A boo is a lot louder than a cheer. If you have 10 people cheering and one person booing, all you hear is the booing.
All the fault and all the blame here falls on me. Whether it’s fans or whether it’s the media… it just gets going and I lost myself in all that.
Anyone who imagines they can work alone winds up surrounded by nothing but rivals, without companions. The fact is, no one ascends alone.
At the end of the day, I have nothing to hide.
But, listen, Eddie Merkyx would have won six Tours if he hadn’t been punched.
Certainly, I’m a flawed character. It’s just this mythic, perfect story. And it wasn’t true.
Cycling is a sport of the open road and spectators are lining that road.
Everybody wants to know: what am I on. What am I on? I’m on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day.
Extraordinary allegations require extraordinary evidence.
For most of my life I had operated under a simple schematic of winning and losing, but cancer was teaching me a tolerance for ambiguities.
For whatever reason, maybe it’s because of my story, but people associate Livestrong with exercise and physical fitness, health and lifestyle choices like that.
I exercise everyday. I swim, I bike, I run and I go to the gym.
I figure the faster I pedal, the faster I can retire.
I have been dealing with claims that I cheated and had an unfair advantage in winning my seven Tours since 1999.
I have never doped.
I joined the swim team when I was 12, and I was the worst kid in the pool – I was put with a group of 7-year-olds.
I made my decisions. They’re my mistake. I view this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times.
I still don’t get golf.
I wanted to live, but whether I would or not was mystery, and in the midst of confronting that fact, even at that moment, I was beginning to sense that to stare into the heart of such a fearful mystery wasn’t a bad thing. To be afraid is a priceless education.
I will spend the rest of my life trying to earn back trust and apologize to people.
If children have the ability to ignore all odds and percentages, then maybe we can all learn from them. When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope? We have two options, medically and emotionally: give up, or Fight Like Hell.
If I can’t face my accusers, that’s a joke. We did that in medieval times.
If we don’t somehow stem the tide of childhood obesity, we’re going to have a huge problem.
If you worried about falling off the bike, you’d never get on.
I’m not the most believable guy in the world right now. I understand.
It can’t be any simpler: the farewell is going to be on the Champs-Elysees.
It’s nice to win. I’ll never win again. I may have to take up golf – take on Tiger.
It’s tough to be a 15- or 16-year-old athlete competing around the country. There’s tension, there’s media. I had no idea what I was getting into.
Knowledge is power, community is strength and positive attitude is everything.
Marathons are hard because of the physical pain, the pounding on the muscles, joints, tendons.
My mom was such a strong character. I don’t want to say she was like a man, but she was tough.
Nobody needs to cry for me. I’m going to be great.
Obviously, I come from one background, and the people that design fitness equipment have been doing it for years and years, and they know what works and doesn’t work.
Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.
Portland, Oregon won’t build a mile of road without a mile of bike path. You can commute there, even with that weather, all the time.
The riskiest thing you can do is get greedy.
There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say: ‘Enough is enough.’
There’s no rule, no law, no regulation that says you can’t come back. So I have every right to come back.
This is my body, and I can do whatever I want to it. I can push it, study it, tweak it; listen to it. Everybody wants to know what I am on. What am I on? I am on my bike busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?
Through my illness I learned rejection. I was written off. That was the moment I thought, Okay, game on. No prisoners. Everybody’s going down.
Two things scare me. The first is getting hurt. But that’s not nearly as scary as the second, which is losing.
What ever your 100% looks like, give it.
Winning is about heart, not just legs. It’s got to be in the right place.
