Lance Armstrong addressed the opening session of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York on Wednesday.
Lance Armstrong, the cancer-survivor who retired after winning a seventh consecutive Tour de France in 2005, will resume his racing career in Australia in January, and will end his season after riding down the Champs- Élysées during the Tour de France in July.
Addressing the opening session of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York on Wednesday, Armstrong said he would convene the first global summit of the Livestrong campaign to raise cancer awareness in Paris after the Tour.
“I cannot guarantee an eighth Tour victory,” Armstrong said as he addressed a room filled with more than 60 heads of state and hundreds of others. “But I can guarantee that the Livestrong message will touch all aspects of our society , all continents of our society and certainly touch all the different aspects of cancer.”
Armstrong, 37, retired from professional cycling in 2005 and has battled suspicions of doping during his career and since leaving the sport.
But he will be back on his bike competing at a major road racing event four months from now — at the Tour Down Under, a stage race held in Adelaide, Australia, held Jan. 20-25.
Armstrong said he will ride in three races — the race in Australia, the Tour de France and the Leadville 100 — for the Astana team, the Kazakhstan-financed team based in Belgium. Earlier, the Associated Press reported that the Kazakh Cycling Federation deputy chief, Nikolai Proskurin, said Armstrong will ride for no salary.
Since his retirement, Armstrong has traveled the world to promote his cancer foundation, which he formed after surviving testicular cancer in the late 1990s. He also has been a staple on the social circuit, attending film premieres and dating actresses and singers.
A fierce and uncompromising competitor, Armstrong has kept in reasonably good shape. He has competed in several marathons, finishing each in under three hours. Recently, he has raced in smaller cycling races near the home he is building in Aspen, Colo., finishing second this summer in the Leadville Trail 100, a 100-mile mountain bike race through the Rocky Mountains. He raced for Team Livestrong, which is associated with his cancer foundation.
Armstrong has said the Leadville race, in particular, stoked his desire to return to competitive racing. Just before that race, he rejoined the testing pool run by the United States Anti-Doping Agency. Athletes are required to be in the program for at least six months before participating in elite-level competition.
Several weeks later, in early September, Armstrong announced his return. He said his return would “raise awareness of the global cancer burden.”
Since then, speculation about which team Armstrong would join focused on Astana, which is led by team director Johan Bruyneel, who was in charge of Armstrong’s team for each of his seven Tour victories. Astana was barred from this year’s Tour because of its involvement in doping scandals the previous two years.
In 2007, Spanish rider Alberto Contador of Astana won the Tour. On Tuesday, he told Spain’s AS newspaper that he would not be comfortable fighting with Armstrong to be Astana’s team leader because he felt that he had earned his place.
“And with Armstrong some difficult situations could arise in which the team would put him first and that would hurt me,” he told the newspaper.
Before announcing that he would join Astana, Armstrong has been adamant about proving that he is clean and not using performance-enhancing drugs.
Don Catlin, a leading antidoping scientist, said Tuesday night that he was in talks to head Armstrong’s personal antidoping program. Catlin, the former head of the U.C.L.A. Olympic Analytical Laboratory, is the chief science officer of Anti-Doping Sciences Institute, a testing and consulting company, and also leads an antidoping research organization.
Catlin said he would aggressively test and monitor Armstrong to create a biological profile of Armstrong over time. Those results would be posted on the Internet for public scrutiny, he said Tuesday.
Armstrong is also broadening his cycling interests and has made moves toward forming a cycling team for riders under 23, and Taylor Phinney — who has been hailed as the next Lance Armstrong — is on the cusp of signing, Taylor and his father, Davis Phinney, said Tuesday.
Axel Merckx, the son of Eddy Merckx, the great Belgian cyclist, will be the team director, said Davis Phinney.