In the worst kept most obvious non-secret in the sporting world, everyone held a collective breath to see if ex-Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong would sign up for this years bike ride. Yeah, he is.
http://grg51.typepad.com/steroid_nation/2008/12/news-flash-not.html
Na-hego, WHAT???
grg wrote:
everyone held a collective breath to see if ex-Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong would sign up for this years bike ride.
No I didnt.
I sure as hell didn't
oh good joke, he's not riding
dude i hope he kicks all those euros asses.
You don't "sign up" for the Tour De France. That's like saying Eli Manning "signed up" for the Super Bowl. You have to be on a pro team that is selected to be in the race.
notreally wrote:
You don't "sign up" for the Tour De France. That's like saying Eli Manning "signed up" for the Super Bowl. You have to be on a pro team that is selected to be in the race.
100% Wrong, and HORRIBLE analogy. You have to choose to compete in the race if you're Lance Armstrong. It's not at all like saying Eli Manning signed up for the super bowl. He would join a team and ask to be entered. Lance could easily join a team without doing the tour de france even if the team did it. Being on a pro team does not mean Lance has to compete in the tour de france. Maybe for some nobody it does, but lance can do whatever he wants for the most part, no one is going to tell him what to do at this point in his career.
No, not really. The poster made it sound like the Tour was a marathon...that you just "sign up". Lance did not sign anything. It was stated in the same fashion that so many idiots use when talking about cycling. So many Americans think the Tour is like a marathon or the MS 150.
In order to ride the Tour,Lance must be on a team that is allowed to ride in the Tour. Then, he must be one of the nine that his team selects. It's not like he could "sign up" as an independent rider, which is what the original poster implied.
There are actually several ways that Lance could be told that he couldn't ride the Tour...by his team, or by cycling's governing body if he failed to go about the proper protocol in renewing his pro license, or by the Tour itself. Yes, Lance can dicatate a lot of what goes on in the team, but he can't and didn't "sign up" for the Tour...that terminology is silly and so are you if you think that's what he did.
And, Mrr82, you should know that teams don't announce their Tour lineups until a week or two before the event. So, Lance is not on the Astana Tour team yet, because NO team has announced their Tour lineup and won't until June. So Lance hasn't 'signed up' for anything...he announced that he is intending to ride the Tour, but that's it.