Family and Personal Life
Armstrong was born to Linda Gayle (née Mooneyham), a secretary, and Eddie Charles Gunderson, a route manager for The Dallas Morning News. His great-grandfather was the son of Norwegian immigrants. He was named after Lance Rentzel, a Dallas Cowboys wide receiver. His father left his mother when Lance was two and has two other children from another relationship. His mother later married Terry Keith Armstrong, a wholesale salesman, who adopted Lance in 1974. Armstrong refused to meet his birth father.
Armstrong met Kristin Richard in June 1997. They married on May 1, 1998 and had three children: Luke David, born October 1999, and twins Isabelle Rose and Grace Elisabeth, born November 2001. The pregnancy was possible through sperm Armstrong banked three years earlier, prior to chemotherapy and surgery. The couple filed for divorce in September 2003. At Armstrong's request, his children flew in for the Tour de France podium ceremony in 2005, where Luke helped his father hoist the trophy, while his daughters (in yellow dresses) held the stuffed lion mascot and bouquet of yellow flowers.
Armstrong began dating singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow in late 2003 and revealed their relationship in January 2004. The couple announced their engagement in September 2005 and their split in February 2006.
In December 2008, Armstrong announced that his girlfriend, Anna Hansen, was pregnant with his child. The couple started dating in July 2008 after meeting through Armstrong's charity work. Although it was believed that Armstrong could no longer father children, after having undergone chemotherapy for testicular cancer, this child was conceived naturally. The baby boy, Maxwell Edward Armstrong, was born in 2009 in Aspen, Colorado. Armstrong announced the birth via Twitter. Armstrong has become a popular Twitter user, with 3,385,486 followers on April 10, 2012. In April 2010, Armstrong, using Twitter, announced that Anna Hansen was having his fifth child. Olivia Marie Armstrong was born in October 2010.
Armstrong owns homes in Austin, Texas, and Aspen, Colorado, as well as a ranch in the Texas Hill Country.
Read more about this topic: Lance Armstrong
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, family and, family, personal and/or life:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters “woman’s peculiar sphere,” her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
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