Focus Assignment

Lance Armstrong was a spectacular cyclist. He won the Tour de France six times, winning the World Cycling Champion; he was rising to the top in the cycling association, only what separated him from the rest was he was American. An American in cycling was like France baseball team in the World Series, the underdogs. One thing so great about him is that in the middle of his career he was caught with cancer, but still managed to recover and dominate in cycling. He also started a cancer foundation to raise money for future cancer research. He was a hero. Public have accused him for cheating because of the use of drugs during cancer recovery that might have helped him in Tour de France, but of course the public and the media always find it’s ways to bring people down.

Lance Armstrong was born in 1971. At this time in Plano, Texas football was the major upset. If you weren’t a football fan, or a football player you weren’t with the crowd. As a child, he was very skilled at running, biking and swimming. Of course that meant that he loved triathlons, and that’s what his childhood was about. He started his career by participating in every triathlon he could find, and was starting to make more money then his mother. His mother had problems with guys, divorced three times, and she was a secretary. Lance began to make name for him, and many people recognized him. He was invited to all kinds of contracts and deals and he joined the American cycling team. He soon quickly rose up and would start to dominate, but he had problems, he was not liked in Europe. He was a known as a stupid American, and he liked to trash talk to older, much respected cyclers. But the major thing that slowed him down was cancer, he would not trade this for anything in the world, because he was enhanced, matured by the experience. In his hard times during cancer recovery, he was much scared, but much confident because he wanted things done fast. He could want to kill cancer and the very next day he would be back on his bike. His will to believe in things is what made him survive, and comeback even greater to the public world.

It wasn’t a very long time until he returned to cycling but he sure was a different person after. When he won Tour de France, he shocked the whole world and not only was that surprising, he won it 6 times. He now inspired many people and published many books about his life, stories of hard times, times of fear and love. Lasting words that he said after cancer "Without cancer, I never would have won a single Tour de France. Cancer taught me a plan for more purposeful living, and that in turn taught me how to train and to win more purposefully. It taught me that pain has a reason, and that sometimes the experience of losing things–whether health or a car or an old sense of self–has its own value in the scheme of life. Pain and loss are great enhancers."