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Customer Rating: 
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List Price: $25.00
Our Price: $11.99
Your Save: $ 13.01 ( 52% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
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Product Description
On the tour and inside the mind of Johan Bruyneel, the winningest team leader in cycling history and the mastermind behind the success of the world's most celebrated champion, Lance Armstrong Johan Bruyneel knows what it takes to win. In 1998, this calculating Belgian and former professional cyclist looked a struggling rider and cancer survivor in the eye and said, "Look, if we're going to ride the Tour, we might as well win." In that powerful phrase a dynasty was born. With Bruyneel as his team director, Lance Armstrong seized a record seven straight Tour de France victories. In the meantime, Bruyneel innovated the sport of cycling and went on to prove he could win without his superstar -- in 2007 he took the Tour de France title with a young new team and a lot of nerve, sealing his place in sports history forever. We Might as Well Win takes readers behind the scenes of this amazing nine-year journey through the Alps and the Pyrenees, revealing a radical recipe for winning that readers can adapt from the bike to the boardroom to life. We witness Bruyneel's near-death crash and comeback as a rider. We are privy to the many ways he and Armstrong outsmarted their opponents. We listen in on the team's race radios to hear the secret strategies that inspire greatness from a disparate team. We learn how to make sure "not winning" isn't the same as "losing" as Bruyneel struggles to prove himself -- post-Armstrong -- with new riders, new strategies, and skeptics around every corner. Whether mounting a difficult climb, or managing a team of thirty riders and forty support staff from a miniature car hurtling along narrow European roads, or looking a future legend in the eye and willing him to believe, Bruyneel is, and has always been, the consummate winner. Readers will relish this inside tour.
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Customer Review(s)
Customer Rating:  Summary: 4.5 Stars... Excellent 'memoir' for Tour de France aficionados (and more) Comment: Johan Bruyneel, the team director of the US Postal/Discovery teams from 1999 to 2007, hails from Belgium (as do I), and I kinda grew up with him watching him on TV (he is 4 years younger than me, yea I'm giving away my age here). After a somewhat unremarkable professional cycling career (the highlight being wearing the yellow jersey in the 1999 Tour for one day), Bruyneel struck a bond with Lance Armstrong, and at the young age of 34 became the team director for the US Postal team.
"We Might As Well Win: On the Road to Success With the Mastermind Behind Eight Tour de France" (224 pages) brings Bruyneel's musing on what it was like to be Lance Armstrong's team director, and what a delight it is to read. Bruyneel is his humble self, even though confident all the way through. The title of the book comes from a conversation with Lance Armstrong, after he recovered from cancer, when they discussed their tactics for entering the 1999 tour: if they were gonna enter the race, 'might as well win it'. And win they did. The beauty of this book is that it gives insights on how determined all of them were in winning the Tour, again and again. But the hardest test for Bruyneel comes after Lance retires in 2005, and heads a team in 2006 and 2007 without Lance, posing the question "whether I was a team director who had won seven Tours thanks to one rider, or whether I was a winner in my own right" (Alberto Contador won the Tour in 2007 for Bruyneel's team).
If your interest in professional cycling is limited to the Tour de France, this book is not for you. The book oozes of great details on other things going on in the sport, including the Tour of Georgia, the one day Classics (such as Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders), etc. Bruyneel's musings are fund to read, and this book flies by in no time. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED reading for professional cycling aficionados.
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