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. - Lance Armstrong

No gifts this year. I have given gifts on the Tour de France and very rarely has it ever come back to help me. This is the biggest bike race in the world and it means more than any bike race in the world. It means more to me than any bike race in the world. I want to win … no gifts.

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.

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.