Its Not About the Bike

I recently finished reading this book about Lance Armstrong's fight against cancer and his return to professional cycling and winning the Tour de France. As he says at the start of the book, its less dramatic and more realistic than one would expect, which makes it much more inspiring. There wasn't any place in the book where I had a slightest sense of cliche. And this is the first time I read a biograhical book in many years, the last one being Harry Houdini's story in some Reader's Digest special book back when I was in 10th grade. Reading the book got me thinking about the state of such sports like cycling, marathon, triathlon, and athletics back in India. For some reason, I find them much more interesting than cricket, which seems to overshadow all other sports in India (except may be Tennis in recent years, probably due to the sex appeal of Sania Mirza). I bet that we as a nation are losing many great athletes, runners, bikers, and gymnasts due to this. I guess thats true to a certain extent in other countries too, for example, soccer in South America and Europe. In the US, there seems to be a greater variety of sports being followed actively. Apart from the baseball, basketball, football, golf, ice hockey, and NASCAR, I see sports channels covering triathlons, skiing and other winter sports, BMX riding etc. Hopefully, that will be the situation in India too some day.

Anyway, thanks to Saket's recommendation, I got intersted in Alanis Morissette, and two of her songs are already on my favourite list: Ironic, and Crazy.