It’s simple. Success comes from training harder, living better and digging deeper than the others.
We are much better than we know.
I’ve read that I flew up the hills and mountains of France. But you don’t fly up a hill. You struggle slowly and painfully up a hill, and maybe, if you work very hard, you get to the top ahead of everybody else.
I may be in timeout forever. But I hope not to be.
My ruthless desire to win at all costs served me well on the bike but the level it went to, for whatever reason, is a flaw. That desire, that attitude, that arrogance.
How do you fight an invisible opponent like suspicion?
I wanted to win the Tour de France. And when I won it once, I wanted to do it again, and again, and again, it just kept going. So there wasn’t another competitive environment.
On a friendship with former president George W. Bush: He’s a personal friend, but we’ve all got the right not to agree with our friends.
The body is telling the mind to stop. The mind is telling the body to shut up.
Made plenty of mistakes along the way – all of which I am truly sorry.
So if there is a purpose to the suffering that is cancer, I think it must be this: it’s meant to improve us.
It gave me a chance to re-evaluate my life and my career. Cancer certainly gives things a new perspective. I would not have won the Tour de France if I had not had cancer. It gave me new strength and focus.
That was my decision, so I have to be responsible for that. It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life and I don’t have a good reason for why I wanted to come back, I don’t have a good reason for doing it all.
The question was, which would the chemo kill first: the cancer or me?
A bike ride. Yes, that’s it! A simple bike ride. It’s what I love to do and most days I can’t believe they pay me to do it. A day is not the same without it...
Your past forms you, whether you like it or not. Each encounter and experience has its own effect, and you’re shaped the way the wind shapes a mesquite tree on a plain.
But the fact is that I wouldn’t have won even a single Tour de France without the lesson of illness. What it teaches is this: pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.
Average is Your Enemy.
Yellow wakes me up in the morning. Yellow gets me on the bike every day. Yellow has taught me the true meaning of sacrifice. Yellow makes me suffer. Yellow is the reason I’m here.
Fear is priceless education.