Single Speed Bicycles

• ISBN13: 9780307589842
• Condition: New
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Product Description
Lance Armstrong is a worldwide icon, indisputably one of the greatest cyclists who has ever lived. After battling cancer and becoming an inspiration to millions, Armstrong won the Tour de France a record-breaking seven consecutive years before retiring from competition in 2005.

Four years later, at thirty-seven, Armstrong decided to come out of retirement and go for the win yet again. He was racing for no salary, in a season when his greatest rival–Tour de France, Tour of Italy, and Tour of Spain champion Alberto Contador–was on his own team. The twenty-five-year-old Spaniard had been handpicked by Armstrong’s own mentor, Johan Bruyneel, to be his successor. Now he would be his fiercest competition. Armstrong was about to suffer like never before–and, for the first time in recent memory, appear to be human on a bicycle.

After seven Tour victories–and beating cancer–did Lance Armstrong really need to prove anything? Beyond the thrill of another possible victory, what drove him to race again? What was he seeking–and would he find it?

Cycling insider Bill Strickland had unprecedented access to Armstrong, Johan Bruyneel, and the team. He takes readers behind the scenes during the 2009 racing season and along for the ride on the Tour de France with a dramatic mile-by-mile account. Offering a penetrating and candid glimpse into the man behind the myth, Tour de Lance goes beyond a single season or a single race to reveal the heart of the sport and the soul of the cyclist.

Tour de Lance: The Extraordinary Story of Lance Armstrong’s Fight to Reclaim the Tour de France

Product Description

World champion at 19… One of the first black athletes to become world champion in any sport… 1-mile record holder… American sprint champion in 1898, 1899, 1900… triumphant tours of Europe and Australia… Victories against all European champions…

Until now a forgotten, shadowy figure, Marshall Walter “Major” Taylor is here revealed as one of the early sports world’s most stylish, entertaining, and gentlemanly personalities. Born in 1878 in Indianapolis, the son of poor rural parents, Taylor worked in a bike shop until prominent bicycle racer “Birdie” Munger coached him for his first professional racing successes in 1896. Despite continuous bureaucratic — and, at times, physical — opposition, he won his first national championship two years later and became world champion in 1899 in Montreal. This beautifully illustrated, vividly narrated, and scrupulously researched biography recreates the life of a great international athlete at the turn of the century. Based on ten years of research — including extensive interviews with Major Taylor’s 91-year old daughter — this is the dramatic story of a young black man who, against prodigious odds, rose to fame and stardom in the tempestuous world of international professional bicycle racing a century ago.

Amazon.com Review
Long before Jackie Robinson crossed baseball’s color line, before Jack Johnson spawned a line of Great White Hopes desperate to take the heavyweight boxing crown back from a black man, Major Taylor was setting records and fighting bigotry in one of the most popular athletic arenas of the turn of the century. The “Extraordinary” in the title of this steady biography is not just spinning wheels.

Both a world and national champion, Taylor bicycled to glory on three continents. His name on the marquee meant added revenue and attendance. In Europe, he was a superstar, and treated like one. Yet he was mocked by fellow riders in America, shunned by his sport’s establishment, and died forgotten and penniless in Chicago in 1932. Part of why Taylor should be remembered is the way he reacted to the hatred he had to ride against: “I always played the game fairly and tried my hardest,” he wrote in his own autobiography, which Ritchie thoroughly mines, “although I was not always given a square deal or anything like it … I only ask from them the same kind of treatment which I give and am willing to continue to give.”

Ritchie does yeoman’s service in reviving Taylor’s story and giving it context with a carefully studied examination of what life was like for black Americans 100 years ago. More importantly, he reaches into the muck of the past and returns with a clear picture of an endangered species: the thoroughly decent human being. –Jeff Silverman

Major Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racer