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Featured Categories : Sports, Hobbies & Games : Cycling : The Tour de France
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People around the world have found inspiration in the story of Lance Armstrong--a world-class athlete nearly struck down by cancer, only to recover and win the Tour de France, the multiday bicycle race famous for its gruelling intensity. Armstrong is a thoroughgoing Texan jock, and the changes brought to his life by his illness are startling and powerful, but he's just not interested in wearing a hero suit. While his vocabulary is a bit on the he-man side (highest compliment to his wife: "she's a stud"), his actions will melt the most hard-bitten souls: a cancer foundation and benefit bike ride, his astonishing commitment to training that got him past countless hurdles, loyalty to the people and corporations that never gave up on him. There's serious medical detail here, which may not be for the faint of heart; from chemo to surgical procedures to his wife's in vitro fertilization, you won't be spared a single x-ray, IV drip, or unfortunate side effect. Athletes and coaches everywhere will benefit from the same extraordinary detail provided about training sessions--every aching tendon, every rainy afternoon, and every small triumph during his long recovery is here in living colour. It's Not About the Bike is the perfect title for this book about life, death, illness, family, setbacks, and triumphs, but not especially about the bike. --Jill Lightner, Amazon.com
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In the opening of Lance Armstrong's memoir, Every Second Counts (coauthored by Sally Jenkins), he reflects: "Generally, one of the hardest things in the world to do is something twice." While he is talking here about his preparation for what would prove to be his second consecutive Tour de France victory in 2000, the sentiment could equally be applied to the book itself. And just as Armstrong managed to repeat his incredible 1999 tour victory, Every Second Counts repeats--and, in some ways exceeds—the success of his bestselling first memoir, It's Not About the Bike.Every Second Counts confronts the challenge of moving beyond his cancer experience, his first Tour victory and his celebrity status. Few of Armstrong's readers will ever compete in the Tour de France (though cyclists will relish Armstrong's detailed recounting of his 2000-2003 tour victories), but all will relate to his discussions of loss and disappointment in his personal and professional life since 1999. They will relate to his battles with petty bureaucracies, such as the French court system during the doping scandal that almost halted his career. And they will especially relate to constant struggles with work/life balance.
In the face of September 11--which arrives halfway through the narrative (just before the fifth anniversary of his diagnosis)--Armstrong draws from his experiences to show that suffering, fear and death are the essential human condition. In so openly using his own life to illustrate how to face this reality, he proves that he truly is a hero--and not just because of the bike. In Every Second Counts he is to be admired as a human being, a man who sees every day as a challenge to live richly and well, no matter what hardships may come. --Patrick O'Kelley, Amazon.com
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Comic writer Tim Moore trades his ailing Rolls Royce for a bicycle, a map and a water bottle in French Revolutions. This is a quest to pedal the route of the Tour de France, no mean feat for the fit, let alone a self-described suburban slouch. The resulting 2,256-haphazard-mile journey transforms Moore into an incredibly fit and passionately proud cyclist. Initially, Moore takes the "I will do it and it probably will kill me" approach. His normal perspective, as a stooge to life's misfortunes, plays well as he prepares to ride the route of the 2000 Tour de France. Moore is the everyman who pedalled in youth and now wouldn't ride a bike to the corner store. But unlike a traveller by car, train or plane, Moore has to navigate France under his own steam. Somewhere around the Ventoux, the world's windiest place, Moore starts to change. He becomes enraptured by the feat itself as mile by mile he realises he is no longer an accidental cyclist but a lean, mean cycling machine. Gradually, the narrative turns from travel to a personal quest. Along the route, Moore's details of the heroes of the Tour make an excellent primer on this gruelling race and helps the uninitiated understand the frenzy that grips France each July as the races meanders through incidental villages, over mountains and, finally, into Paris. It is worth reading for that alone. Having survived mountains of pain, a disgusting diet and motels of dubious value, a new, muscular Moore concludes that "I might never leave my mark on the Tour, but that didn't matter. It has left its mark on me". To follow Moore's path of perspiration is certainly not a vacation. Yet, this curmudgeonly clever and inspirational book makes one want to do just that. "Old Father Time was catching up with Old Father Tim. If I didn't do it this year, I wouldn't because maybe next year I couldn't," he says before starting out. And that, as Tim Moore so surely points out, is what pushes any true traveller out the door. --Kathleen Buckley
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The Tour Is Won on the Alpe: Alpe D'Huez and the Classic Battles of the Tour De France (Photography)
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The publishing of Breaking the Chain must surely rub salt into cycling's ugly wounds. The sport is still reeling from the explosion of controversy that was sparked by the arrest of Team Festina backroom staff member Willy Voet and his cargo of narcotics, on the Franco-Belgian border on July 8, 1998. The subsequent police investigation uncovered a drugs scandal that destroyed that year's Tour de France but Voet sensationally claims in Breaking The Chain, endemic cheating has been at the heart of the sport for years.Voet's role as team "pharmacist"--ferrying and administering the cocktails of performance-enhancing drugs--made him the invisible hand that shaped the fortunes of one of the sport's most successful teams and he spares little detail in relating how it was done. Step-by-step guides to the business of "charging" on amphetamines and testosterone, administering mid-race injections and the secrets of beating the dope tests, are revealed for the first time.
.You slip the part of the tube fitted with the condom up the backside, inject clean urine up the tube ... cork it and stick it to the skin following the line of the perineum as far as the testicles ... this system was never bettered ... I used it for three years without any worries.
This is an astonishing story and Voet's is an amusing, candid voice--strong on the thrills of cheating and on the horrors of being caught--but given the ongoing investigations, and that fact the Voet, along with other senior members of the Festina team, is living under the cloud of a suspended prison sentence, it is hard to gauge whether the author's version of events has itself been "doctored". He names specific individuals related to the Festina case but protects the identities of other cheats that he claims operated on the pro circuit and it remains to be seen whether the full story of the scandal has now been told. --Alex Hankin
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