Lance Armstrong will ride for Astana team in return to cycling
The seven-time Tour de France winner says he will compete in Australia in January, though the federation head for the Kazakhstan-based team indicated he'd ride in five races.
NEW YORK -- Lance Armstrong won his first seven Tour de France titles with Johan Bruyneel as his team director. No way would he try for No. 8 without him.
Armstrong will ride for Bruyneel's Astana team as he seeks to win the 2009 Tour, he said Wednesday. Kazakh Cycling Federation deputy chief Nikolai Proskurin told The Associated Press that Armstrong agreed to ride for the Kazakhstan-based team for free the first year and has signed up to take part in five races, including the Tour de France.
He has dedicated his comeback to raising global awareness for the fight against cancer. It also offers him an opportunity to try to prove that he is clean to skeptics who doubted that he could have achieved his feats without using performance-enhancing drugs.
Armstrong announced that anti-doping expert Don Catlin will run an independent program to test the rider. Catlin oversaw testing for anabolic agents at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and ran the country's first anti-doping lab at UCLA for 25 years. He now runs Anti-Doping Research, a nonprofit organization he founded to research performance-enhancing drugs, uncover new drugs being used illegally and develop tests to detect them.
"Ultimately you have one of the world's leading experts to validate the performance," Armstrong said.
Armstrong said the only major race before the Tour that he knows he will definitely compete in so far is the Tour Down Under in Adelaide, Australia, in January.
Earlier, in a speech to an audience full of political and corporate leaders at the Clinton Global Initiative, he announced that his foundation was committing $8 million over five years to expand its fight against cancer from the U.S. to underserved parts of the world such as Africa and South America.
"For us as Americans, for us as an international community, if we are not supplying the medicine we have to the people who need it the most, we are failing morally and ethically," Armstrong said.
What the rest of the Astana team will look like is unclear. Alberto Contador, the 2007 Tour de France champ, might already be looking for a new team.
"I think I've earned the right to be the leader of a team without having to fight for my place," the Spanish rider said Tuesday in AS newspaper. "And with Armstrong some difficult situations could arise in which the team would put him first and that would hurt me."
