Lance's Return

The news came out officially yesterday in Vanity Fair: Lance Armstrong is coming back. I usually stick to running, but I'll make the exception for this. Jay (aka JPS) wrote an interesting post about the mixed feelings (to be kind) he has about this. Jay's a real cyclist -- I got tired driving up the hills he rides in California -- so his perspective was pretty interesting. His argument comes down to cycling moving on the Lance era, which brought tons of casual fans to the sport but also marked the height of the doping era. Like Jay, I have my doubts Lance was clean while everyone else was dirty. It's pretty understandable, and it doesn't take away from what Lance accomplished.

The question remains why. He seemed to be having a pretty good time raising money for his foundation, getting people to seriously think of him as a politician and struggling through marathons in respectable but not outstanding times. (A 2:50 is a nice time, but the guy's got such incredible lung capacity that I'd expect faster. At least he said ) I have a theory that all the commentators are wrong when they say athletes want to go out on top. I don't believe that. I think athletes don't want to leave while they still have something left. Lance still has something to prove. He loves doubters, and now he actually has them instead of making them up. I'm not a cycling purist, so I'll find it interesting, particularly as a 35-year old watching Lance trying to race at the highest level at 37. Lance thinks it's nothing:

Ask serious sports physiologists and they’ll tell you age is a wives’ tale. Athletes at 30, 35 mentally get tired. They’ve done their sport for 20, 25 years and they’re like, I’ve had enough. But there’s no evidence to support that when you’re 38 you’re any slower than when you were 32.

11 miles, 1:26:32

No Gifts

This is a pretty new blog. One of the people who will probably come up often is Lance Armstrong. I'm not a cyclist, as Pigdog reader JPS will tell you, but I admire what they go through in the saddle. Riding up and down mountains is impressive. No matter what you think about Armstrong, what he accomplished was amazing. He faced down the ultimate pigdog, which had nothing to do with cycling. What I loved was that when he came back, he did it fierce, completely uncompromising and unrelenting. I went through YouTube looking for my favorite Lance moment, but it's been removed. It was in 2004, during the stage after he wrapped up the race by killing the field on the Alpe d'Huez. It was assumed he'd give Andreas Kloden a consolation prize that day because it was meaningless. The Phils on OLN called Kloden the winner with about 100 meters to go because it was just a formality. But Lance surged ahead at the last minute, in the slipstream, and overtook a startled Kloden. The rationale was simple: a bunch of German fans had spit on him going up Alpe d'Huez, cursing him as a doper. His explanation on the OLN video: "I thought I'd let Kloden win. Then I thought to myself, 'No, not today, that's not right." For a lot of people (read: Euros), it showed Lance at his worst: petty and kinda classless; I thought it showed him as he is: competitive and driven beyond belief. Lance said it was his favorite moment of the Tour that year. On the podium for something like the fourth straight day, Tour legend Bernard Hinault told him, "Perfect. No gifts." About 2:40 from the end, you see him eat up Kloden.