Andy Tullis / The BulletinChris Horner, center, enjoys a moment together with his 14-year-old son Garrett, his 11<2044>2-year-old son Wyatt, and his wife Megan on the front porch of their Bend home this week.

Chris Horner is realistic about his age, but he is not ready to give up bike racing just yet.

The longtime Bend resident and seven-time Tour de France rider is 44 now, yet only three years removed from winning the Vuelta a España, one of cycling’s three Grand Tours.

Riding on the Lupus Racing Team this season, Horner has posted some mixed results. But he and his team are set to race at next week’s Cascade Cycling Classic in Central Oregon, and he hopes to go for a stage win in his home race.

The father of four says he thinks about retirement all the time, especially because he has been battling a persistent bacterial lung infection for two years.

“At this age, you wake up in the morning and it’s always hard getting out of bed,” Horner says with a laugh. “You go out and mow the lawn and the next day it’s hard getting out of bed. I’m factoring in all these things daily. On the bike I could be factoring it in every 10 minutes. Am I ready to retire? Nope, not yet. Maybe. Not yet.”

Horner’s highlights this season are few and far between — 13th overall in the Tour de Beauce in Quebec and ninth overall in the Tour of the Gila in New Mexico — and Horner does not even consider those highlights.

“I’m used to winning, so I don’t look at it as a highlight,” he says. “I’m used to being the guy in the front group that’s causing the action and the pain and instead I’m the last guy in the front group who’s like, ‘Hey, can we slow down up there?’ Right now I’m just trying to ride it out and see if the lungs get better. It’d be nice to keep racing my bike.”

Still, Horner takes solace in the fact that he has ridden in the lead group in most of his longer climbing stages this season, despite being about 20 years older than many of his counterparts and despite his illness.

Horner finished 17th in the 2014 Tour de France, the last time he competed in pro cycling’s biggest race. He placed as high as ninth, in 2010.

Most notable, Horner won the 21-stage Vuelta in 2013 at the age of 41, the oldest ever to win a Grand Tour.

Horner says he has been fighting his lung infection since the 2014 Tour de France, taking several rounds of antibiotics over the past two years to try to clear his lungs. Now, he says, he has been off medication for more than two months and he is breathing better than he has in the past two years.

“That’s good because when you’re on the medication it helps the lungs, but it also wrecks the legs,” Horner says. “You get better lungs, but you get worse health conditions overall.”

Still, Horner says he is riding only about 300 to 450 miles per week, compared with his more typical 550 to 650 miles per week.

“It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s because I can’t physically,” he says.

Racing for Airgas-Safeway last season, Horner finished 12th overall in the Cascade Cycling Classic. He finished second overall at the CCC in 2001, and he won the Downtown Criterium in 2003 before his success led him to racing in Europe.

Horner grew up in San Diego, but he has lived in Bend for the past 16 years, so winning a stage of the Cascade in front of so many friends and family members would be memorable.

“It’d be nice to win something here,” Horner says. “The best to win, most exciting to win, of course, is the Downtown Criterium. All of Bend is down to watch that. (In 2003), I went into the last two corners full sprinting, no brakes, and it was crash and die, or win the race. And I won by like half a wheel.”

One of Horner’s teammates on the Lupus Racing Team, Nicolae Tanovitchii of Moldova, held the leader’s jersey after the time trial last year at the CCC while racing for Jelly Belly. He finished the five-stage race eighth overall.

“If he comes back with that same form, Lupus will be winning the race,” Horner says. “I might be riding the front for Nicolae. I’m still there to help the guys win, but the main objective is to get healthy and start winning races (myself) again, too.”

When retirement from bike racing does come, Horner will have much to keep him busy. He has a 1½-year-old son with his wife, Megan, and three teenage children from a previous relationship.

Being the father of a toddler again in his mid-40s has its ups and downs — but Horner loves it.

“At his age it’s just amazing, because everything they’re doing is just new and exciting,” Horner says with enthusiasm. “You walk in the door, and they’re just like, dad’s home, this is cool. And it’s hard, of course. Every parent understands the good comes with the bad. We’re in the stage now where he’s sleeping 10 hours a night, so he’s going pretty easy on us and he’s just a bundle of fun at the moment.”

When his racing career is over, Horner says, he hopes to stay in the cycling business, perhaps coaching or running his own cycling team. Megan has her own business, and Horner says he has made enough money in his career that he will not require a job immediately after leaving bike racing.

“But I’ve still got to work until I retire,” he says. “I just want to stay around the bike, in general, which is what I’ve done my whole life.”

This month, when not racing or training, Horner has watched the Tour de France on television with a heavy heart. He watched this week, flabbergasted, as the favorite Chris Froome pulled away on a descent to take the overall lead and, as he saw it, none of the other riders worked to catch him.

Horner calls it “devastating” to watch the Tour on TV, yet he still feels he MUST watch it.

“I’m watching because I love to and I can’t turn it off,” he says. “I think every athlete who’s raced at that level is going to go home and still have heartbreak when they’re watching it on TV. They’re still gonna want to be there, still gonna want to go back.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0318,

mmorical@bendbulletin.com