I guess if I looked at it from an athletic standpoint, I don't really need to win another Tour. Seven Tours for me was a dream, six broke the record, so that eight doesn't really mean much.

Obviously, I come from one background, and the people that design fitness equipment have been doing it for years and years, and they know what works and doesn't work.

My mother told me...if you're going to get anywhere, you're going to have to do it yourself, because no one is going to do it for you.

If you worried about falling off the bike, you'd never get on.

Athletes don't have much use for poking around in their childhoods, because, introspection doesn't get you anywhere in a race.

I have never doped … I have competed as an endurance athlete for 25 years with no spike in performance, passed more than 500 drug tests and never failed one.

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.