Trek Livestrong

The Story

After three years of retirement, Lance Armstrong is back on the bike and ready to race. Lance returns to the professional ranks in pursuit of more Grand Tour wins and in support of his global cancer-fighting initiative and LIVESTRONG Foundation. The Cancer fight is something that Lance cites as his primary focus for his return- even asking Trek to help him promote his campaign.

The result? On Lance’s new custom painted Madone you’ll notice two significant numbers — 1274 and 27.5. The former signifies the number of days Armstrong was in retirement. During this time, nearly 27.5 million people worldwide succumbed to cancer. 27.5- it’s a huge number, a huge battle, but one we’re proud to help Lance fight.

Lance’s Choice, Your Choice.

So- the world’s greatest stage racer decides to come out of retirement. Sounds like a good opportunity to do something special. Good thing Trek is set up to do special paint for not only Lance, but any rider that wants a unique paint scheme or parts build. We call it Project One — our build to order system that can create a new Madone or TTX from the ground up to your or Lance’s exact wishes.

Lance chose to go with a 58cm 2009 Madone 6.9 Pro fuselage; the very same frame we offer to the public. The ‘Pro’ designation, as opposed to a ‘Performance’ version pertains to the height of the headtube. The Pro version has a 30mm shorter headtube for a lower hand position. We actually sell substantially more Performance versions, but for Lance, aero matters more than most.

The 1274 : 27.5 paint scheme was designed within the Trek creative team, and painted in our Waterloo, Wisconsin facility using no decals. Look close and you’ll realize the challenge in not using vinyl stickers for graphics. Using a complex series of paint masks, each letter, logo and design element is masked to size, painted and then covered for the next layer. The first one took 40 hours by our best painter, but we’ll get faster.