The Oprah Interview

Lance Armstrong sat down with Oprah Winfrey for two-and-a-half hours.

This is what I saw online instead of commercials.

The much-anticipated Oprah Winfrey interview with Lance Armstrong aired online at 3 a.m. in Spain, which meant waking up in the middle of the night. Thankfully, it started out fast or I probably would have fallen back to sleep. I watched the entire 90-minute broadcast the first night, but skipped the hour-long second part the following night.

From My Laptop To Belgian TV

Note the "Allan Peiper" reference. Twenty minutes after I sent out the release, it popped up on the TV in the next office.

The Most Startling Thing In Cycling

You could have paid me $1,000 and I still wouldn't have said I would ever see Lance Armstrong wearing an Astana kit.

Not A Big Fan, But He's Growing On Me

Lance Armstrong (in the rainbow-striped jersey) and Greg LeMond's
careers briefly overlapped in the mid 1990s.
I don't know what it was that first turned me off to Lance Armstrong. Maybe it was that so much was written about a young kid who wasn't even a cyclist and how he was going to be "the next Greg LeMond."

It might have been his brash attitude. Or that young lady who was always hanging all over him in podium shots who was never identified (I eventually learned it to be his mother, Linda, who had Lance when she was a teenager).

When he started winning - world titles, the Tour duPont, the million dollars bonus for the "Triple Crown" series win, etc. - I started looking the other way. After all, this was a triathlete who was parlaying his way into the sport of cycling. He had no regard for the tradition or how the "patron" of the peloton called the shots (at that time, LeMond was the patron, but not a strong one).

It wasn't until Lance was stricken with cancer that I started following his career. Tragic story. Tragic ending to a career. Much like people did when LeMond was shot in a hunting accident, I wrote off Lance.

In 1998, I started taking notice - and becoming a fan. Lance raced the Cascade Classic a year after I officiated it with my friend, the late Sue Hefle. Not only did he compete (a feat in itself), he won. Wow. Then he finished fourth at the Tour of Spain. Crazy! Americans weren't even racing "The Vuelta" back then.

So it set the stage for his heroics in 1999. That first Tour de France win. I'll admit it - I don't cry much (at least I didn't back in those days) but I did when Lance donned his first yellow jersey. Here I was, thinking no American would ever wear "the golden fleece" and here was a guy from Texas who survived cancer winning cycling's greatest prize.

But as time wore on and the evidence mounted that Lance wasn't just drinking Gatorade and eating energy bars to collect those yellow jerseys, I started looking the other way. It just seemed too good to be true. (And it still does, frankly.) So when Lance hung it up in 2006, I hardly batted an eyelash.

Fast-forward to last September. Lance announces he is coming back. No surprise, really. He was burning bridges with companies he still endorsed through his antics with Hollywood-types. The "Lance Brand" was getting a bad name. If he could run a sub-three-hour marathon, perhaps he could get in shape to ride his bike again, many agency types (and anyone who was making money off of Lance) probably wondered aloud.

So he's back. And he wants to win. And one thing stands out above all the rest - his work ethic. Perhaps it was epitomized in this commercial:



Accurate or not, Lance is training like a mad-man. And thanks to his Twitter feed, I've become somewhat of a fan. What other pro athlete is providing their daily training regiment to me - in virtual real-time? I work with professional cyclists every day. But only one is telling me every day what he is doing to get ready for the season (and he doesn't even know me).

Here's a sample of a typical Lance day - as tapped out on his Blackberry:

5 a.m. - wake up
6 a.m. - breakfast
7 a.m. - begin training
12:30 p.m. - lunch
3 p.m. - massage
4 p.m. - golf (usually six holes)
6 p.m. - drink a beer
7 p.m. - dinner
9 p.m. - bedtime

Pretty impressive.