# The Texas Cyclist *A Biography of Lance Armstrong* — Legendary Biographies No. 037 - **Subject:** Lance Edward Armstrong (born Lance Edward Gunderson) - **Written by:** Roland Mercer - **Shelf:** Sport / Cycling - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 198 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-487-2) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Gideon Marsh (ISBN 979-8-90623-473-5) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/037-the-texas-cyclist.html ## About this book He won seven consecutive Tours de France from 1999 to 2005, the first after stage-four testicular cancer that had metastasised to his lungs and brain. He raised an estimated $500 million for Livestrong. He was stripped of every Tour title in October 2012 by the US Anti-Doping Agency's Reasoned Decision. He confessed to Oprah Winfrey in January 2013. Roland Mercer's biography follows the arc from a Plano, Texas, childhood with a single mother and a triathlon father he barely knew, through the 1992 U.S. Olympic cycling team, the 1996 cancer diagnosis, the U.S. Postal Service team, the Tour years, the Livestrong empire, the Floyd Landis federal whistleblower suit of 2010, the 2012 USADA finding, the Department of Justice civil action, the $5 million settlement of 2018, and the post-cycling years on the WEDŪ podcast and the Move media company. What emerges is a portrait of a great endurance athlete and a programmatic doper — an enduring contradiction the cycling press, the cancer-survivor community, and the federal courts have all spent the last decade trying to reconcile. ## Contents 1. Plano 2. The Peloton 3. The Diagnosis 4. The Comeback 5. The Tour 6. The Machine 7. Livestrong 8. The Witnesses 9. The Inner Circle 10. The Retirement That Wasn't 11. The Federal Investigation 12. The Unraveling 13. Oprah 14. The Ban 15. The Institution 16. The Damage 17. After 18. The Mechanics ## Questions **Who is The Texas Cyclist about?** Lance Edward Armstrong (born Lance Edward Gunderson). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Texas Cyclist — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,027 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 198 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Roland Mercer is a Boston-based culture writer whose biographies of athletes have appeared as cover features in Sports Illustrated and The Atlantic. He covers the NFL, NBA, and the institutions that profit from each. His longform writing focuses on the physical costs of modern athletic competition and the complex systems that surround professional sports. Through books like The Fastest Woman, Friendly Fire, and The Bypass Transfusion, Mercer examines the intersection of physical endurance and commercial pressure. In books such as The Twisties and The Industrial Park Murder, he explores the psychological strain on high-profile competitors and the darker aspects of competitive industries. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he spends his free time rowing on the Charles River and collecting vintage sports memorabilia.