Lance Armstrong Years Quotations

It's tough to be a 15- or 16-year-old athlete competing around the country. There's tension, there's media. I had no idea what I was getting into.

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.

I joined the swim team when I was 12, and I was the worst kid in the pool - I was put with a group of 7-year-olds.

I want to die at a hundred years old with an American flag on my back and the star of Texas on my helmet, after screaming down an Alpine descent on a bicycle at 75 miles per hour.

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.

I don't think history is stupid.History ultimately rectifies a lot of these things. If you had to ask me what I think happens in 50 years, I don't think it sits empty in 50 years. Maybe somebody else's name is there. But you can't leave it empty.

Twenty-plus-year career, 500 drug controls worldwide, in and out of competition. Never a failed test. I rest my case.

[The] pain is temporary. It may last a minute, an hour, a day, or a year, but eventually it subsides. And when it does, something else takes its place, and that thing might be called a greater space for happiness ... Each time we overcome pain, I believe that we grow.

I am just coming into my best years. This year I did new things; stretching and abdominal work.

If you're trying to hide something, you wouldn't keep getting away with it for 10 years. Nobody is that clever.

I have never doped. I can say it again, but I've said it for seven years.

My career is going to be played out year by year. Will I be here in 2004? I don't know. The record won't keep me here. Happiness will.

Everything in my life is in perspective. OK, perspective ebbs and flows. I've had bad days, but they weren't in the last years. A bad day is 2 October 1996: 'We've got bad news for you, you've got advanced testicular cancer and you've got a coin's toss chance of survival.' That's a bad day.

For 15 years I was a complete arsehole to a dozen people. I said I would try and make it right with those people, and anybody that gave me an audience, I was there.