Lance Armstrong Quotes

I want all of you to know that I intend to beat this disease. And further, I intend to ride again as a professional cyclist.

No one trains like me. No one rides like me. This jersey's mine. I live for this jersey. It's my life. No one's taking it away from me. This fucking jersey's mine.

I'm not happy if I'm not doing some physical suffering, like going out on a bike ride or running. First, it's good for you. No. 2, it sort of clears my mind on a daily basis. And it's a job. My job is to suffer. I make the suffering in training hard so that the races are not full of suffering.

One of the redeeming things about being an athlete is redefining what is humanly possible.

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'm on. What am I on? I'm on my bike busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?

Without cancer, I never would have won a single Tour de France. Cancer taught me a plan for more purposeful living, and that in turn taught me how to train and to win more purposefully. It taught me that pain has a reason, and that sometimes the experience of losing things — whether health or a car or an old sense of self — has its own value in the scheme of life. Pain and loss are great enhancers.

Every year the media comes up with something to describe my race … The first year it was "the comeback." Then it was the "the confirmation." I don't know what it was last year. This year, for me, it's "the year of the team." I can't say how I compare to the rider I was in 1999 or 2000 or 2001, but this team is much stronger than it has ever been. It has made it easier for me.

The Tour (de France) is essentially a math problem, a 2,000-mile race over three weeks that's sometimes won by a margin of a minute or less. How do you propel yourself through space on a bicycle, sometimes steeply uphill, at a speed sustainable for three weeks? Every second counts.

Life, to me, is a series of false limits and my challenge as an athlete is to explore those limits on a bike.