* (starred review) *
Cycling writer Strickland is all over the story of Lance Armstrong’s return in 2009, after a three-year absence, to the Tour de France. The story is forceful on its own: the champion’s grueling comeback leading to the great race, Armstrong’s redefined role as a domestique to teammate and 2009 winner Alberto Contador, and the response of thousands at every racing venue to the cyclist’s Livestrong campaign against cancer. But Strickland, who had access to Armstrong’s inner circle, enhances it with an eye for detail and an understanding of its importance in the context of cycling’s own physical demands and singular history. He reminds readers, as if they need it, of Armstrong’s supremacy and laser dedication in the sport. But Armstrong, says Strickland, is different this time around: “So many times over so many years I had witnessed Armstrong bend the Tour de France to his will. Now for the first time I wondered if the race was, as it did with everyone else, bending him.” An irresistible account of a story that needed telling.
— Alan Moores, Booklist
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A year ago to the day, Lance Armstrong set off to try to win his eighth Tour de France, having come out of a four-year retirement at the age of 37. The twist was that his biggest threat, the young Spaniard Alberto Contador, was in his Astana team.
And they didn’t get on, in a big way. Bill Strickland shadowed Armstrong in his preparations and in the race itself, often in the team director’s car. His account of the American’s doomed attempt is a masterly piece of reportage stuffed with expert insights into the Tour’s Byzantine tactics.
A self-confessed fan, he does not shy away from the doping allegations that have dogged Armstrong, returning a Scottish verdict of “not proven”. Equally elusive is Armstrong’s motive for returning; he said it is to publicise his cancer charity but a team insider claims: “He’s a killer, and missed killing.” Armstrong has just embarked on what he claims is his final Tour. This book can’t tell you what will happen but it will undoubtedly help you understand why it did.
—Simon Redfern, The Independent, July 4, 2010
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When Armstrong announced his intentions to return to the sport’s most celebrated stage, the author was torn. While he understood the (mostly positive) passions Armstrong evoked among cycling followers and cancer patients and their families, he worried that a failed attempt at a comeback would damage his reputation for pulling miracles out of thin air. Was Armstrong trying to prove something to critics, like rival Greg LeMond, whose accusations of drug use clouded Armstrong’s otherwise sterling reputation? Or was it something deeper? Was Armstrong, whom some considered the greatest champion in any sport, trying to teach himself a lesson in humility? In the spring and summer of 2009, Strickland pursued these possibilities, chasing Armstrong and his Astana team around the world as they trained for the ultimate cycling test. It was not a smooth journey. During the Vuelta a Castilla y León in March, Armstrong suffered his first ever collar-bone break. Just a month later, however, he was back on the bike for the Tour of the Gila in New Mexico. Though most cycling enthusiasts already know that Armstrong did not win the 2009 Tour de France, Strickland’s progress report manages to sustain suspense throughout. The author is a gifted writer and supremely knowledgeable about the sport.
Cycling fans will probably get more out of the book than a general audience, but diligent readers will be rewarded with an enjoyable read about a private journey to understand an enigmatic public figure and his place in sport and culture.
—Kirkus Reviews
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TOUR DE LANCE PIERCES PSYCHE OF FAMOUS CYCLIST
There are few athletes more polarizing than Lance Armstrong. Fans believe he’s capable of performing miracles on two wheels while detractors are certain he doped his way to seven consecutive victories in the world’s toughest bike race.
This book isn’t likely to sway either side. But for cycling fans – especially those whose pulse quickens when they hear the names of classic climbs like Mont Ventoux or L’Alpe d’Huez – Bill Strickland has written a book that manages to reveal new insights into Armstrong’s overanalyzed character.
The author was granted extraordinary access in late 2008 and throughout 2009 as Armstrong returned to professional cycling after three years in retirement. He rode in the team car during the most memorable stages of the Tour and in many of the races leading up to it. He saw firsthand Armstrong’s combative relationship with his teammate and eventual winner Alberto Contador.
And to his credit, Strickland never pretends to be objective. He is forthright about his initial feeling about the comeback, writing: “I didn’t want the man who’d been so full of miracles to come up one short.” But by the end of the journey, he comes to appreciate how Armstrong’s third-place finish endeared him even to the French: “The Tour seemed to be turning Armstrong into a man who was more noble than he’d ever been as a hero.”
The writing is at times flowery. Strickland’s description of Armstrong as he exits the team bus during a tuneup race in Spain: “His charisma was more majesty than grace – a beauty not sublime but terrible, and made not of his movements nor his expressions but our own cumulative memory of all he had vanquished.”
But the occasionally overwrought prose is forgiven by the author’s passion. Strickland – editor-at-large for Bicycling magazine and an accomplished amateur racer himself – is unabashed about his love for the sport. You can hear the whirring of tires and the gunning of support car engines as he takes readers along for the ride.
—Robert Merrill, Associated Press, June 15, 2010 (linked here to its publication in Huffington Post)
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Sports comebacks are unwieldy animals that rarely go according to plan or end well. More than baseball, boxing or basketball, bicycle racing offers absolutely no margin for error, no wiggle room, no accommodations for age or motivation. It’s a young man’s dance with pain and suffering on the edges of endurance.
Saddle back up and reclaim the Tour de France? Dream on.
Unless you’re Lance Armstrong. When he announced his un-retirement to compete in the 2009 Tour, the world took notice. As long as Lance has a heartbeat and two wheels no one should count the man out.
The bigger question was why?
Armstrong had gone out on top and on his own terms. Nothing left to prove and certainly no financial incentive. So why chance the legacy?
The official line had him doing it to put the spotlight on cancer research. As his comeback plays out that’s a sincere and legitimate part of the story. Bicycling magazine’s editor-at-large, Bill Strickland, brings back the rest in Tour de Lance: The Extraordinary Story of Lance Armstrong’s Fight to Reclaim the Tour de France.
There are more books about Armstrong than there are LiveStrong bracelets, but this time around the reporter has been there since the beginning. Strickland was on the job and interviewing Armstrong before the never-say-die Texan was a household name. It’s 1994, and Lance is a caged animal of a kid, with raw talent and everything to prove, sitting on a threadbare lawn chair after the Tour DuPont.
“He was not a star or even a Tour de France star but simply a star bike racer, which for those who love the sport is like the difference between a movie star and a star of Shakespearean theater,” Strickland writes. “He was an ignorant, gutsy, mouthy and unpredictable kid who rode like a banging fist against the sophisticated chessboards of strategy and interlocked tactics that were European bike races. And we loved him for it.”
And that’s why the book works. Because Strickland has loved, studied and reported on bike racing and Armstrong for his entire career. He does not sugarcoat or vilify but simply asks why at every stage in the comeback and lets the answers pace the book. This elevates the prose from a clinical read about a rich athlete’s efforts to stay relevant and at the top of a sport he needs as much as oxygen, to why so many others invest emotion into his success or root for his failure.
Along the way, the underbelly of the sport is exposed, but also the purity. Armstrong’s motivations may be layered and complicated, but Strickland navigates the training races, the tenuous teaming with Alberto Contador and the gripping showdown in the mountains between a handful of worthy opponents during the final stages of the Tour. Strickland finds the heart and soul of why comebacks matter not only to the gladiator suiting up one more time, but to the rest of us.
(A personal note: When Strickland was interviewing Armstrong back in 1994, I was a reporter working for a newspaper in Silver City, N.M. I covered a race called the Tour of the Gila. That gave me a chance to follow the series east to cover the Tour DuPont. I was standing off to the side while Strickland interviewed Armstrong, the same interview included in Tour de Lance. I could see the scene in my mind as I read it on the page.)
—Joe Kurmaskie, The Oregonian, June 26, 2010
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In Tour de Lance, Bicycling magazine editor-at-large Bill Strickland uses Lance Armstrong’s return to the Tour de France after a three-year retirement as an opportunity to accompany him through nine grueling months of training and the race itself to take stock of a world-class athlete in a period of transition. Armstrong frames his comeback as a promotional vehicle for his foundation’s anticancer efforts, but a simpler truth soon emerges: Fish swim, birds fly, and Lance pedals. The 45-year-old Strickland tries to be objective; he describes the Armstrong he met in 1994 as “an ignorant, gutsy, mouthy, and unpredictable kid.” But he also admits that he once owned an autographed Lance Armstrong lunchbox. Still, Strickland’s breezy style and insider knowledge produce high drama, low humor (who knew Tour riders sometimes stop en masse for a communal “arrêt pipi”), and a mind-boggling primer on pro cycling’s Machiavellian gamesmanship (though the book was printed too early to include a discussion of the doping accusations against Armstrong that surfaced last month). Witnessing the brutality of this tour brings a new appreciation for the brash Texan who won seven in a row and is back for more.
—Mike Shea, Texas Monthly, July 2010
