Yellow Jersey: Lance Armstrong and Me

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YELLOW JERSEY
Lance Armstrong and Me

Lance's Story | The 1999 Tour | My Story | A Word to Men

My name is Peter Trowbridge. I'm 46, I'm a civil engineer, and I live in Bloomington, Indiana. In 1988 I was treated for testicular cancer in Indianapolis, and I've been well ever since. Every fall I ride a century, a hundred miles in a day, through the hills of southern Indiana, as a way of saying thank you.

On Sunday, July 25, my wife Karen and I sat in front of the television and watched a man who had the same kind of cancer I had, treated in the same city I was, ride into Paris wearing the yellow jersey as the winner of the Tour de France. I am not ashamed to tell you I cried. Karen says she did not. Karen is not being entirely truthful.

I made this page because I want people to know Lance Armstrong's story, and because I want men to know something that might save their lives. Here is his story, as best I can tell it from the newspapers and the magazines. The 1999 Tour has its own page, and my own story is on another, along with a plain word to men that I hope you'll read even if you skip everything else.

LANCE'S STORY

1971	Born September 18 in Plano, Texas. Raised by his mother. He was a competitive swimmer and a teenage triathlete before he found his way to the bicycle.
1993	At 21, he wins the world road race championship in Oslo, Norway, and wins a stage of the Tour de France in his first try at it. He is young, brash and fast, mainly known as a rider for one-day races and single stages, not a man for three-week Tours.
October 1996	Diagnosed with testicular cancer, and it has already spread to his lungs and his brain. He was 25.
Treatment	Surgery, then brain surgery, then chemotherapy at the Indiana University medical center in Indianapolis, the place where much of the modern treatment for this cancer was worked out in the 1970s. The chemotherapy his doctors chose was meant to spare his lungs, so that if he lived, he might ride again.
1997	Cancer-free and rebuilding. He starts a foundation to help people with cancer. Not many people in cycling think he will race at the top level again.
1998	Racing again, for the U.S. Postal Service team. It's a rough start, but by the fall he finishes fourth in the Tour of Spain, a three-week race in the mountains, and suddenly people start wondering.
1999	Wins the Tour de France. The whole Tour, stage by stage >>

WHY IT MATTERS TO ME

When you have cancer, people mean well, and they tell you that you'll get back to normal. What nobody tells you, because nobody can, is whether you'll get back to the things that make you yourself. For me that was riding. For Lance, it was racing the hardest bicycle race in the world.

There are a great many men walking around today who were cured of this disease, most of them quietly, and you'd never know it to look at us. What Lance did this summer was not quiet. He took the most visible stage in his sport and showed the whole world what life after cancer can look like. I can tell you that every man in my old support group called every other man that Sunday.

BLOOMINGTON'S OTHER BIKE STORY

If you know Bloomington at all, you probably know it from Breaking Away, the 1979 movie about the town kids and the Little 500 bicycle race at the university here. It's still the best bicycle movie ever made, and I'll argue with anybody who says otherwise. I moved here in 1981 partly because of it, which Karen finds hilarious and is true.

visitors since July 26, 1999

E-mail: [email protected]
If you're facing this yourself and want to talk to someone who's been there, write me.

Last updated Monday, September 20, 1999