A conversation with Lance Armstrong
Lance Armstrong, is training in Santa Rosa with Team Astana, Tuesday February 3, 2009.
KENT PORTER/ PDPublished: Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 3:08 p.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 3:08 p.m.
Following his retirement after the 2005 Tour de France, Lance Armstrong remained competitive — just not in pro road cycling. He finished three well-celebrated marathons and a 100-mile mountain bike race. But off the bike, his life has been as much of a triathlon as any organized competition.
In the past 3½ years, Armstrong has traveled around the world promoting cancer awareness. But he’s also opened a bike shop in Austin, Texas, built a home in Aspen, Colo., and placed his expansive ranch in Dripping Springs, Texas, on the market for $12 million. With girlfriend Anna Hansen, Armstrong will be a parent again — for the fourth time — this summer. And most recently, he’s become enthralled with the social network, Twitter.
As the Santa Rosa training camp for his team Astana concluded last week, the seven-time Tour de France titlist spoke in a telephone interview with freelance writer and Press-Democrat contributor James Raia about a wide range of topics:
Question: With all the demands on your time, how do you determine how much time you give to cancer patients and how it occurs?
Lance Armstrong: It’s definitely changed. As the momentum of the foundation has grown, the requests have also grown at the same time. Sometimes the stuff is structured. I’m going to go to hospital ABC tomorrow. You have to call the hospital and the hospital knows you’re coming and you’re either going to give a talk or walk around.
Normally, those are very private and low-key visits. They’re designed for the patients and their families. But I get a lot out of them. The patients in their rooms get a lot out of it. But it’s motivating for me to go do that. And when I say motivating, it keeps me in perspective. It keeps reminding me why I do what I do on a daily basis.
Q: The Tour of California will have a few guys coming back to the sport and others with whom you’ve had long relationships like Ivan Basso, Floyd Landis, and Tyler Hamilton. Any thoughts on being back in the peloton with some of the guys you came through the ranks with?
L.A.: Cycling has evolved, but you still have some of the same characters and that list goes deep. Add George Hincapie to that list. There’s a lot of history with juniors to amateur racing to 11 years as a pro. I think for me, the thing to keep in mind at the Tour of California is that Levi (Leipheimer) is super motivated and super, super fit which he confirmed to us here at training camp. So we just have to ride for him and hope that he hammers the time trial as hard as he can like he did last year.”
Q: Speaking of the Tour of California, do you recall the last time you raced in California?
L.A.: Ojai Criterium, 2005. I’ve never raced Redlands of the Sea Otter Classic. But I did do the Race of Champions, which was up there on the same course at Laguna Seca. Back in those amateur Subaru-Montgomery (his team) days, we did (races) Visalia, Fresno and we did crits (criterions, or a bike race held on a short course) at UCSB (Santa Barbara). They weren’t all in the same area as the Tour of California, like the Tour of the Unknown Coast, I think, in 1990. And the San Francisco Grand Prix in maybe 2002, 2003. So, there was a lot of California stuff like that, but never the bigger races from around here.
Q: Since you announced your comeback last September and when you began to win some of the regional races, has what has happened on the bike been different than what you thought it might be?
L.A.: No. The improvement has been pretty consistent on what we’ve seen in the tests and in training. All of that feedback is improving and tracking nicely. The question mark is whether it gets to a point and then just stops improving. But I tell you . . . what’s the date today? . . . Feb. 6. Take Feb. 6 versus any Feb. 6 from any of those other years (1999-2005) and there’s absolutely no comparison.
I had a chat today with Benjamin Noval. He was on my team for a bunch of Tours (de France) and he’s on this team. He said there’s absolutely no comparison to those years. He said I’m much more fitter, much leaner, much more race-ready in February this year than in any of those years.
Q: From the pictures and video I’ve seen, you look thicker or stronger in your upper body. Has your body changed?
L.A.: When I started training last summer before I decided to come back, I was spending a lot of time in the gym. In the last couple of years, I’ve put on some upper-body mass and put on weight. That’s for sure. And I continued to train in the gym all the way until October. So it’s going to take a few months to get that off. It’s already come down considerably. But the pictures and the cameras can be deceiving, too. But it’s really what the scale says and it’s what it says in April that’s a good comparison, not in February. Still. I’m much lighter at this time of the year than I normally would be.
Q: You’re going to be a father again, and your fourth child will be about one month old or so when the Tour de France comes along. Will you bring him or her along to the finish like your other children or do you have a different plan at this point?
L.A.: He or she will be at the Tour, for sure. Quite honestly, my schedule this year pretty much revolves around my kids’ schedule. (Former wife) Kristin (Armstrong) has been the real hero and very helpful to me and understanding of this comeback. It’s not optimal that I fly from here back home for five days before the Tour of California. That’s the schedule Kristin and I have set out and the kids want to see their old man. I will always travel back and forth to have quality time with my kids. That’s what we’ll do this week and so all that will stay the same as it was the first time.
Q: For the last couple of months, you’ve had a Twitter account and you’re very active on it and it’s very popular (more than 70,000 followers). Are you an investor in the company, are you a hyper toe-tapper type, or just what’s your interest?
L.A.: I don’t have a financial stake in Twitter, no. I didn’t even know about it three months ago. But sometimes I feel like I work for them. I get asked about it and it’s unbelievable what gets written in regards to me and Twitter (laughter). But, hell, I wish I had a little piece of the action. But I don’t. But in the end, it’s profitable or beneficial for me and it’s beneficial for the foundation and for the team.
Look, in the last 10 years, primarily 1999 to 2005, I wasn’t the most openly transparent person in the world. And it led people to say, ‘Well, hmm. We don’t know where he is. We don’t know what he’s doing. He won’t talk to us. So, he must be up to no good. And even if they didn’t write that you’re up to no good, they would think that you’re up to no good and it would lead to speculation and rumor. Something like Twitter comes along or accessibility to video blogs, you say, f--- it. I’m going to come back and you may not care, but I’m going to tell you what I had for breakfast and I’m going to take a picture of it. I’m going to tell you when I’m on a training ride. I’m going to tell you when I’m at my son’s flag football game. I’m going to tell you when I just cracked a bottle of badass red wine.
You can take my biggest detractor in the pressroom and if they read that, then after awhile they’ll realize, man, this is really him telling us what he’s doing. And then they realize ‘You know what? This guy is not secluded in a dark room with a team of mysterious doctors up to no good. This guy is a regular f---ing guy.’ So, I’ve got no stake in Twitter, but Twitter has helped.
Q: Throughout your career, you’ve been a team leader. What do you think of Lance Armstrong as a domestique (team rider)?
L.A.: It’s definitely a possibility. I think it’s healthy for me to remind myself why I came back. And I came back because I wanted to take the Livestrong message around the world and I came back because I wanted to ride my bike again. It’s very simple, it’s not complicated.
It becomes complicated when somebody says, ‘Lance you won the Tour seven times. If you get fourth, you’re going to ruin your legacy. You’re going to ruin a perfect record.’ That’s their impression. That’s the pressure we put on ourselves. We want athletes to be perfect and we want them to hit the game-winning shot, walk away and never come back. Sometimes, they (the athletes) get in the locker room and say ‘f--- it. I want to come back.’ And that happened to me.”
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