Last night was catching up watching some of the Tour de France stages I had recorded but had yet to watch. Towards end of Stage 4, promo comes on for an interview by Mike Tirico with former cyclist and Texas homeboy Lance Armstrong. I was surprised during an earlier stage when the announcers checked in with Lance Armstrong via remote during one of his podcasts on this years Tour. I found his commentary interesting, and looked forward to hearing more during later stages.

Watched most of the Lance Armstrong interview after the stage was over (fortunately the recorder had continued beyond the end of coverage and bled into the subsequent programming on NBCSN) and during the interview, they not only mentioned Lance's son Luke was attending Rice , but showed a picture of Luke in uniform at HRS with the EZF in the background. I had not previously known about the connection (Lance Armstrong's son, Luke Armstrong, headed to Rice as preferred walk-on).

Kind of a weird little plug for Rice, and with Lance answering questions like what would he say to someone who came to him stating he was interested in doing performance-enhancing drugs, and Lance kind of dancing around on that more than I would have thought--he then pivoted to performance enhancing drugs for athletes in other sports and mentioned his son Luke was playing at Rice, so I'm not sure he ever gave a clear answer. Tried to rewind it, but accidentally erased it instead, so I'll have to go online to re-watch. It did look like Lance had done some work on himself as far as coming to terms (this was 6 years after the Oprah interview), but he was so jumpy during the questions Tirico was asking that it seemed he still has a ways to go with getting fully on the right side of it. Then again, his was a difficult and unique position, and he's trying to re-hab his image somewhat, so while he was clearly trying to be truthful and admitted his guilt, he was struggling to put a better face on what he did and how it all happened.

I did like his answer when asked would he do it all again. Lance said he would, and his reason made a lot of sense: without all he did and went through, he would never have been able to do the work he's apparently been doing to change and grow as a person from the kid who did what he did and was so defiant for so long about it. He's still a fan of cycling, still has his better memories of it, and stated that if all he did was cheat without doing all the other things like race prepping, reconning the courses, team strategy planning, diet, etc..etc., he would not have won any Tours. He said he hoped that today's riders were clean, but was so far removed from things and didn't have, as he put it, "any intel," that he just could not say for sure and couldn't really answer that question.

It must be unique to be his son and have to deal with such a famous, and infamous dad, but it looks like Luke chose a place that hopefully is not as prone to cheat as some of the ESUs may be. I wish both Luke and Lance well this season and in their futures, as well as the Owls team.

Unfortunately cycling-related, but just saw this as well:

Cyclist Bjorg Lambrecht dies after crash at Tour de Pologne