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.”
Lance 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.
(Read more at TeamRadioShack.us.)
No comments:
Post a Comment