Graham Watson and Lance Armstrong have collaborated on a coffee table book called Lance Armstrong: Images of a Champion that was just released by Rodale Books. This is a 208-page coffee table book full of Graham Watson photos of Lance Armstrong’s career from 1992 to the end of last season. It includes a significant number of photos from Lance Armstrong’s pre-cancer career– a period of time where he won quite a few races, including the World Road Cycling Championship, the U.S. Pro Cycling Championship, the Tour duPont, and Fleche Wallone.
Graham Watson is one of the greatest cycling photographers in history and he has covered nearly every event in which Armstrong has appeared for more than a decade. He and Lance began working on this project during the winter, selecting 250 color images from more than 1,000 photos that had been pulled out of Graham’s collection. Lance Armstrong wrote the photo captions. Robin Williams wrote the forward.
CyclingNews.com published a few sample photos from the book on its website.
I put Lance Armstrong: Images of a Champion on my Amazon.com Wish List as soon as I saw it, but I haven’t had time to comment about it. It looks like a great book to add to my living room bookshelf. My wife and I pull illustrated books off those shelves from time to time for entertainment and inspiration. This book would be both entertaining and inspirational to me.
I wondered about the timing of this book– did it seem like a career retrospective? In a way it is, but the career of a great champion like Lance Armstrong is too big for any one photo book or biography. I’m sure they’ll be a second edition of this book or a second volume someday, depending on how long Lance continues to race professionally.