CastIron

Good to know when I leave for the beach tomorrow I've picked a decent book for the task.

jslopez

I think that aside from lance being a great athlete his approach was just more intelligent than his opponents. Scouting the routes, wind tunnel testing and active interest in the equiment materials used, and ofcourse his training regimen (dr. ferrari debate aside) were just way ahead of everyone else.

Look at Floyd Landis new TT positioning which was a direct result of the wind tunnel tests he did.

As far as being tough it seems to me that all the gritty climbers seem to have some sort of tragedy to fuel them.

CyLowe97

C'mon people.... Barkley's schtick is to say provocative things. He said this with a twinkle in his eye. He's a brighter fellow than he wants the public to think. It's just no fun to know that he actually is a bright guy.


Skip Bayless, on the other hand, is like media columnists anywhere. They will write inane ramblings to get a reaction and act like they are the sharpest knife in the drawer. They are deceiving readers when they do this. Any major American newspaper has a few columnists that this is their business. Some are good at it, but the majority are just hacks who change their opinions by the day just to keep on writing. Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times comes to mind as a complete and utter moron.

patentcad

But they DO pull you up on the climb - if you have the snot to hang on their wheel. Which presumably a TDF team leader should have. And YES they do keep you out of the wind for the other 199km of a 210 km stage - and don't think that doesn't help you the VERY NEXT DAY in the ITT when you're less fried than you would have been otherwise. Team tactics are huge - and at the same time they can be a bit overstated. Because you're right - you DO need the mojo in the first place to get up a climb like Alp DHuez. On the other hand not having team mates there with you at crucial moments can cost you the Tour. And Lance has rarely had to contend with that circumstance - thanks to some of the best teams in TDF history...

tekhna

I just picked up a copy off Amazon. Not a huge Lance fan, but sounds like it is an interesting read nonetheless.

patentcad

I AM a huge Lance fan - but the fascinating parts of this book through the first 100 pages have little to do with Lance - and more to do with Jan, Vino, Indurain, and the whole Euro pro bike racing scene. Really can't put it down stuff for long time bike race fans. Never HEARD half of this stuff. Great book, really.

I think there's something in this book for Lance lovers AND Lance haters alike. Which is what makes it so intriguing. Even EURO might like this book : ).

euphoria

Picked it up at Half Price Books today along with the Cyclist's Training Bible. Something tells me I'll be reading these twice over and then some.

USAZorro

I think it's a little more than that. On a number of the mountain stages, the USPS team sat on the front setting a pace that made it impossible for a serious breakaway to get launched. Last year, Discovery didn't do quite as good a job of it - but then again, they didn't have Landis or Ekimov at Lance's disposal.

btw - another fun read is Michael Barry's "Inside the Postal Bus". The book is a series of not-so-connected chapters, and it paints a friendly view of Lance, but it is full of some interesting tidbits and a lot of little "cameos" written by George Hincapie.

I'm waiting for Dave Zabriskie to write a book on cycling. I'd snap that up in a flash.

donrhummy

Lance's team was phenomenal but...

1. Lance was a big part of putting that team together, having first suggested the hiring of Brunyeel and then helping with choosing some (not all) of his teammates.

2. Part of why those guys were so good and worked so hard WAS Lance. His drive, determination and embracing of technology and science had a big impact on the team as a whole.

3. Everyone always mentions how the team made it easy for Lance to win, but never mention times like in the past TDF where his team left him completely exposed and yet he lost zero time/placings. That's impressive for Lance, not the team. (Oh, and he did that while being the oldest man to ever win a TDF!)

patentcad

Zorro hits the nail on the head. They don't call it the 'Blue Train' for nothing. And don't underestimate the value of being surrounded by team mates at the FRONT of the gnarliest, biggest, fastest peloton on the planet - you know where the crashes generally do NOT occur? I raced for nearly a decade and never crashed in a race (had a few very spooky close calls) - primarily because I was rarely farther than 8-10 places from the front of the race. Out of sheer crash avoidance mostly. Like Lance : ).

pedex

I believe the above is called "god of the kilowatts" or something to that effect in LA book #2.Having 8 guys to fetch water and food, keep you out of trouble, and set a pace that burns people out is a pretty awesome tool to have. 8 domestiques that are disposable booster rockets basically. Riding in the draft of the peloton takes only 80-135 watts to stay in the pack, thats a HR of around 100 or so LOL.Then consider how many teams emulate this same model, not many is it. Many teams have sprinters, not LA. Many teams dont even try for a GC win or even attempt contention for the same. That narrows things down quite a bit too. Lots of factors involved, chessmatch on wheels just like any race prettymuch.

Moochers_Dad

SI has always been very pro- Armstrong. I think you are thinking of Ron Borges, who was working for MSNBC when he wrote an absurd article wondering if Armstrong is even an athlete.

The article was called "Great Feat, but Not a Great Athlete" has completely been removed from MSNBC's servers and search functions. I'm pretty sure it led to him getting fired. I've added the article below because the only place I can find it is on another site that might have limited bandwidth.


Here it is:

Great Feat, but Not a Great Athlete By Ron Borges (one of the top 1000 sportwriters)

Armstrong winning Tour impressive, but it’s not athletic

CERTAINLY ARMSTRONG IS A HELL of a bike rider, but does that make him superior to Michael Jordan, Barry Bonds, Jerry Rice or Marion Jones? Does it make him a better athlete than the Williams sisters? Does the ability to sit on a skinny bicycle seat for hours on end and pump your legs like a madman make you a great athlete or merely a guy who does better without training wheels than most people?

If Armstrong is a great athlete, so are marathon runners. Athletes, for my money, must do more with their bodies than pump their legs up and down. If that’s all it took, the Radio City Rockettes would have to be considered the greatest athletes of all time.

It seems inevitable that Armstrong is going to win the Tour de France on Sunday for the fourth straight time, barring any unforeseen bicycle accidents. This is a great feat in his sport, so good for him, but who really cares?

For the past two weeks, there have been regular reports about how the Texas-bred cancer survivor was going to catch the field of mostly foreign bike pedalers after they entered the Alps and beat them down the other side to the Champs-Elysse and under the Eiffel Tower.

A few skinny men and women seem quite excited about this prospect, although Armstrong has done it with the kind of regularity that has made more than a few advocates of this fringe sport wonder if he’s pedaling on premium fuel while his competitors are (mostly) using regular.

Whatever Armstrong is doing, most of the sporting world couldn’t care less. Newspapers annually kill a few trees to print stories about this race, and occasionally it is mentioned on network news with the required picture of a bunch of bikes bunched together and one guy wearing an ugly yellow shirt. After that, they move on to curling news.

ESPN SportsCenter updates us daily on Armstrong’s whereabouts because that is what they do. They also had a special last week on a dog competition that involved running through tiny gates and jumping over small fences. Draw your own conclusions.

That a man can race around France on a bicycle and live to tell about it is a noble feat, although I’d think more of it if he actually was using his feet. It would be more of a feat if he was forced to dine on French cuisine each night too and then lug those heavy sauces around with him the next morning. After a week of that it would be the Bus Tour de France because everyone’s bicycle seats would be broken.

Armstrong’s task is most certainly a difficult one, but so is the world lumberjack contest, and no one goes on National Public Radio and argues the winner is the best athlete in the world. He’s just a guy who operates an axe better than the rest of us.

I would argue the same is true of Armstrong. He can pedal a bike better than anyone. He probably didn’t even need training wheels. But could he do it if someone was playing defense?

How fast is he when they take the bike away? Is he as fast as Marion Jones? Is he as fast as Chipper Jones?

For my money, being the greatest athlete in the world involves strength, speed, agility, hand-eye coordination, mental toughness and the ability to make your body do things that defy description. Chief among them is not pumping your legs up and down while your feet are strapped to bicycle pedals.

Do not misunderstand me. Lance Armstrong’s feat of winning the Tour de France, if he indeed does it for the fourth time, is deserving of praise and recognition.

If you want, you can even argue that it is a great sporting feat. After all, there are people out there who actually think golf is an athletic endeavor, although I feel if it is, so is pool.

In recent years, a minority of media members in America have tried desperately to convince us that fringe sports such as cycling must be given their due. It is a passion of theirs to try and convince the rest of us American sports fanatics that the less we see of something the better it really is.

Fine for them. Just don’t be trying to give away the title of world’s greatest athlete to a skinny guy from Texas who sits on a bicycle seat for nine hours a day careening through the mountains, tall though those mountains might be.

Praise Armstrong’s grit, his determination and his cardio-vascular system. But don’t try to convince me he’s the world’s greatest athlete. First try to convince me he’s an athlete at all.

Warblade

Overweight by a few pounds for a CYCLIST...not a normal being. Therefore he's skinny as hell.

Warblade

Does anyone know where Ron Borges lives? I just bought a shotgun.

Anbaric Cog

Thanks for the copy of the story by Mr Borges:

He says," For my money, being the greatest athlete in the world involves strength, speed, agility, hand-eye coordination, mental toughness and the ability to make your body do things that defy description..."

Having watched Lance ride over the last few years I would say he has done all of those things and is a "real" athelete.

I think marathon runners are atheletes too--however they only have to do it for a few hours. In the great tour races they have to go out and "run another marathon," the next day and the next...

Just my$ 0.02

a.c.

patentcad

Borges is an idiot. Period.

I'm a big sports fan. Baseball. Football. Track. I even like Gold, Tennis, Basketball, F1 Racing, etc. I've long admired the athletic feats of individuals from Willie Mays to Michael Schumacher to Barry Sanders - the list of GREAT athletes isn't that short really. There are a bunch of them.

But all that being said, in my view, for ME personally, with my world experience, NOTHING even remotely TOUCHES what Lance accomplished by winning 7 TDF's in a row. After almost dying from cancer just makes it all the more other worldly. I do understand this is subjective.

You don't hear me saying Barry Bonds isn't a great athlete because he can't pedal a racing bike up a hill as fast as Lance. Again, Borges is just a bonehead. I'm astonished that S.I. - the very publication that has featured Lance on its cover 5-10x and has named him Sportsman of the Year at least once - would even publish such drivel. They certainly know better there.

The ironic part is that I think Lance's accomplishments generally tends to put other great athletes in complete awe of him - because 95% of them KNOW how hard it is to ride a bicycle. They just can't believe anyone could do what Lance has done. Which is more than you can say for Mr. Borges. But don't SHOOT the guy. It's more entertaining to have a journalist that STUPID around so we can read him and smack our foreheads : ).

DrPete 

Wow, thanks for the re-post. I forgot how much I truly hated that article. I truly hope he got fired--That was just ignorant inflammatory crap.

DrPete

Moochers_Dad

It wasn't in Sports Illustrated. I read it on MSNBC.com as Lance was wrapping up TdF win #4; but I think it was also published in the Boston Globe. Borges is not only an idiot, he's a terrible writer.

pedex

on the face of it sure, coming back from any likely fatal ailment is, but it DID help him, he likely wouldnt have won any TDF's having not had cancer, and this is by his own admission

tekhna

It's not too often you get your entire body rebuilt for you.

pedex

he was up against some scary odds too, he easily could have recovered but had lung damage, from reading book #1 it was a chance they took and he came out ok

Your average joe out there, this thing kills you. It would have killed me, no money for treatment, not even close.

Duke of Kent

They pull everyone else up too. It's not like Lance was the only person who got to sit in the draft. I highly doubt Jan or Ivan were EVER out of the draft on a non-mountain mass start stage the last couple of years. And when the pack breaks up, down to groups of two, three, four riders, going up a mountain, the draft doesn't mean much. So to say that the only reason that he did so well was because of his team is ridiculous.

classic1

Great comment.

shawnj73

CSC won the team points in last year at the tour, and did not seem to help Basso. Do not take this wrong; Yan is a great rider and probably would have won a few tours without Lance in there. Yan is the favorite this year to win the Tour. I think that Yan fans that say he could have one with the Postal squad, or really putting the rest of the T-Mobile guys down. This is not a fair statement as far as I am concerned, because the way I see it; Yan is the leader of that squad and he should have had his squad prepared to do the work for him. why did this not happen?? Just for curiosity how many times did the US Postal squad win the overall team points during Lances first six wins at the tour?

HigherGround