Cycling Betting - Famous Cyclists
Lance Armstrong
Date of Birth: September 18th, 1971
Place of Birth: Plano, Texas
Nationality: American
Lance Armstrong is a retired American professional road racing cyclist. He is most famous for winning the Tour de France a record seven consecutive times from 1999 to 2005, several years after brain and testicular surgery and extensive chemotherapy in 1996 to treat testicular cancer that had metastasized to his brain and lungs.
In 2002, Sports Illustrated magazine named him their Sportsman of the Year. He was also named Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year for 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005, received ESPN's ESPY Award for Best Male Athlete in 2003, 2004, and 2005, and won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Overseas Personality Award in 2003. Armstrong retired from racing at the end of the 2005 Tour de France, but his success prompted some to nickname the event the "Tour de Lance".
His athletic success and his dramatic recovery from cancer inspired Armstrong to commemorate his accomplishments in conjunction with Nike through the Lance Armstrong Foundation, a charity founded in 1997.
Armstrong has clearly triumphed at least partly because he learned to apply the obsessive focus he developed fighting cancer to making a career of winning the Tour de France, training in Spain for months leading up to the Tour de France and making frequent trips to France to fully analyze and ride key parts of the upcoming Tour de France course.
Few would disagree at how instrumental the team's sports director, Belgian ex-cyclist Johan Bruyneel, had been in all of Lance's victories. A master tactician who shared Lance's obsession for detailed preparation, Bruyneel's symbiotic relationship with Armstrong makes it difficult for even them to ascertain which one influenced the other how much. Starting with Armstrong talking Bruyneel into becoming their sports director, and Bruyneel convincing Armstrong that he could win the Tour, to their almost constant radio communications during each race, the amount of support these men provided for each other through the seven victories is immeasurable.
There is no question that the superior tactics employed by Armstrong and his team through the seven victories were virtually flawless. Focusing the efforts of all team members on a victory for Armstrong, the list of brilliant tactics employed by Armstrong and his team goes on and on. In contrast, the glaring mistakes made by his opponents, some repeated year after year, did not hurt his ability to succeed.