Lance Armstrong yesterday took to Instagram to refute a report published on Wednesday on a fake news site that he had died.

In a short video, he holds up a smartphone showing an article headlined “BREAKING NEWS: Road racing cyclist Lance Armstrong has died” with the shot zooming out to show Armstrong, alive and well, shaking his head.

 

“The rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.” – Mark Twain

A post shared by Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong) on

The words attributed to Mark Twain by Armstrong, banned from cycling for life in 2012 for doping and stripped of his seven Tour de France titles, are in fact a misquote.

The author actually said, “The report of my death was an exaggeration,” his words published in the New York Journal on 2 June 1897. Rumours that Twain, who was visiting London at the time, had died had been circulating in the United States for several days.

Twain himself took up cycling in his forties, and in his 1884 essay, Taming The Bicycle, wrote: “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live.”