Armstrong Is Planning to Make Another Tour

Lance Armstrong is not ready to quit the Tour de France.

Armstrong, the Texas cancer survivor who set a record last year by becoming the first man to win the grueling 22-day cycling race for a sixth consecutive time, announced Wednesday that he would ride again this summer.

After he won the 2004 race by a commanding margin of 6 minutes 19 seconds over runner-up Andreas Kloden of Germany, Armstrong said he might skip this year’s race.

The team Armstrong had ridden for -- United States Postal Service -- was taken over by Discovery Channel, and Armstrong suggested he might take a year away from the world’s most renowned cycling event to concentrate on winning some of the sport’s other classic events.

Armstrong’s critics have said he should not be considered in the same light as legendary Belgian Eddy Merckx, because Armstrong hasn’t won the other races known as Grand Tours -- the Giro d’Italia, Italy’s race, or the Vuelta, the tour of Spain. And Armstrong has said he would like to break the world indoor speed record.

But on the Discovery Channel team website Wednesday, Armstrong said, “I am grateful for the opportunity that Discovery Communications has given the team and look forward to achieving my goal of a seventh Tour de France.”

Just last month, Armstrong told a Houston Chronicle reporter that he would definitely be in France this summer, “but it just might not be on the bike.”

But last week, appearing on Oprah Winfrey’s show with his girlfriend, rock singer Sheryl Crow, Armstrong said he was definitely going to ride in a seventh Tour. He was vague on whether that would be this year or next.

On the website, Armstrong said, “I am excited to get back on the bike and start racing, although my condition is far from perfect.”

Usually at this time of year, Armstrong is sequestered at his home in Spain, deep into serious Tour training. But last weekend, Armstrong was in Los Angeles at the Grammy Awards, where he and Crow presented an award.

Discovery Team spokesman Dan Osipow said Armstrong would head to Europe by the end of the month and would return to the U.S. in April to defend his title in the Tour of Georgia, a five-day race.

Jan Ullrich, the German who won the Tour de France in 1997 and is a five-time runner-up, told Associated Press, “It’s good that he is here. The best should be at the Tour.”

Kloden, last year’s surprise runner-up, said, “I always said Lance would ride. I’m glad he’s here.”

Armstrong said his first race this year will be the Paris-Nice stage race in March and that he also will participate in the Tour of Flanders in April.

This year’s 2,222-mile, 21-stage Tour de France, which is scheduled from July 2-24, will include stages in Germany, where Ullrich and Kloden should be warmly welcomed. The route has been flattened, with less taxing mountaintop finishes and nothing as extreme as last year’s time trial up 21-switchback L’Alpe d’Huez, a stage where Armstrong dominated and cemented his victory.

Time trials are also shorter, and some experts predicted Armstrong would skip the Tour because it seemed clear the stages where Armstrong was most likely to dominate have been tamed.

But the same was said last year when the Tour was backloaded, with all the mountain climbing scheduled for the last 10 days. Considered too old to handle that challenge by skeptics, Armstrong had the strongest finish of his career. He will be nearly 34 when this Tour begins, an age when previous great champions have faded.

Yet just last year, Armstrong won five solo stages, plus pushed his U.S. Postal Service riders to the team trial win in perhaps his greatest sustained performance.