Lance Armstrong is unbelievable. Most of us know the story. He's a prodigy of an athlete as the only son of a poor single mom in some rural town in Texas. He's on the small side but tough as hell, so in a state that only cares about one thing - football - he starts swimming and running and cycling every single day starting when he's a kid until he's literally exhausted at the end of the day, consuming tons of spaghetti or other carbs each night. This continues into his early teens, where he regularly competes against and beats much older boys from high school. In high school he competes against college and pro athletes and starts to be the talk of the county, then the state, then pretty soon he's out of high school and training in Europe for the Giro d'Italia and soon the Tour de France, not to mention still competing in triathlons in Texas and winning them. He keeps finishing better and better and looks to be one of the top cyclists in the world, when all of a sudden his world comes crashing down when he's diagnosed with testicular cancer.
He has to lose the little guy, but good thing us guys carry spares! Unfortunately after a period of remission the cancer returns like crazy in different parts of his body, but most notably his brain. Several of the best oncologists in the world give him 5% chance or less to live, some saying he's got a matter of months. Instead he tries a radical treatment from some guy in Chicago (I think...been awhile since I read his book), which makes him violently sick and turn to skin and bones for a year or two, miserable every single day. His mom is his only friend who sticks with him, all his sponsors cancel their contracts with him, most famously Nike, and he's broke. The treatment goes ahead anyway, an experimental case for a patient with no other choice since none of the normal protocols will cure him, and eventually in a last ditch effort chemo treatment is combined with radiation AND extremely risky brain surgery (which he has to stay awake for) to remove huge tumors in his brain and keep the blood and bone cancers suppressed. Somehow, miraculously, he lives, and after a couple more years he's still in remission, scrawny and looking ten years older instead of just a couple. He's so weak at the end of his treatment he can only drink liquids and uses a walker to get around for months. His body is destroyed.
Then comes one of the most remarkable things I have ever witnessed (by reading about it; I remember the time quite well as it was at my peak of being a sports fan so I followed his story as closely as I could). He learned to walk again, then jog. Then begin to eat healthy food, and slowly put on muscle. He never regained the larger build he once had, but stayed light and trim, having lost 20-30 pounds of lean muscle mass even once he was rehabilitated. But "rehabilitated" medically isn't enough for Armstrong, so he starts to ride all day, every day. He eats scientifically, he trains as long as the sun is up. He not only gets back to where he once was but with his body now much lighter, he actually develops a better VO2 max (sort of the amount of oxygen your capillaries can take in from each breath), his heart is 30% larger than the average person's, his body fat is a preposterous 5%. His power to weight ratio is through the roof, and he trains every single day, whether it's raining or snowing or asteroids are bombarding the earth. He wears out riding partners and has to change them at mid-day because they can't even keep up his training pace.
Finally after a year back on the Pro circuit but still not sponsored, he places well in the Giro and some Spanish events, and suddenly there's the US Postal Service team wanting to recruit him, and a raft of sponsors. Nobody can believe he's back from the dead. They make a big deal of his story and how he's won simply by returning and qualifying. But this is Lance. He competes in the Tour de France again for the first time since his illness, the most prestigious event in cycling, and wins it. That win may have been one of the most shocking things I ever remember reading about in sports.
People write heartwarming stories and even the French reluctantly embrace an American as a hero, especially when he moves to France and buys a small house, to train there year round, and learns to speak French well enough to conduct interviews and chat with neighbors. The next year, he proves it was no fluke, winning the Tour again. He's now in his mid twenties. To cut to the chase, he becomes the greatest cyclist in the modern history of the sport, breaking all records by winning SEVEN Tour de Frances in a row, something that is too incredible to describe when there's a field of hundreds for the weeks-long event, which meanders all over France and dips into Germany and Austria. He gains the reputation for being unbeatable, which he his. He never loses a race again.
The French are fickle fans, and while on the one hand embracing him on the other hand they create a witch hunt in the media, accusing him of doping. As a result, drug testing gets more sophisticated and more random and frequent, to the point where nearly all his closest competitors, including seven of the top ten in the world, are eventually banned by testing positive, yet Lance never once tests positive. He passes every test every given to him (and still has to this day), and decides on his own after seven consecutive Tour victories to retire on top, in the best shape he's ever been in. He's the Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods of cycling, except maybe better. And in an age when athlethes train harder and more scientifically than ever, honing their bodies to perfection, no one is even close. And he seems graced somehow - he seems to never slip on wet corners, never ends up in the pile when the peloton goes down en masse, never cramps or gets ill (or maybe he just fights through it), never has a serious injury. When he does fall he seems to find an extra something inside himself to make up the time. He easily surpasses Miguel Indurain and Eddy Mercx's records and becomes the greatest cyclist of all time except to those Mercx fans in Belgium who will never concede anyone better than their hero, even if he won 10 or 12 Tours in a row.
After retiring, he starts running marathons again, and finishes respectably in the famous Boston Marathon as well as in New York and several other premier events. He also takes up mountain biking in his spare time, training in the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas and quickly becoming one of the elite mountain bikers (timed climbs and endurance events, not crazy downhill stuff) in the world, in a totally different kind of sport where there are famous people in their own right who have earned X-Games medals and dedicated their lived to the sport, and yet find themselves losing to Armstrong badly. At one point he's ranked #2 in the world, and the guy ranked #1 says Lance could beat him pretty easily if he was really motivated to do so. His "Livestrong" yellow bracelets have raised millions for cancer research over the years. People talk about him going into politics.
The latest, now, is that, after three or four years of not racing, he's decided to return to pro cycling and try to dominate the Tour once again, as well as try to become the best endurance mountain biker in the world (update: though lately I haven't heard much of anything about mountain biking). Maybe a top marathoner as well, and who knows, maybe he'll find time to fit some swimming in and dominate the triathlon circuit too. He'll be nearing his 38th birthday when he competes in the Tour this summer, an age where you should be retiring, and at which no cyclist has ever won the Tour (his seventh victory came when he was 34 - the last time someone that old won it was in the 1920s). All these totally ripped machines of men in their mid-20s and absolute prime condition will line up to take him down.
Which is why I wouldn't be surprised at all if this unbelievable athlete came back and won it all again, just to show he can. Despite his upbringing in rural Texas and George Bush's attempts to use him as a celebrity friend, he's remained a Democrat who is "left of center," pro-choice, and very individually-minded. He's openly atheist. He appears to be a good dad to his three kids and states now that he would rather become the president of the American Cancer Society than the Governor of Texas, so that he can reach everyone and not just one half of the electorate. This guy is one of my personal heroes, without a doubt.
Links to check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong
http://www.lancearmstrong.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOQflZqzn_U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHJErrp4eOw
