Tour de Lance Review
by Ronit Bezalel for femmefan.com

As of this writing (July 5, 2010) Lance Armstrong is back in the Tour de France. He’s got some unfinished business, having lost the race last year to former Astana teammate and rival Alberto Contator. Can Lance win the Tour an unprecedented 8^th time? The jury is out.

 “I would never ever bet against him,” says Bill Strickland, the editor at large of Bicycling Magazine and author of the recently released book Tour de Lance (Harmony Books). And Bill should know.  He spent the last year following Lance’s 2009 comeback from retirement to third place in the Tour. Strickland vividly chronicles Lance’s journey in Tour de Lance.

 Tour de Lance begins in 2008 when Strickland learns that Lance is returning to cycling. Curiously, Strickland is conflicted about Lance’s return. “I believe he’d gotten his exit [in 2005] as close to perfect as anyone gets these days…His farewell fit the mythic truth of his life.” 

 Armstrong’s re-entry is far from perfect. He skittishly rides the Tour of California, and then crashes out of Madrid’s Vuelta Castilla Y Leon with a fractured clavicle. The 37-year old athlete flies home to Austin to heal with the tour just months away. Lance’s friends worry about him, “his heart didn’t seem to be into the comeback anymore.”  But, after being confronted by his team director, Johan Bruyneel, Lance is back on a bike, furiously pedaling into racing shape.

 Tour de Lance is at its best when it viscerally draws the reader into the cycling world. Strickland paints a full picture of the Tour from the throngs of Lance fans at the side of the route, to life on the Astana team bus, to striking blow-by-blow accounts of each racing stage. Strickland describes the sheer brutality of the race as  “riders’ bodies are beginning to eat themselves; they simply can’t take in enough calories or liquid to match what is being depleted.” 

 Strickland is no outsider to professional cycling. He’s covered Armstrong since 1994, when 22 year-old Lance was “an ignorant, gutsy, mouthy and unpredictable kid…he seemed to me near berserk with fury at the road, at the race, at the bike that yielded under his assault…I understood immediately that before me was one of the greatest cyclists who would ever live.” 

 In Tour de Lance, the story comes full circle as upstart teammate Alberto Contador battles head to head with Lance and emerges as the Astana contender to win the Tour. Not terribly well-liked, Contador is clearly the stronger rider. A worn out Armstrong concedes victory and according to Strickland, “says something unbelievable. He says, ‘I’m content.’”

 I recently interviewed Strickland via phone about his book and cycling in general. Of course, I had to ask Bill about what Armstrong is ‘really like.’

 He replied, “the thing I was most struck by was how human Lance was, especially when he had to confront the idea that he wasn’t going to win [the Tour]…I started to see he struggles with things a lot of us do, getting older and having enough time and trying to be with your kids and working with people you don’t like—all of that and I just started to appreciate him more.’

 “Lance definitely has—not a charisma, not like George Clooney or someone, but he’s got this magnetic pull to him…there is something about him that just makes people want to believe in him and to see the magnitude of that was surprising. and to feel myself get pulled into that as well. “

 I asked Bill about his writing process. He hung out with the Astana team, but quickly realized he couldn’t ask the riders direct questions. “They never go off message…they really don’t give you anything.” Instead he “just decided I was just going to hang around with these guys and BS with them and just talk about everything except what I wanted to know. And yet, I would let the conversation sort of drift around and eventually they would talk about things that were going to be useful to the book. “ 

 Strickland had the distinct advantage of being a cyclist himself and occasionally helping out the team. “There were times when I was in the team car when I was helping them when an escape would go up the road. I would help them figure out the numbers or the times, that sort of thing. Because of my familiarity with the sport, I definitely got in there in a way that I don’t think anyone else exactly has. And yet it was frustrating because I knew once I was in, I couldn’t turn on the tape recorder because then I would be out, you know.”  Instead, he furiously scribbled down notes during opportune times, winding up with “somewhere between 25 and 30 thousand words.”

 I also asked Bill about Alberto Contador. “I think he’s phenomenal. That guy is—he might be the best bike rider I have ever personally seen. What I love about him is how different he is off the bike. I’m sure this is going to change at some point, but right now, this year and at least last year before, he was still shy, very unassuming off the bike. And yet, when he, when the kid is on the bike, he just rips the legs off of people.”

 Of course, the conversation inevitably wound its way towards doping allegations. In Tour de Lance, Bill writes “What I ended up believing was that I couldn’t know if he’d [Lance] ever doped. After wading through evidence as objectively as I could for a decade, I’d become an agnostic.”

 Bill told me that Lance’s camp wasn’t thrilled at Strickland’s “nuanced position on doping…they would definitely have preferred me to say, that “100% I know he never doped.” And while it’s still a possibility, all I say is, “I don’t know.” There’s a heck of a lot of evidence out there.”

 Tour de Lance is a great read for both cycling enthusiasts and non-cyclists alike. I highly recommend it, especially as the Tour de France is underway once again.