Tour De France Quotes

No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages 1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5. 3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.” 4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank. 5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13. 6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14. 7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15. 8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil. 9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19. 10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961. 11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936. 12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23 13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24 14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record 15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity 16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 28 18) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world 19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter 20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean 21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind 22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest 23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight 26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions. 27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon. 28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and 49 years old when he wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas 30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger 31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States 32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out. 33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote "The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out. 35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa. 36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president. 37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels. 38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote "The Cat in the Hat". 40) Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived 41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise 42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out 43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US 44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats 45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President

I think it is just terrible and disgusting how everyone has treated Lance Armstrong, especially after what he achieved, winning seven Tour de France races while on drugs. When I was on drugs, I couldn’t even find my bike.

Art, literature, and philosophy are attempts to found the world anew on a human freedom: that of the creator; to foster such an aim, one must first unequivocally posit oneself as a freedom. The restrictions that education and custom impose on a woman limit her grasp of the universe...Indeed, for one to become a creator, it is not enough to be cultivated, that is, to make going to shows and meeting people part of one's life; culture must be apprehended through the free movement of a transcendence; the spirit with all its riches must project itself in an empty sky that is its to fill; but if a thousand fine bonds tie it to the earth, its surge is broken. The girl today can certainly go out alone, stroll in the Tuileries; but I have already said how hostile the street is: eyes everywhere, hands waiting: if she wanders absentmindedly, her thoughts elsewhere, if she lights a cigarette in a cafe, if she goes to the cinema alone, an unpleasant incident can quickly occur; she must inspire respect by the way she dresses and behaves: this concern rivets her to the ground and self. "Her wings are clipped." At eighteen, T.E. Lawrence went on a grand tour through France by bicycle; a young girl would never be permitted to take on such an adventure...Yet such experiences have an inestimable impact: this is how an individual in the headiness of freedom and discovery learns to look at the entire world as his fief...[The girl] may feel alone within the world: she never stands up in front of it, unique and sovereign.

I discovered when I went all out, when I put 100 percent of my energy into some intense, impossible task - when my heart was jack-hammering, when lactic acid was sizzling through my muscles - that's when I felt good, normal, balanced.

Under the physical therapist’s gaze, I am a Tour de France long shot on the verge of pulling off a record-setting victory. Success soothes my aching muscles. I am a phenomenal downhill skier. I can still hear the roar of the crowd on the slope and the singing of the wind in my ears. I was miles ahead of the favorites. I swear!

...bright-shirted racers of the Tour de France zoomed by like fantastically bicycling macaws.

most people don't know what they want unless they see it in context. We don't know what kind of racing bike we want—until we see a champ in the Tour de France ratcheting the gears on a particular model. We don't know what kind of speaker system we like—until we hear a set of speakers that sounds better than the previous one. We don't even know what we want to do with our lives—until we find a relative or a friend who is doing just what we think we should be doing.

The true value of communication is often not so much what you say to each other but the simple, powerful fact that you care enough to say something to each other so often.

Here’s what I was learning: secrets are poison. They suck the life out of you, they steal your ability to live in the present, they build walls between you and the people you love.

Tour de France riders need to eat the equivalent of 27 cheeseburgers a day.

I guess when you risk hell, there's not much left to scare you.

Slowly, inch by inch, I felt myself recovering. After a few weeks, the darkness began to recede; my appetite for life returned. Haven was wonderful; she understood and nursed me through these weeks until I felt strong enough to go out in public, to get on my bike again.

truth is a living thing. It has a force inside it, an inner springiness. The truth can’t be denied or locked away, because when that happens, the pressure builds. When a door gets closed, the truth seeks a window, and blows the glass clean out.

That's how it can be on life's journey. Some people share your path for a moment, leaving before you've had a chance to even become acquainted.

One day I'm a normal person with a normal life,” he said. “The next I'm standing on a street corner in Madrid with a secret phone and a hole in my arm and I'm bleeding all over, hoping I don't get arrested. It was completely crazy. But it seemed like the only way at the time.

Cycling has nothing to do with the Tour de France. Racing a bike is a totally different sport than just being into cycling. Cycling is this therapeutic, beautiful mode of transportation where you attach yourself to this machine and it becomes part of you. Then you can go to all of these new places that you weren’t able to go before, and that has nothing to do with racing. I’m not a bike racer; I’m a bike rider. I love riding my bike, but I also love testing what I can do on my bike. So, in that regard, I am a racer. But if I had been born in Belgium and I had to race in Belgium all the time, I would’ve never gotten to the level that I am now, because the racing over there is so stressful. It just takes everything away from the niceness of being able to ride a bike.

People think doping is for lazy people who want to avoid hard work. That might be true in some cases, but in mine, as with many riders I knew, it was precisely the opposite. EPO granted the ability to suffer more; to push yourself farther and harder than you'd ever imagined, in both training and racing.

Armstrong was perfect for their goals—an extraordinary combination of athletic talent, drive, ambition, and ruthlessness. And once he began winning, he became the chairman and CEO of the business of making himself rich and famous.

Lance is the inevitable product of our celebrity-worshipping culture and the whole money-mad world of sports gone amok. This is the Golden Age of fraud, an era of general willingness to ignore and justify the wrongdoings of the rich and powerful, which makes every lie bigger and widens its destructive path.

Lance is Donald Trump. He might own all of Manhattan, but if there’s one tiny corner grocery store out there without his name on it, it drives him crazy.

Lance worked the system—hell, Lance was the system.

Impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and improper,” read a section of the IOC’s report following the Stockholm Games on women’s competitions. Even

The peloton was Facebook on wheels-and during this period, information was flying.

To their right, behind a row of nearer peaks, stood Mont Blanc, the tallest in Western Europe—a monument to those things humans can crawl their way up but not alter.

We got through it. Haven made excuses for me to friends, and made an appointment with a terrific doctor, who put me on Effexor, 150 milligrams a day, enough to get my brain straightened out.

Mounted on these machines, if equally proficient in the use of them, the average man and woman are nearly equal as they perhaps ever can be in any undertaking requiring muscular energy and skill.

As it turned out, the story he told wasn’t about doping; it was about power. It was about an ordinary guy who worked his way up to the top of an extraordinary world, who learned to play a shadowy chess match of strategy and information at the outermost edge of human performance. It was about a corrupt but strangely chivalrous world, where you would take any chemical under the sun to go faster, but wait for your opponent if he happened to crash.

Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers.22 It wasn’t the goal of winning the Tour de France that propelled the British cyclists to the top of the sport. Presumably, they had wanted to win the race every year before—just like every other professional team. The goal had always been there. It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome.

Dr. Ashenden, in the wake of the confessions of Hamilton, Landis, and others, had gradually come to understand doping from the bike racer’s point of view. “Before, I saw them as weak people, bad people,” he said. “Now I see that they’re put in an impossible situation. If I had been put in their situation, I would do what they did.

When you’re afraid of going forward, you fall. By advancing, you constantly prevent the worst thing that could happen: falling. You might fail, but look at it this way. A cyclist and someone, who is terrified of biking, have an accident. The cyclist will know why he fell, and will make sure it doesn’t happen again; he will continue biking, however. The other person will make sure it doesn’t happen by never biking again. I had an acquaintance tell me something that still sticks with me now: doubt will get you out of action, and action will get you out of doubts.   Success is waiting for you. Stop overthinking it, and move forward like it’s the Tour de France.   You won’t be doubting yourself again.

In 2002 Hamilton crashed early in the three-week Tour of Italy, fracturing his shoulder. He kept riding, enduring such pain that he ground eleven teeth down to the roots, requiring surgery after the Tour. He finished second. “In 48 years of practicing I have never seen a man who could handle as much pain as he can,” said Hamilton’s physical therapist, Ole Kare Foli.

You’ve spent your career inside this elite brotherhood, this family, playing the game alongside everybody else when suddenly—whoosh, you’re flushed into a world of shit, labeled “doper” in headlines, deprived of your income, and—here’s the worst part—everybody in the brotherhood pretends that you never existed. You realize you’ve been sacrificed to keep the circus going; you’re the reason they can pretend they’re clean.

Non, Céline n'est pas une marque de chaussures. C'est un écrivain français. Le héros de son plus célèbre roman s'appelle Bardamu et il fait le tour de la planète à la recherche d'un coupable. Il traverse la guerre, la misère, la maladie, il va en Afrique, en Amérique, et il ne trouve jamais le responsable de notre désolation. Le livre est sorti en 1932 et cinq ans plus tard, Céline se trouvait un bouc émissaire : les juifs.

Any girl faced with daily attention from a gorgeous boy with a cute accent and perfect hair would be hard-pressed not to develop a big,stinking, painful,all-the-time,all consuming crush. Not that that's what's happening to me. Like I said.It's a relief to know it won't happen. It makes things easier. Most girls laugh too hard at his jokes and find excuses to gently press his arm. To touch him.Instead,I argue and roll my eyes and act indifferent. And when I touch his arm,I shove it.Because that's what friends do. Besides,I have more important things on my mind: movies. I've been in France for a month, and though I have ridden the elevators to the top of La Tour Eiffel (Mer took me while St. Clair and Rashmi waited below on the lawn-St. Clair because he's afraid of falling and Rashmi because she refuses to do anything touristy), and though I have walked the viewing platform of L'Arc de Triomphe (Mer took me again,of course, while St. Clair stayed below and threatened to push Josh and Rashmi into the insane traffic circle),I still haven't been to the movies. Actually,I have yet to leave campus alone. Kind of embarrassing. But I have a plan.First,I'll convince someone to go to a theater with me. Shouldn't be too difficult; everyone likes the movies.And then I'll take notes on everything they say and do, and then I'll be comfortable going back to that theater alone.A

Then there’s the superstition about spilling salt. One night midway through the Tour of Italy, my CSC teammate Michael Sandstød decided to risk breaking the rule. He purposely knocked over the salt shaker, then poured out the salt in his hand and tossed it all around, laughing, saying, “It’s just salt!” We laughed too, but more nervously. The next day, Michael crashed on a steep downhill, breaking eight ribs, fracturing his shoulder, and puncturing a lung; he nearly died.

You can grade your performance in a race the same way you would grade a test in school. If you cross the finish line in the lead group, then you earned an A: you might not have won, but you never got left behind. If you are in the second group, you get a B—not great, but far from terrible; you only got left behind once. If you’re in the third group, you get a C, and so on. Each race is really a bunch of smaller races, contests that always have one of two results: you either keep up, or you don’t.

« [...]. Il est certain qu’il y a eu dans les rapports de la Chrétienté et de l’Islam des choses bien extraordinaires, et qui sont très mal connues. Les Arabes sont restés en Provence, dans les Alpes, etc., au moins jusqu’au XIe siècle, mais l’histoire écrite par les Européens le cache soigneusement ; mais de nombreux noms d’origine arabe (noms de lieux et noms de personnes) restent toujours, en France aussi bien qu’en Italie ; je vous citerai seulement comme exemple la rivière appelée Ain (source), qui a donné son nom à un département dont le chef lieu est Bourg (tour ou forteresse)… » [Lettre à Guido Di Giorgio, Le Caire, 22 mars 1936]

…we encourage you to trust your coping plan over the long haul. It is useful to acknowledge your small and daily successes, such as facing things you would typically avoid. There will likely be daily examples of slipups, too, but, similar to looking at a garden, we encourage you to focus on the flowers as much, if not more so, than you do the weeds. As an aside, both of us have taken up bike riding in the past few years. In our appreciation of the multiday, grand stage races in Europe, such as the Tour de France, we have seen a metaphor that helps to illustrate the goal of coping with ADHD. These multiple stage bike races last from 3 or 4 days on up to 3 weeks. Different days are spent climbing steep mountain roads, traversing long flat stages of over a hundred miles that end in all out sprints to the finish line, and individual time trials where each rider goes out alone and covers the distance as quickly as possible, known as “the race of truth.” The grand champion of a multiday race, however, is the rider whose cumulative time for all the stages is the fastest. That is, if you ride well enough, day-in and day-out, you will be a champion even though you may not be the first rider to cross the finish line on any single day’s race. Similarly, managing ADHD is an endurance sport. You need not cope perfectly all day, every day. The goal is to make progress, cope well enough, handle setbacks without giving up, and over time you will recognize your victory. Just keep pedaling.

participated in the grueling competition, which was broken up into stages and went on for days. But in the spring of 1940, Germany invaded France, and shortly after that, the German army marched into Paris. The Tours de France had been canceled indefinitely. Now it was 1942, and the Occupation had dragged on for two long years. Who knew how long it would last or when the race would start up again? The bumpy cobblestones made the bike shake. But Marcel wouldn’t let that stop him. He knew that in 1939, the spring classic Paris-Roubaix bicycle race included fifteen or more cobbled sections as part of the grueling 200-plus kilometer course. Some were even steep hills. He had just rounded the corner of the street where Madame Trottier lived when suddenly a streak of orange flashed across the road. Zut alors! He jammed his feet on the brakes hard and

claque, aka canned laughter It’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s nothing new under the sun (a heavenly body, by the way, that some Indian ascetics stare at till they go blind). I knew that some things had a history—the Constitution, rhythm and blues, Canada—but it’s the odd little things that surprise me with their storied past. This first struck me when I was reading about anesthetics and I learned that, in the early 1840s, it became fashionable to hold parties where guests would inhale nitrous oxide out of bladders. In other words, Whip-it parties! We held the exact same kind of parties in high school. We’d buy fourteen cans of Reddi-Wip and suck on them till we had successfully obliterated a couple of million neurons and face-planted on my friend Andy’s couch. And we thought we were so cutting edge. And now, I learn about claque, which is essentially a highbrow French word for canned laughter. Canned laughter was invented long before Lucille Ball stuffed chocolates in her face or Ralph Kramden threatened his wife with extreme violence. It goes back to the 4th century B.C., when Greek playwrights hired bands of helpers to laugh at their comedies in order to influence the judges. The Romans also stacked the audience, but they were apparently more interested in applause than chuckles: Nero—emperor and wannabe musician—employed a group of five thousand knights and soldiers to accompany him on his concert tours. But the golden age of canned laughter came in 19th-century France. Almost every theater in France was forced to hire a band called a claque—from claquer, “to clap.” The influential claque leaders, called the chefs de claque, got a monthly payment from the actors. And the brilliant innovation they came up with was specialization. Each claque member had his or her own important job to perform: There were the rieurs, who laughed loudly during comedies. There were the bisseurs, who shouted for encores. There were the commissaires, who would elbow their neighbors and say, “This is the good part.” And my favorite of all, the pleureuses, women who were paid good francs to weep at the sad parts of tragedies. I love this idea. I’m not sure why the networks never thought of canned crying. You’d be watching an ER episode, and a softball player would come in with a bat splinter through his forehead, and you’d hear a little whimper in the background, turning into a wave of sobs. Julie already has trouble keeping her cheeks dry, seeing as she cried during the Joe Millionaire finale. If they added canned crying, she’d be a mess.

Un jour vint se loger, dans une des maisons qui sont sur la place, un homme de talent qui avait roulé dans des abîmes de misère ; marié, surcroît de malheur qui ne nous afflige encore ni l’un ni l’autre, à une femme qu’il aimait ; pauvre ou riche, comme vous voudrez, de deux enfants ; criblé de dettes, mais confiant dans sa plume. Il présente à l’Odéon une comédie en cinq actes, elle est reçue, elle obtient un tour de faveur, les comédiens la répètent, et le directeur active les répétitions. Ces cinq bonheurs constituent cinq drames encore plus difficiles à réaliser que cinq actes à écrire. Le pauvre auteur, logé dans un grenier que vous pouvez voir d’ici, épuise ses dernières ressources pour vivre pendant la mise en scène de sa pièce, sa femme met ses vêtements au Mont-de-Piété, la famille ne mange que du pain. Le jour de la dernière répétition, la veille de la représentation, le ménage devait cinquante francs dans le quartier, au boulanger, à la laitière, au portier. Le poète avait conservé le strict nécessaire : un habit, une chemise, un pantalon, un gilet et des bottes. Sûr du succès, il vient embrasser sa femme, il lui annonce la fin de leurs infortunes. « Enfin il n’y a plus rien contre nous ! » s’écrie-t- il. « Il y a le feu, dit la femme, regarde, l’Odéon brûle. » Monsieur, l’Odéon brûlait. Ne vous plaignez donc pas. Vous avez des vêtements, vous n’avez ni femme ni enfants, vous avez pour cent vingt francs de hasard dans votre poche, et vous ne devez rien à personne. La pièce a eu cent cinquante représentations au théâtre Louvois. Le roi a fait une pension à l’auteur. Buffon l’a dit, le génie, c’est la patience. La patience est en effet ce qui, chez l’homme, ressemble le plus au procédé que la nature emploie dans ses créations.

It was very quiet at the hotel, as if there had been a death in the family. When you have quit the Tour, nobody really knows what to say or do. (...) Everything I'd previously achieved meant nothing; all I was now was a pro rider who couldn't finish the Tour de France.

Mais le premier de tous est un savant illustre, qui n'appartient pas seulement à la Bretagne, mais à la France, le célèbre voyageur en Égypte, M. Caillaud. Doué de l'esprit le plus sagace et le plus pénétrant, il a fait en histoire naturelle plusieurs découvertes, une surtout, des plus intéressantes, pour laquelle la Hollande lui a décerné, il y a peu d'années, un prix extraordinaire, la découverte du procédé de perforation des pholades. On avait jusqu'alors cru que les pholades, petits mollusques très-communs sur les côtes de Bretagne, employaient, pour percer le dur granit où elles vivent, un acide qu'elles distillaient à travers les valves de leur coquille. M. Caillaud eut des doutes à ce sujet: il recueillit, près du Pouliguen, des pholades attachées à des morceaux de roc (gneiss), les plaça dans un bocal d'eau de mer incessamment renouvelée, et attendit l'effet de leur travail. Huit jours, quinze jours se passèrent sans que les pholades donnassent signe de vie, lorsqu'une nuit il fut éveillé par un bruit de scie qui retentissait dans le bocal; il se lève, et, à la lueur d'une lampe, il voit un des petits animaux se tournant et se retournant à droite et à gauche, avec un mouvement régulier, à la manière d'une vrille qui perce un trou; puis, après un certain temps, la pholade s'arrête, et un jet de poussière fine obscurcit l'eau du bocal; c'était le résidu de son travail, la partie du roc pulvérisé où elle avait pénétré, dont elle se débarrassait et qu'elle chassait au dehors. Et tour à tour le savant, attentif et charmé, surprend une à une les pholades accomplissant leur patient ouvrage, et se creusant leur demeure, l'arrondissant et la polissant, comme avec la râpe la plus délicate, sans autre instrument que leur coquille; et cette coquille, au lieu de se détériorer par le frottement continu, se développe à mesure que le travail avance; à la scie qui s'use une autre scie s'ajoute, puis une troisième, une quatrième, et ainsi de suite jusqu'à quarante, que M. Caillaud a comptées, et avec lesquelles le petit animal, à force de tourner et retourner sa frêle enveloppe, cette coquille que la pression d'un doigt d'enfant suffirait à briser, perce à jour le granit sur lequel s'émousse un ciseau de fer! phénomène admirable qui confond la sagesse humaine,

Indeed, at 92.5, LeMond’s is among the highest VO2s ever recorded by any athlete. VO2 is reckoned to be the most significant measurement in endurance athletes; it refers to the volume of oxygen, in liters per minute, transported by the athlete during exercise. The Norwegian cross-country skiers Espen Harald Bjerke and Bjørn Dæhlie are believed to have the highest ever recorded VO2, at 96. By way of comparison, Lance Armstrong’s has been reported as 85; that of another multiple Tour winner, Miguel Indurain, was 88. Figures appear to be unavailable for Bernard Hinault. LeMond’s VO2 of 92.5 could, therefore, be the highest ever recorded by a cyclist. By way of further comparison, the “normal” VO2 for a man in his 20s is between 38 and 43.

Cycling isn’t load-bearing because the bike supports your body weight. Studies have shown that some professional racers competing at a Tour de France level have a bone mineral density well below average for their age.

Auditors are to the world of finance what anti-doping lab technicians are to the Tour de France; they both test thousands of random samples each year and find nothing wrong.

Hugo Houde est né et a grandi à Paris. Quand Hugo avait dix ans, sa famille a dû partir vivre à l’étranger pour le travail de son père. C’est ainsi qu’Hugo a atterri dans la classe numéro treize où personne ne parlait français. La France lui manquait énormément. Comme il ne pouvait pas y retourner, il décida d’amener la France à lui. Alors, avec son argent, il acheta la tour Eiffel et la mit dans son jardin. C’est la vie. CHAPTER

The world’s greatest footrace,” Runner’s World’s Amby Burfoot called it in 2007. “The Boston Marathon, the Super Bowl, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one, on acid,” says one of the 176 Americans running in the 2010 event. (Apparently that quote has legs; other variations of it making the rounds involve Disney World, the Tour de France, and steroids.) To Yasso it is “the one race that still haunts my dreams.” It was 1982 when someone in the Boston Marathon—he can’t remember who—told him that Comrades tested the human spirit in ways that no other race in the world did.

Unless you have some need to expedite recovery, like you’re in the Tour de France and you have to do another race the next day, the exact timing of your postexercise nutrition isn’t do or die. “You can just go have a regular meal and you’ll be all right,” Betts says.

But in 2009, even as the British track cycling team was preparing for the London Olympics, Brailsford embarked upon a new challenge. He created a road cycling team, Team Sky, while continuing to oversee the track team. On the day the new outfit was announced to the world, Brailsford also announced that they would win the Tour de France within five years. Most people laughed at this aspiration. One commentator said: “Brailsford has set himself up for an almighty fall.” But in 2012, two years ahead of schedule, Bradley Wiggins became the first-ever British rider to win the event. The following year, Team Sky triumphed again when Chris Froome, another Brit, won the general classification. It was widely acclaimed as one of the most extraordinary feats in British sporting history. How did it happen? How did Brailsford conquer not one cycling discipline, but two? These were the questions I asked him over dinner at the team’s small hotel after the tour of the facilities. His answer was clear: “It is about marginal gains,” he said. “The approach comes from the idea that if you break down a big goal into small parts, and then improve on each of them, you will deliver a huge increase when you put them all together.” It sounds simple, but as a philosophy, marginal gains has become one of the hottest concepts not just in sports, but beyond. It has formed the basis of business conferences, and seminars and has even been debated in the armed forces. Many British sports now employ a director of marginal gains.

One very simple way to compare the workloads of farmers, hunter-gatherers, and modern postindustrial people is to measure physical activity levels (PALs). A PAL score measures the number of calories spent per day (total energy expenditure) divided by the minimum number of calories necessary for the body to function (the basal metabolic rate, BMR). In practical terms, a PAL is the ratio of how much energy one spends relative to how much one would need to sleep all day at a comfortable temperature of about 25 degrees Celsius (78 degrees Fahrenheit). Your PAL is probably about 1.6 if you are a sedentary office worker, but it could be as a low as 1.2 if you spent the day in a hospital on bed rest, and it could be 2.5 or higher if you were training for a marathon or the Tour de France. Various studies have found that PAL scores for subsistence farmers from Africa, Asia, and South America average 2.1 for males and 1.9 for females (range: 1.6 to 2.4), which is just slightly higher than PAL scores for most hunter-gatherers, which average 1.9 for males and 1.8 for females (range: 1.6 to 2.2).38 These averages don’t reflect the considerable variation—daily, seasonal, and annual—within and between groups, but they underscore that most subsistence farmers work as hard if not a little harder than hunter-gatherers and that both ways of life require what people today would consider a moderate workload.

Bonjour madame!” , he was coming out of the bathroom when he saw her in the corridor. He was in his blue towel, wrapped around his well built waistline. Rrlene blushed as she saw him semi naked but couldn’t help looking at his bare chest, which ran down to his flat stomach, further covered down by his long towel. His hair all wet, and there were still droplets on his shoulders. She was moving her eyes carefully from one part to another, appreciating everything she saw with her soft gaze, which was kind of stuck on his muscled up chest and she wondered he must have done a lot of tour de france and twisted her lips with a naughty smile.

Let me start with a fundamental observation: most people don't know what they want unless they see it in context. We don't know what kind of racing bike we want—until we see a champ in the Tour de France ratcheting the gears on a particular model. We don't know what kind of speaker system we like—until we hear a set of speakers that sounds better than the previous one. We don't even know what we want to do with our lives—until we find a relative or a friend who is doing just what we think we should be doing. Everything is relative, and that's the point. Like an airplane pilot landing in the dark, we want runway lights on either side of us, guiding us to the place where we can touch down our wheels. In

Ein Mann war wie geschaffen für die Herzen aller Fans der Tour de France – und für viele, blumige Attribute. Gestatten: Jens Voigt, Radprofi mit Feldallergie, also immer vorneweg. Ein Profi, der nach einer langen Karriere heute mit dem Slogan „Shut up legs“ durch die Szene tourt.

Floyd’s account of Ferrari relating his worries that steroids had given Lance testicular cancer in the first place.

losing weight was the hardest but most efficient way to increase the crucial watts per kilogram number,

the Tour de France wasn’t decided by God or genes; it was decided by effort, by strategy. Whoever worked the hardest and the smartest was going to win.

Here is the secret: You can't block out the pain. you have to embrace it.

To think at a deeper level about my irritable state of play, being unsure of this thing I’ve come to call adventure, I make toast. As I stand eating at the sink, crumbs going everywhere, it occurs to me that, in a horrible stroke of symmetry, I’ve lived roughly the same number of days as adult and non-adult. This is a somewhat arbitrary statistic, other than to say the physical meat of me is no longer prime. Lamb is turning to mutton. I can no longer, for example, share a birthday with the winner of the Tour de France.

Not only did Lance train hard but he also was one of the fiercest competitors ever. After winning his fifth Tour de France in 2003, he defiantly said, “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.” Lance didn’t just visualize success. He also visualized crushing his competitors. I respect that mindset.

Pierre believed sports should be competitions among men and exist for no other aim than honor or glory or achievement. He believed athletics had the power to achieve something close to peace, taking his inspiration from the Olympic Truce of the ancient Greek games and an agreement that prevented the host country from being attacked while the Olympics were ongoing.

Britain had never had a winner of the Tour de France since the race was established in 1903.

Just a few days ago, I’d been in the greatest shape of my life, beating some of the best athletes in the world on Mont Ventoux. Now I could barely make it up this tiny hill. We joked about it, because that was all we could do. But it was unnerving. It shook me deeply: my strength wasn’t really in my muscles; it was inside my blood, in those bags.

La vérité est que c’est la royauté qui, par là, ouvrit inconsciemment le chemin à la Révolution, et que celle-ci, en la détruisant, ne fit qu’aller plus loin dans le sens du désordre où elle-même avait commencé à s’engager. En fait, partout dans le monde occidental, la bourgeoisie est parvenue à s’emparer du pouvoir, auquel la royauté l’avait tout d’abord fait participer indûment ; peu importe d’ailleurs qu’elle ait alors aboli la royauté comme en France, ou qu’elle l’ait laissée subsister nominalement comme en Angleterre ou ailleurs ; le résultat est le même dans tous les cas, et c’est le triomphe de l’« économique », sa suprématie proclamée ouvertement. Mais, à mesure qu’on s’enfonce dans la matérialité, l’instabilité s’accroît, les changements se produisent de plus en plus rapidement ; aussi le règne de la bourgeoisie ne pourra-t-il avoir qu’une assez courte durée, en comparaison de celle du régime auquel il a succédé ; et, comme l’usurpation appelle l’usurpation, après les Vaishyas, ce sont maintenant les Shûdras qui, à leur tour, aspirent à la domination : c’est là, très exactement, la signification du bolchevisme.

In 813 the Council of Tours encouraged priests to preach in rusticam romanam linguam (the rustic Roman language). It was the first clear indication that people outside of the Church spoke not Latin, but Roman. In English this language is often referred to as Romanic and more generally as Romance, derived from romanz, as it was spelled in Romance. The term actually applied to all the Latin-based languages being spoken in France at the time. They are also called Gallo-Romance languages to distinguish them from the Romance languages of Spain, Italy and Romania (Basque and Breton do not fall into this category). The first complete text to appear in French Romance was Les serments de Strasbourg (the Oaths of Strasbourg), a treaty struck between two grandsons of the Frankish Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne (742–814), Louis the German and Charles the Bald, in 842. One version of the text is in Romance, the other is in a German vernacular called Francique. According to the treaty, Louis took his oath in Romance in front of his brother’s men, who spoke Romance, while Charles made the same pledge to Louis’s men in Francique.

where the pleasure subsists in the simple fact that you are doing it, that you can do it, that the challenge you never set yourself before has presented itself whereat the joy of embracing it, meeting it and surmounting it is supreme.

Our virtues are, for the most part, no more than vices in disguise.’ One of his maxims addresses one of the major themes of this book: the fear of success. ‘It takes far greater inner strength to endure good fortune than bad.

One of the most famous people in the world came to tour the city of Paris for the first time on June 28, 1940. Over the next three hours, he rode through the city’s streets, stopping to tour L’Opéra Paris. He rode down the Champs-Élysées toward the Trocadero and the Eiffel Tower, where he had his picture taken. After passing through the Arc de Triomphe, he toured the Pantheon and old medieval churches, though he did not manage to see the Louvre or the Palace of Justice. Heading back to the airport, he told his staff, “It was the dream of my life to be permitted to see Paris. I cannot say how happy I am to have that dream fulfilled today.

Williams was making more than $20 million a year.

No single Barry Bonds home run or Lance Armstrong Tour de France stage win can be attributed to doping, nor did doping act alone. Bonds still had to hit the ball, and Armstrong still had to pedal. But doping surely helped them hit farther and bike faster. Major storms, like home run records and multiple Le Tour wins, have happened before.

Gibney, we gotta win this fucking Tour de France.

the only way back is to spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers so that you can, if you’re lucky, grovel your way back to rejoining that same messed-up world that chucked you out in the first place.

If you shut up the truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way. —Émile Zola

When you look at other sports it’s just ludicrous, really. A soccer player’s touched; he collapses like he’s been shot. Tennis: A player cramps, there’s a break, he gets a massage. But the embarrassment, the humiliation LeMond had to endure. But I tell you one thing: He went up in my estimation for that. There was always a sense that LeMond was … classy but soft. Yeah, classy but soft. He was looked on as being a curiosity, as not being serious. Being in a French team, I tried to fit in by pretending I was French, following the French rules—no ice cream but a ton of cheese. He refused that, refused to compromise. But what a bike rider. What a fucking bike rider.

It was 60, 70 kilometers to go, and I took a peach,” LeMond says. “About 10 km later, I went to a teammate, ‘Pass me your hat.’ He was like, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Pass me your hat, please.’ ‘What do you want my hat for?’ ‘Pass me the goddamn hat!’ “I shoved it down my shorts; it didn’t feel like it was going to be diarrhea, but oh, my God, it was so severe. I just felt the shorts go woooooop! And it fills my shorts, then slowly dribbles down my legs into my shoes. I mean literally, it was dripping into my wheels, it was flying off the spokes. And then everyone separated off from me. We were single file, we were going hard, and I was cramping, my stomach.

diktat

In April, he spent ten days off the grid training with Carmichael and Bob Roll, Carmichael’s affable thirty-eight-year-old former 7-Eleven teammate, in the college town of Boone, North Carolina, in the Appalachian Mountains.

Anquetil won the Grand Prix de Lugano seven times, I think,’ says Brunel. ‘After he’d won it six times, the organiser said to him it would be better if he didn’t come back next year, as he was finding it difficult to get sponsors because Anquetil kept winning. Then, in the winter, he changed his mind and said he could come after all, as he was a star, an important rider, but if he were to let Baldini win, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. “I’ve not got anything against you. It’s for the good of cycling,” the organiser explained. Anquetil said, “OK, but you have to pay me at the start. I don’t want to wait around after to be paid and have to face the journalists. And it’s double the normal rate. If not, I won’t come.” It was all agreed, but when he arrived he went to see Baldini and said, “Listen, don’t say anything to the organisers, but if you want, I’ll let you win today, but you must give me your appearance money.” Baldini agreed and gave him the money up front, so he took all three fees, and he went and won the race. Just for a laugh. It was just a game for him. He got on really well with Baldini. They were very good friends. In fact, Baldini is still a good friend of Jeanine. It wasn’t about the money for Anquetil. It was about having fun. He just wanted to have fun.

Miguel Indurain, five-time winner of the Tour de France, reported a resting heart rate of only 28 bpm. The reason for this is that, with appropriate training, the heart muscle increases in both size and strength.

Livestrong sent a lobbyist to visit U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano (D., NY), who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, in order to talk about USADA and its pursuit of Armstrong.

Willpower might be strong, but it’s not infinite. And once you cross the line, there’s no going back.

a faster cadence put less stress on the muscles, transferring the load from the physical (the muscle fibers) to a better place: the cardiovascular engine and the blood.

I tried not to lie too much. I know that sounds crazy—I mean, there I was, having doped consistently for eight years, professing my innocence—but I instinctively tried to keep things as close to the truth as I could.

I remember being impressed that they were carrying hepatitis vaccine—pretty thoughtful, given how many shots those riders were getting.

Lance called the process “unconstitutional,” complained about access to evidence, and issued what might rank as one of the most ironic tweets of all time: “It’s time to play by the rules.

Reproducing a human is a massive biological effort. Energy-wise, it's on par with the limits of the most extreme sports, for example, running 5,000 km (3,000 miles) over 120 days or cycling the Tour de France.

Chaque matin, avant de partir à son tour, elle nous préparait le repas du midi et déposait sur la table une pièce de cinq francs. Cette pièce, ce minuscule cercle d’argent, était pour nous la promesse du meilleur moment de la journée : celui où le marchand de glaces et son camion sonore se garaient devant notre immeuble.

(...) la vida l'hem de viure com un Tour de France que ens deixen córrer però que no podem guanyar, com si ens haguessin desqualificat a la sortida perquè havíem de ser d'un país oficial, què sé jo, i som d'un altre lloc extraoficial que no pot competir, una cosa així d'absurda; però precisament per això n'hem d'intentar guanyar totes les etapes.

The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.

Climbers are unique racers, myth and fool.

24 A 2010 study in the Journal of Sports Sciences noted that between 1989 and 1997, the average length of the Tour de France rose from 3,285km to 3,944km (2,040–2,450 miles) and featured 17,000m (55,770 feet) of additional climbing. Average speeds should have slowed by 11.3% during this time. They improved by 4.5%.

No one forced us to dope, but in the end, you were either in or out: you couldn’t survive in the sport without doing it.

Lance is a role model known for determination, integrity, and a spirit that never gives up. There is no better ambassador for quality and trusted information.

fallait que je le devienne à mon tour. J’ai saisi la première occasion. J’espère que c’est ce que tu as compris. Mais écris-moi seulement que nous repartons pour Souvarof et je serai là demain. « Surtout prends bien soin de Fifi, et si tu ne peux pas la garder après ton retour en France, écris-moi et je ferai tout mon possible pour venir la chercher. » Oui, toutes ces lettres et tous ces voiliers qui passent, retour des grandes mers, le Verona, le Saint-Briac, le Diogène, le Barochita... qui passent sur le golfe de Corinthe et se détournent pour me dire « Qu’est-ce que tu fais là... » et l’Europe qui tire sur sa chaîne comme une chienne à la niche, et Fifi elle-même qui me regarde sans comprendre, sans comprendre tout ce monde en vacances autour de moi, les miens, les nôtres, « ces gens gentils et qui ne nous veulent que du bien... » drôles de gens, hein, Fifi ?

He padded his training with substances to improve his abilities, though he was hardly the only one. Strychnine stimulated muscle activity. Nitroglycerine improved his breathing, though it risked hallucinations and exhaustion. Ether deadened his pains, even while he rode, one hand removed from the handlebars, a handkerchief lifted to his face. It was tolerated by everyone—pharmaceutical companies advertised in l’Auto, and the drugs were freely given out by team trainers. Henri rubbed chloroform against his gums and dropped liquid cocaine into the corners of his eyes.

Voulez-vous mériter la confiance de ceux qui ne vous connaissent pas? travaillez. On estime toujours ceux qui travaillent.

If you happen to be riding a stage of the Tour de France while you eat the doughnut, or are engaged in other intense exercise, those calories will be consumed almost instantly in the muscles. But in a typical sedentary person, who is not depleting muscle glycogen rapidly, the excess energy from the doughnut will largely end up in fat cells (or more specifically, as triglycerides contained within fat cells).

Mary Verrando-Higgins, an artist and ex-Olympian, embarked on a journey blending sports and creativity. Mary showcased her prowess from the '84 Olympics to the Women's Tour de France in 1985. Running Verrandeaux Visual Communications for 21 years, she continued her fine art while she ventured into Artletic Apparel in 2015, selling it in 2021 due to back problems. Mary dedicates herself to her obsession of fine art.

positive impact on my recovery. (It also helps you sleep if used before bed.) Warning: Start slow. I tried to copy Amelia and did 20-plus minutes my first session. The next day, I felt like I’d been put in a sleeping bag and swung against a tree for a few hours. Rolling your foot on top of a golf ball on the floor to increase “hamstring” flexibility. This is infinitely more helpful than a lacrosse ball. Put a towel on the floor underneath the golf ball, lest you shoot your dog’s eye out. Concept2 SkiErg for training when your lower body is injured. After knee surgery, Amelia used this low-impact machine to maintain cardiovascular endurance and prepare for the 2014 World’s Toughest Mudder, which she won 8 weeks post-op. Kelly Starrett (page 122) is also a big fan of this device. Dry needling: I’d never heard of this before meeting Amelia. “[In acupuncture] the goal is not to feel the needle. In dry-needling, you are sticking the needle in the muscle belly and trying to get it to twitch, and the twitch is the release.” It’s used for super-tight, over-contracted muscles, and the needles are not left in. Unless you’re a masochist, don’t have this done on your calves. Sauna for endurance: Amelia has found using a sauna improves her endurance, a concept that has since been confirmed by several other athletes, including cyclist David Zabriskie, seven-time U.S. National Time Trial Championship winner. He considers sauna training a more practical replacement for high-altitude simulation tents. In the 2005 Tour de France, Dave won the Stage 1 time trial, making him the first American to win stages in all three Grand Tours. Zabriskie beat Lance Armstrong by seconds, clocking an average speed of 54.676 kilometers per hour (!). I now use a sauna at least four times per week. To figure out the best protocols, I asked another podcast guest, Rhonda Patrick. Her response is on page 7. * Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”?

on a seagull poo–like texture when mixed into cold water. Amelia saved my palate and joints by introducing me to the Great Lakes hydrolyzed version (green label), which blends easily and smoothly. Add a tablespoon of beet root powder like BeetElite to stave off any cow-hoof flavor, and it’s a whole new game. Amelia uses BeetElite pre-race and pre-training for its endurance benefits, but I’m much harder-core: I use it to make tart, low-carb gummy bears when fat Tim has carb cravings. RumbleRoller: Think foam roller meets monster-truck tire. Foam rollers have historically done very little for me, but this torture device had an immediate positive impact on my recovery. (It also helps you sleep if used before bed.) Warning: Start slow. I tried to copy Amelia and did 20-plus minutes my first session. The next day, I felt like I’d been put in a sleeping bag and swung against a tree for a few hours. Rolling your foot on top of a golf ball on the floor to increase “hamstring” flexibility. This is infinitely more helpful than a lacrosse ball. Put a towel on the floor underneath the golf ball, lest you shoot your dog’s eye out. Concept2 SkiErg for training when your lower body is injured. After knee surgery, Amelia used this low-impact machine to maintain cardiovascular endurance and prepare for the 2014 World’s Toughest Mudder, which she won 8 weeks post-op. Kelly Starrett (page 122) is also a big fan of this device. Dry needling: I’d never heard of this before meeting Amelia. “[In acupuncture] the goal is not to feel the needle. In dry-needling, you are sticking the needle in the muscle belly and trying to get it to twitch, and the twitch is the release.” It’s used for super-tight, over-contracted muscles, and the needles are not left in. Unless you’re a masochist, don’t have this done on your calves. Sauna for endurance: Amelia has found using a sauna improves her endurance, a concept that has since been confirmed by several other athletes, including cyclist David Zabriskie, seven-time U.S. National Time Trial Championship winner. He considers sauna training a more practical replacement for high-altitude simulation tents. In the 2005 Tour de France, Dave won the Stage 1 time trial, making him the first American to win stages in all three Grand Tours. Zabriskie beat Lance Armstrong by seconds, clocking an average speed of 54.676 kilometers per hour (!). I now use a sauna at least four times per week. To figure out the best protocols, I asked