have won a single Tour de France. Cancer taught me a plan for more purposeful living, and that in turn taught me how to train and to win more purposefully. It taught me that pain has a reason, and that sometimes the experience of losing things–whether health or a car or an old sense of self–has its own value in the scheme of life. Pain and loss are great enhancers."
  • "Everybody wants to know what I am on. What am I on? I'm on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?"

--- Lance Armstrong was quoted by ET Magazine as saying "If there was a god, I'd still have both nuts."
ET Magazine 2004

TIME magazine 10 questions for Lance Armstrong
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1005777,00.html

TIME:
For a miracle man, you're not very religious.
Lance: "I don't have anything against organized religion per se. We all need something in our lives. I personally just have not accepted that belief. But I'm one of the few. "
  • "Being a champion is redefining what's humanly possible."

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story

Peter La Fleur: Uh, actually I decided to quit... Lance.
Lance Armstrong: Quit? You know, once I was thinking of quitting when I was diagnosed with brain, lung and testicular cancer all at the same time. But with the love and support of my friends and family, I got back on the bike and won the Tour de France five times in a row. But I'm sure you have a good reason to quit. So what are you dying of that's keeping you from the finals?
Peter La Fleur: Right now it feels a little bit like... shame.
Lance Armstrong: Well, I guess if a person never quit when the going got tough, they wouldn't have anything to regret for the rest of their life. Well good luck to you Peter. I'm sure this decision won't haunt you forever.

Quotes about Lance Armstrong

The perfect athlete is Lance Armstrong. What he achieved, no other human has or, in my opinion, will ever achieve. It's hard enough surviving cancer, but winning seven Tour de France titles after that is amazing. He is a true inspiration to me and makes me believe that nothing is impossible. When you have a dream and work hard at it, it's possible.
Nastia Liukin, the 2008 Olympic individual all-around Artistic Gymnastics gold medalist after being asked who the perfect athlete was.http://www.forbes.com/2008/07/08/perfect-olympic-athlete-forbeslife-olympics08-cx_avb_0708olympians_slide_16.html
 
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