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Tour De Lance: The Extraordinary Story Of Lance Armstrong’s Fight to Reclaim The Tour de France

By Joe Kurmaskie

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 outer edges of endurance.

Saddle back up and reclaim the Tour de France? Dream on.

Unless you’re Lance Armstrong. When he announced his intention to compete in the 2009 Tour, everyone took notice. As long as Lance has a heartbeat and two wheels no one should count that man out.

The bigger question was why?

He’d 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 the 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 ... and it’s one for the ages.

There are more books about Armstrong than there are, well, Livestrong bracelets, but this time around the reporter has been there since the beginning — literally. Strickland was on the job and interviewing Lance 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 it is like the difference between a movie star and a star of Shakespearean theater. 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,” Strickland wrote.

And that’s why the book works. Because Strickland has loved, studied and reported on bike racing and Lance Armstrong for his entire career. He does not sugarcoat or vilify, but simply asks “why” at every stage in the comeback, and let 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 emotions into his success or root for his failure.

Along the way, the underbelly of the sport is exposed, but also the purity. Lance’s motivations may be layered and complicated, but as the book navigates the training races, the tenuous teaming of cycling star Alberto Contador and the gripping showdown in the mountains between a handful of worthy opponents during the world’s most acclaimed bike race, you’ll learn who came before, how this story fits into the larger context of bike racing history and people’s lives who have never done more than pedaled around the neighborhood, and you’ll feel as though you’re riding shotgun in the team car as a trusted member of the crew. And while you know how this story ends, it’s the getting there that counts, and 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, New Mexico. 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 Lance. The very interview included in Tour de Lance. It’s a case of worlds colliding. I could see the scene in my mind even as I read it on the page. Incidentally, this was my interview where Lance said that bicycle racing was like a bad love; an Ike and Tina Turner size love and that you marry the pain and go faster, embracing it more as it gets worse. Little did any of us know how his words would become a mantra for his own life beyond the bike.

Tour De Lance: The Extraordinary Story Of Lance Armstrong’s Fight to Reclaim The Tour de France. Bill Strickland, Harmony Books, hardcover, 320 pages $25.99.

Joe Kurmaskie rides a bike for the joy of it. His next book, “Mud, Sweat and Gears: One Family’s Rowdy Adventure Across Canada on Seven Wheels,” is now available. For more information go to www.metalcowboy.com