Lance Armstrong recently shared on his Instagram page that he’s been meeting with the crew that’s building the 2028 Olympic mountain bike course near Los Angeles, California. Here’s a screenshot of the post that Lance shared on his Instagram page:
Below is a bigger version of the main photo, with Lance wearing the black sweatshirt in the middle of the group and holding a beer can. We did a Google search for Athletic Brewing and found that it is a non-alcoholic beer.
Lance used to race in some of the biggest mountain bike races in the U.S. in the late 1990s, placing in the top ten at some of those races. Here’s a photo and article about one of those races:
Lance Armstrong was most famous for winning the Tour de France seven times, then having to surrender all seven of those titles after he was found to have been using performance-enhancing drugs.
We recall hearing that the Tour de France didn’t award those titles to any of the other riders for those years because the Tour de France authorities were afraid that so many of the other riders were using performance-enhancing drugs that the negative publicity of such a revelation could destroy the Tour de France.
Jeremy Repanich wrote about that topic in his 2012 article, “So Wait, Who Actually Won All Those Tour De France Titles?”:
“It appears second-place finisher Alexander Zülle is our new 1999 champion! But wait. The Swiss cyclist was a member of that tainted Festina team that had just been thrown out of the Tour a year before. He even later admitted that he used drugs, and tested positive. So Zülle is out. I’d name Fernando Escartin the winner, but in 2004 a former teammate spilled the beans about Escartin’s team’s systemic doping, so that’s not a safe pick. In fourth place was Laurent Dufaux, but like Zülle, he was on that Festina team. Ángel Casero, the fifth-place rider, was named in Operacion Puerto, a big investigation into by Spanish police that took down the doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, who provided the doping fix for countless riders. Abraham Olano finished behind Casero, but he was a happy customer of Italian doctor Michele Ferrari (Armstrong was another client), who has been banned by USADA for giving drugs to his athletes. From my research, it looks like Daniele Nardello should be champ because he’s the highest finisher not twisted up in a drug scandal. Congrats, Daniele. Someone should find him and tell him.” Here’s the link to that article:
Mountain Bike Action contacted Progressive Trail Design, the company that is designing and building the Olympic mountain bike course for the 2028 L.A. Olympics, to see if Lance Armstrong is really helping them with the design and building of the course, and the founder of the company confirmed that Lance was helping them.
Here’s what Woody, the founder of Progressive Trail Design wrote back to us at Mountain Bike Action:
“Yeah, Lance is a friend of mine and he’s in LA a lot so we could just synched up and get some feedback on the course.
“We have been working together for at least 5 years creating a branded trail experience, called the PTD X LA trail experience which we mainly do at resorts and resort communities
“Let me know if you need more info…”