Lance Armstrong Quotes

340 Lance Armstrong Quotes

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When you’re 17 and a man takes a Camaro IROC Z away from you, he’s on your hit list. It was years before we spoke again.
Lance Armstrong

I was super strong, but I didn’t understand a lot about the tactics of racing.
Lance Armstrong

The life of a road cyclist means having your feet clamped to the bike pedals churning at 20 to 40 miles per hour, for hours and hours and days on end across whole continents. It means gulping water and wolfing candy bard in the saddle because you lose 10 to 12 litres of fluid and burn 6,000 calories a day at such a pace, and you don’t stop for anything, not even to piss, or to put on a raincoat.
Lance Armstrong

Nothing interrupts the high speed chess match that goes on in the tight pack of cyclists called the peloton as you hiss through the rain and labour up cold mountainsides, swerving over rain slick pavement and jouncing over cobblestones, knowing that a single wrong move by a nervous rider who grabs his brakes too hard or yanks too sharply on his handlebars can turn you and your bike into a heap of twisted metal and scraped flesh.
Lance Armstrong

I don’t check my mother at the door.
Lance Armstrong

In my first big international race, I did everything my coach told me not to do.
Lance Armstrong

Classic early Armstrong: a contrary and spectacularly ill-advised attack.
Lance Armstrong

Cycling is an intricate, highly politicised sport, and it’s far more of a team sport than the spectator realises…
Lance Armstrong

It’s a race of attrition. That’s the essence of road racing.
Lance Armstrong

I think I can.
Lance Armstrong



Chris told me something I’ve never forgotten. ‘You’re gonna win the Tour de France one day.’.
Lance Armstrong

Cycling is a sport that embarrasses youth, rather than rewards it.
Lance Armstrong

I want to be the best rider there is. I want to go to Europe and be a pro. I don’t want to just be good at it, I want to be the best.
Lance Armstrong

There is nothing more uncomfortable than riding in the rain, because you can never, ever get warm. Your Lycra jersey is nothing more than a second skin. Cold rain soaks it, plastering it to your body, so the chill mingles with your sweat and seeps down into your bones. Your muscles seize up and grow heavy with frigid, sodden exhaustion.
Lance Armstrong

I wasn’t a quitter.
Lance Armstrong

Why don’t you just quit? Son, you never quit.
Lance Armstrong

I had actually thought I had a chance of winning, and now I wondered if I could compete at all. They had laughed at me.
Lance Armstrong

I had little or no idea tactically how to ride in the race – I just put my head down and bulled through it, and when I stepped onto the medal podium it was more with relief than elation.
Lance Armstrong

Who’s this guy and what’s he all about? It was a question I still needed to answer for myself.
Lance Armstrong

An American in cycling was comparable to a French baseball team in the World Series.
Lance Armstrong



You don’t win a road race all on your own. You need your team-mates and you need the goodwill and cooperation of your competitors, too.
Lance Armstrong

There are three places on a podium, and Argentin didn’t want to stand beside me. In an odd way, it made more of an impression on me than any lecture or fistfight could have. What he was saying was that he didn’t respect me. It was a curiously elegant form of insult, and an effective one.
Lance Armstrong

You can teach someone how to control their strength, but you can’t teach them to be strong.
Lance Armstrong

Wait a minute. If I’m the strongest guy, why didn’t I win?
Lance Armstrong

The closer we got to that day, the quieter I grew. I shut down, planning the race in my mind.
Lance Armstrong

The tough part of the fight was over; there would be no more naysayers telling us we wouldn’t amount to anything, no more concerns about bills or scrabbling for equipment and plane tickets. May it was the end of the long, hard climb of childhood.
Lance Armstrong

Life from now on would be a matter of incremental improvements, of seeking the tiniest margin that might separate me from the other elite riders.
Lance Armstrong

There was a science to winning.
Lance Armstrong

Often a race is won by a mere fraction of acceleration that was generated in a performance lab or a wind tunnel or a velodrome long before the race ever started.
Lance Armstrong

Cyclists are computer slaves; we hover over precise calculations of cadence, efficiency, force and wattage.
Lance Armstrong



I would have to find a new kind of strength, that inner strength called self-discipline.
Lance Armstrong

I would win on adrenaline and anger, chopping off my competitors one by one.
Lance Armstrong

I could push myself to a threshold of pain no one else was willing to match, and I would bite somebody’s head off to win a race.
Lance Armstrong

I did what came most naturally to me: I attacked.
Lance Armstrong

I went, and I went faster than I’d ever ridden. It was a tactical punch in the face, and it had nothing to do with strength or ability; everything depended on the initial shock and separation. It was insane, but it worked.
Lance Armstrong

I had learned what it means to ride the Tour de France. It’s not about the bike. It’s a metaphor for life…
Lance Armstrong

The Tour is not just a bike race, not at all. It is a test. It tests you physically, it test you mentally, and it even tests you morally.
Lance Armstrong

I understood that now. There were no shortcuts…
Lance Armstrong

I wouldn’t be able to win a Tour de France until I had enough iron in my legs, and lungs, and brain, and heart.
Lance Armstrong

I thought I knew what fear was, until I heard the words ‘You have cancer’.
Lance Armstrong



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