Johan Bruyneel has revealed how close Lance Armstrong’s comeback this year came to being curtailed after the Texan broke his collarbone in the Vuelta a Castilla y León.
Few know Armstrong better than Bruyneel, who is very much part of the cancer survivor’s inner circle having guided him to seven Tour de France wins between 1999 and 2005 as directeur sportif of the US Postal Service team. The pair hooked up again at Astana this season, and in 2010 Bruyneel will undertake a similar role at Armstrong’s new outfit, Team RadioShack.
In a remarkably candid interview with the Belgian magazine Humo, Bruyneel said that Armstrong came very close to throwing in the towel on his comeback after his accident, and it was only after the Belgian texted the cyclist with one of the Texan’s favourite aphorisms that Armstrong reconsidered, Bruyneel telling him “pain is temporary, quitting lasts forever.”
Armstrong had apparently been on the verge of abandoning his comeback, with his hunger to compete having vanished, according to Bruyneel, and no-one in the US managing to convince him otherwise. The Texan went on to finish 12th in the Giro d’Italia and stood third on the Tour de France podium in Paris, won by team-mate Alberto Contador after a fraught three weeks in which the fractures in the Astana team were all too visible.
Bruyneel took the opportunity of the Humo interview to launch a broadside at the Spaniard, saying that Contador was misguided in thinking that his victory in the Tour de France was down to his efforts alone, with little contribution from the Astana team.
He attributed Contador’s view that he effectively won the race with only the support of his mechanic and his brother Fran to the Spaniard getting a bit carried away with his sense of self-importance after his rapid rise through the professional ranks after his Tour de France win in 2007 and victories in the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España the following year.
Bruyneel also suggested that the endorsements and money that flowed in afterwards, and his elavation to stardom among the Spanish public, might have gone to his head and coloured his judgment.
The interview also touched upon Bruyneel’s relationship with Frank Vandenbroucke, the troubled Belgian cyclist who died earlier this month at the age of 34. The pair first met in 1989, when the prodigious Vandenbroucke was only 13 years old and already training with the Belgian national team ahead of the World Championships in Chambéry, France.
Bruyneel fondly remembered some of the Belgian team’s riders struggling as they undertook a recce of the main climb of the road race course, with the barely teenaged Vandenbroucke comfortably keeping up at the back of the group.
Straight into the sun is perhaps an exaggeration, but at that time it would be about ESE, and there are bits of the road which head roughly SSE, so...
7 October was just a bit of harmless fun until the "msm" ramped it up.
It's not censored if you just pirate it
an example of Kesgraves "best cycling infrastructure in the country" https://maps.app.goo.gl/GsCMbzDUTPdq59qS9
They are not going full gas at every point. They would destroy themselves. And tactics, they save themselves for when effort is really needed....
It turns out that that is national police policy. We found out from this process that there is national 'secured by design' policy which causes...
Been available for quite a while, full GRX mechanical 12 speed. Probably around the same time as 105 mechanical 12 speed if I were to guess.
Less harmful citrus degreaser is easy to find at £8 or less for 5 litres. Works ok for me, even diluted up to 4:1. Both paraffin and white spirit...
Nope, it's to keep your straps down and quieter. Plus most sunglasses are polycarbonate and aren't going to shatter like glass anyway
And, more seriously, where's the coverage of the closure of the cycle lane which forces you to cycle on the Totton bypass.