Lance Armstrong Comeback Highlights Cancer Epidemic
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Lance Armstrong may be a contender for the Tour de France title once again this year, but he says that making governments aware of the need to invest in cancer research is a more important goal.
Lance Armstrong has campaigned tirelessly in the USA to make people aware of the scale of the threat of cancer and set up the Lance Armstrong/LIVESTRONG Foundation (LAF) as a tool to battle the disease.
He has returned to his professional cycling career to use it as a platform to campaign for a global awareness and response to the threat of cancer. Armstrong kicked off the first 145-kilometre stage of the Tour Down Under in Sydney last Tuesday.
Armstrong survived testicular cancer to go on and win his first Tour de France in 1999. He went on to win the gruelling race a further six times before going into retirement in 2005.
According to the LAF, cancer kills more people worldwide than malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS combined. The aim of the LAF is to work with world leaders to focus on developing international partnerships to advocate research and data collection into the causes and effects of cancer and to encourage them to spend more resources on fighting the disease.
At a press conference in Australia yesterday, Armstrong claimed that 27.5 million people had died of cancer in the last 3.5 years in the face of worldwide complacency about the disease.
The LAF believes that people with cancer often suffer in isolation, and that increased mortality due to cancer can be traced to poorly resourced cancer awareness campaigns, screening, prevention, treatment and care relating to the illness. Early detection could mean that about 30 per cent of cancers could be cured if detected early enough.
Of his ambitions in the Tour Down Under, Armstrong said,”Failure would be a broken collarbone,” he said.
“If I were the first guy dropped on Tuesday that would be a failure. That would not be good. But I don’t have any clear ambitions or standards in my mind. To me it’s successful just being here and getting into racing earlier than I would have. I have a job to do and my job is to train hard and try to be the best bike rider I can be and take this (anticancer) message around the world – and it kicks off here.”
