BikeMonkey Guest PostEven the greatest sporting event on the planet is getting into the Web2.0 act! Being in the US, land of the time-zone and sports-television challenged, I usually follow Le Tour on cyclingnews.com via their live updates. (Although for some inexplicably crazy reason the live page is in reverse chronological order this year, epic sporting spoiler FAIL!!!)
This year there is a new and improved way to get extra color commentary on the goings-on. Turns out a few of the pro cyclists have adopted Twitter, either haltingly or with full enthusiasm. In this latter list is @lancearmstrong. If you take a look at his Tweets from today you'll find a list of other TdF competitors who are on Twitter.
Twittercounter claims that ol' Lancie is the 16th most-followed Twitt, strange for a retired celebrity from an obscure (for the US anyway) Frenchified sporting endeavor. Except there's this little thing about him being a cancer survivor. And his charity, the Lance Armstrong Foundation/LiveStrong.
Love or hate Lance from the sporting perspective or for his interpersonal behavior, you have to respect this. Following him on Twitter has given me an appreciation of how engaged this celebrity is in promoting awareness of cancer and supporting many programs which support those people who are fighting or have survived various cancers. Highly engaged. Twitter allows him to talk about the doings of the LAF and about cancer survivors every day...and he apparently tries to hit just such a frequency. Kewl.
Medicine & Health
Comments
The Eurosport audio coverage isn't terribly bad, though sometimes they banter about the strangest things.
Posted by: Nic | July 6, 2009 11:15 AM
The cancer survivor thing is just a sidebar to the Lance Armstrong story. Lance Armstrong's household name status rather has everything to do with his being American. If he was some world champion cycling cancer survivor from Ghana, nobody outside the cycling community would know who he was.
Posted by: whimple | July 6, 2009 3:38 PM
whimple, even with his record number of Tour wins, Armstrong would be nowhere near as recognized outside of the cycling community if he had not survived cancer and launched the Livestrong foundation. it is far more than a sidebar.
Posted by: bikemonkey | July 6, 2009 6:45 PM
Yes whimple, I am sure if someone from Ghana had survived metastasized golf ball sized tumors in their lungs, and gone on to win the Tour seven times, no one would even remember their name today. Sidebar indeed.
Posted by: Kerry Maxwell | July 9, 2009 9:19 PM