Too tough to die

Like any champion athlete, Lance Armstrong fields a lot of stupid questions. One of the more absurd from this year's Tour de France came during the press conference after the stage to Luz-Ardiden - a traumatic victory in which he started the day just 15 seconds ahead of Jan Ullrich, crashed, caught up, nearly crashed again, and then blasted past everyone on a spike of adrenaline that you could see in his eyes. Here's what the reporter asked: 'So, Lance are you orchestrating all this drama or...'

Armstrong didn't let her finish the sentence, cutting her off, addressing her by name, and spelling out what was plain as day. 'Uh, Suzanne, this has been the Tour of too many problems,' he said. 'Too many close calls, too many near misses, too many, uh - things that seem like they're worth a lifetime. So, the answer is, "No." But part of the answer also is that I just wish it would stop. I wish I could just have some uneventful days. But anyways [sic], it was a good day today.'

Not for Ullrich. Earlier in the stage he had accelerated on the Tourmalet and dropped Armstrong, but he couldn't maintain his own pace. Then on the final climb he found himself in a familiar position of shadowing Armstrong. And now he was 1min 7secs down on the American - within reach technically, but perhaps not spiritually. Armstrong's violent escape, up through the fog and the serpentine gauntlet of Basque rowdies, put him back in charge of the race.

Ullrich had missed his best chance, Vinokourov was fading, the Euskatel boys - Zubeldia and Mayo - didn't have much of a chance now that the major climbing was over, and Tyler Hamilton was so far back in the overall standings that he was no longer a threat.

All of these riders, at various points until the finish at Luz-Ardiden, had looked as if they might steal the Tour from Armstrong. They were all riding phenomenally well, and Armstrong kept running into trouble. He wiped out in a pile-up on the first stage; he nearly went down on the stage to Gap, when the Spaniard Joseba Beloki crashed; he lost the first time trial to Ullrich by 96 seconds because he was severely dehydrated (he says he lost 13 pounds that day); and he finished behind Ullrich on the climb to Aix-Trois-Domaines. Then came the craziness on Luz-Ardiden. Armstrong has often said 'anything can happen at the Tour de France,' and this year it seemed that anything - indeed, everything - was happening.

Ullrich's impressive form wasn't the shock. 'I've always counted Jan as my biggest, most serious threat,' Armstrong told me last winter, long before anyone was taking Ullrich seriously. The surprise was the strength of the other contenders. After watching Armstrong win the 2002 Tour by more than seven minutes, nobody could have predicted he would have so much difficulty this year, that Armstrong could be vulnerable. 'There's been a lot of strange things that happened this Tour de France and I need them to stop happening,' he said with a shrug after Luz-Ardiden. 'It's just been a very odd, sort of crisis-filled Tour.' Then his demeanour started to change. Maybe he was thinking to himself that he'd done it again - toughed it out. 'I'm a believer in momentum,' he added. What makes him so interesting - and what earned him his fifth Tour, equalling the achievement of Miguel Indurain, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Jacques Anquetil - is that he got that momentum rolling last winter.

Saturday afternoon in Austin, Texas, the warm December air pungent with pollen, the sky sharp blue, the grass plain brown. Good day for a bike race. You're standing in Walnut Creek Park, a terraced ramble of tennis courts, picnic cabanas, and cedar thickets, talking tyre treads with one of the bike hounds gathered for a cyclocross event sponsored by a local sports shop, when a black Suburban rolls up and makes its own VIP spot along the curb. The vanity plate reads OCT 2, and you don't have to think twice about who's inside. You remember the press conference - what was it, six years ago? - when he announced his diagnosis to a roomful of reporters who had grown accustomed to calling him brash and cocky and typically Texan, but who now had to figure out how to address an ashen-faced 25-year-old champion who'd just had a swollen, cancerous testicle cut away from his body and was talking about modest things like wanting to live. That was the day everything changed for Lance Armstrong: 2 October, 1996. Year Zero.

At 31, Armstrong is many things, most of which are listed on the cover of his best-selling 2000 autobiography, It's Not About the Bike , in an order that seems telling: winner of the Tour de France, cancer survivor, husband, father, son, human being. He is also a philanthropist (the Lance Armstrong Foundation has raised $23 million for cancer survivors); an adviser to George W. Bush (he sits on the President's Cancer Panel along with three oncology specialists); and a highly paid spokesman for Subaru, Nike, Coca-Cola, and Bristol-Myers Squibb. But he doesn't do this to raise his profile. 'I'm not a big fan of attention,' he told me. 'Celebrity is a shitty word. I try to avoid it.'

Just before the cyclocross race starts, Kristin Armstrong, Lance's blond, green-eyed 31-year-old wife, meanders over with their three-year-old son, Luke, and their one-year-old twins, Grace and Isabelle. Her parents and her younger brother, Jon, have also turned out to cheer Lance on. It's a few days before Christmas 2002; six weeks from now, Lance and Kristin will separate, but you wouldn't know it from the way the family looks today.

The racers start off full-tilt, dreaming, perhaps, that Lance is out of shape, or hungover, or doesn't care about this pissant competition. For most of the race - an hour of laps around the park's grassy circuit - Lance hovers 20 seconds behind the lead group, which dwindles from eight riders to one, and then he closes in on Will Black, the Texas state cyclocross and mountain-bike champion. At the finish it's you-know-who in front. Lance crosses the line to scattered yelps.

Black hustles over to shake hands with The Man.

'Hey, thanks a lot,' he says.

'No problem,' says Lance, towelling off his face. 'That was good. You made me work today.'

'You coming out tomorrow for that other race?'

'Yeah, I'll be there. Unless I drink too many beers tonight.'

'That's cool,' Black says absentmindedly. 'No! Wait. Do drink a lot of beers tonight.'

'OK,' Lance says, cocking his head agreeably. 'I was going to anyway.' He looks around at his entourage and lets out a snort.

It would be nice if it were always like this - no press conference, no throng, no scandal, no pissing in a cup. Then again, normality is a place Lance only visits.

Lance Armstrong is a workaholic. Though his racing season runs from March through to September, he views his job as a year-round gig. Since he won his first Tour, in 1999, his responsibilities have steadily accrued as his appeal has evolved from a feel-good story about an athlete's courage to one that ranges well beyond sports, tapping into Platonic ideals of willpower, leadership, discipline and determination.

It's demanding work. Armstrong owes 45 days a year to his 13 sponsors, the biggest of which each pay him north of $2 million a year to pitch their products. He puts in another 10 days working with his foundation, not to mention countless phone calls and covert visits with cancer patients, sneaking them into his hotel rooms or slipping into their hospital rooms to deliver pep talks that border on tough love. Last December, he signed a five-year, $12.5m contract with Subaru. Between these agreements, his $4m United States Postal Service Pro Cycling Team salary, and the $3.5m in bonuses he received for winning the Tour again, he made $16.5m this year. That doesn't count the $150,000 he receives for speaking engagements.

Though his friends marvel at how he packs so much activity into every day, the obligations of superstardom are starting to tear at him. He's finding it harder to balance his job, and the needs of his wife and children, with what he wants for himself. The way Armstrong sees it, he has one shot at true greatness - and because his very life, post-cancer, is a second chance, he's determined not to let anything stand in his way. He needs to leave a monument to his suffering, a rock of proof that a fatherless loner from the Dallas suburbs could rise to the top and keep rising. He'll tell you that he's not interested in cycling records, that he just wants to be remembered as the cancer survivor who won the Tour (however many times). Not because his story is so improbable, but because it reflects, in universal terms, the pain he felt growing up. He can be understood. To explain himself, all he has to do is win a bike race.

'I don't even know if it's so much winning, but the fear of losing,' Lance tells me, slouching in a wooden rocking chair, a can of beer in his hand.

It's Saturday evening after the cyclocross race, and we're sitting on the porch of his small cabin on the west edge of Austin. The property is called Milagro - Spanish for miracle - because, he says, 'Kristin truly feels like my survival and the births of our kids were miracles.'

'I don't like to lose,' he continues. 'I just despise it. I mean, if I lost the Tour, I would be incredibly upset. With myself. If something bad happened - an accident or whatever - I would still be upset with myself. But if I just failed on a performance level, on a fitness level, that would not be' - he pauses, rubbing his ship's prow of a jaw with his free hand - 'acceptable.' At this point, of course, he can't even imagine what the 2003 Tour holds for him.

The drive out here - Lance hunched over the wheel of the Suburban, stereo blaring - testified to his competitiveness. He turned it into a private time trial. I was right on his bumper, determined not to get dropped, when we caught a yellow light. That's when his hand darted up through the sunroof, waving me through, as if to say, 'C'mon, don't be a skirt!' Hauling ass to keep up seems crucial, as it must to everyone who deals with Armstrong.

Even now, he can't stop talking about winning. 'Like today. I'd have been mad if I didn't win.' He laughs, snugging his cap down over his monk's coif of greying hair. 'I would have been livid.'

When Armstrong talks to you, he engages mentally and physically in the dialogue. He uses his hands like an Italian, his facial expressions like a Frenchman. He speaks in evidentiary terms, listing examples, citing details to support each point, slapping you on the knee for emphasis. His cadence is brisk, just as it is on the bike, but he is not terse.

He tells me about his routine. 'I wake up and run right to the coffee. It's already made. Yeah, baby! Timer. I'd go nuts if I had to wait.' And about his son, Luke. 'When I get dressed in my cycling clothes, he tells me, "Have a good day at work!" He was cool today, huh? I heard him every time I came around.' And whether it's still anger that primarily fuels him. 'Last year,' he says of the 2002 Tour, 'there was no vengeance, no anger, no revenge. There was none of that_ Maybe that made it less fun. Everybody likes to give payback a bit. That's human nature.'

Did he ever dream he'd be so successful? 'I'll never have to worry about money, and I never thought it would be like that,' he says, looking amused. 'I always thought that would keep me busy. It's an interesting place for me to be, because a lot of times when that happens to an athlete, you see them change - you see their performance change, their motivations, their desires. Mine hasn't changed. I still love it. I still need it. The riding, training, building, crafting, and hopefully, the winning. I just get off on it - the whole process.'

Still, surviving cancer left him with a kind of manic urgency, and he's perfectly aware of what this costs him. 'I'm burning the candle at both ends more than I ever have,' he says. 'In terms of training, fulfilling other responsibilities in the off-season. The last three weeks, the amount of travel I've done, and tried to train, and tried to do local races, and tried to have a family, and tried to lead a fairly normal life... That's hard. I can see that there are ways to make it easier, and I can see the end of it coming.'

He's talking about life beyond the Tour - when the hypermasochistic training regimen is over, when he doesn't have to sleep in an altitude tent - but he really can't let himself think too far into the future. For now, he loves his job. In February he'll make his annual move to Girona, Spain, where preparation for the Tour becomes all-consuming. There's nothing to do but ride.

'Simple, simple, simple,' he says. 'Beautiful.'

Riding a bike is easy, but because the machine is so efficient, you have to go long and hard and often to reach your potential. So you sit on a wedge of leather and push the pedals for half a day at a time, constantly notching the chain up or down to calibrate that burning in your thighs, knowing that if you don't taste the pain now, it will be incapacitating during a race. It's normal for your hands, feet, and crotch to fall asleep. Cycling numbs the mind, too, and everything is reduced to a visceral level. You become a zombie.

On suffering and endurance, Armstrong's authority is absolute. He was born in 1971 to Linda Mooneyham, who was then 17, and his father walked out before he was two. He grew up with a stepdad, Terry, he didn't like and watched his mother struggle to pay for the rent; Linda divorced Terry Armstrong when Lance was 14. His mother was never satisfied with the state of things, and strived to upgrade their lives. 'When I used to babysit,' she told me, 'I'd be in this nice home, and I'd say, "One of these days I'm going to have that." I wanted something more. I had every excuse to fail, but I was obsessed.'

She led by example, working her way up from secretary to global account manager at the mobile phone giant Ericsson. Her son assimilated her drive. In his autobiography, he says: 'Everybody told us we wouldn't amount to anything.' The message was ground into him at Plano East High School in the north Dallas suburbs, where he didn't fit the middle-class mould. He wasn't good at football, couldn't afford Polo shirts, and didn't belong to a country club.

He channelled his rising anger into swimming and cycling, and soon began winning junior triathlons. His victories got him noticed by the US Cycling Federation and, in 1990, he was tapped to join the national team. Even there he found reason to take umbrage: Chris Carmichael, a former Olympian who was the coach at the time, placed Lance on the second-tier squad - a minor distinction - but not to a young man determined to be somebody.

The best way to cope, he decided, was to torture himself on the bike. He quickly made a reputation for himself as 'that brash Texan' by hammering his way to eleventh in the amateur World Championships in 1990. (Carmichael told him that if he had paid attention to tactics, he'd have been on the podium.) Armstrong turned professional a year later and continued ticking off the wins: the pro World Championships in 1993, the Clasica San Sebastian in 1995, and two Tours du Pont (in '95 and '96). He raced in the Tour de France four times before developing cancer, winning a stage in both 1993 and 1995 but finishing only once.

The pace, and his stubbornness, is probably why he ignored the symptoms of choriocarcinoma for six months before he was diagnosed. The story is richly told in It's Not About the Bike . The cancer had spread rampantly, and after the neurosurgeons removed two lesions from his brain, the oncologists had to tackle a 'snowstorm' of tumours in his lungs. He refused to rule out cycling again, so they used a chemotherapy treatment that wouldn't scorch his lungs. He received such intensive doses of the platinum-based drug cisplatin that, by the fourth round, it began to dissolve his musculature and burn his skin from the inside out.

Now cancer-free, he's still spooked by the ordeal, almost seven years later. He celebrates 2 October as his birthday and sees things all the time that remind him. 'I've never been scared for my life like that since,' he wrote to me in an email. 'When I go in for blood work, I see the blood coming out, and I wonder if it's cancerous blood or healthy blood. It's a bizarre and scary experience.'

Before cancer, Armstrong was a talented cyclist with huge natural ability, but he didn't eat as he should have or train as he could have. He was living freely in Austin, with girlfriends, a million-dollar home, and a Porsche.

'The odd thing is that Lance was, by comparison [with his current incarnation], a slacker,' Washington Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins said. Having worked with him closely, ghostwriting his auto biography and Every Second Counts (his next book) Jenkins explained that, above all, cancer made him serious. 'A lot of people have cancer and come away with a gauzy outlook, a determination to work less hard, enjoy their family more,' she says. 'He's peculiar in this regard. He came out of it ready to work hard. He's been given the capacity to be the best cyclist in the world, and he feels obligated to make the most of that.'

Bart Knaggs, 36, a partner at Capital Sports & Entertainment, the firm that manages Armstrong, thinks it was a leaner temperament that transformed his best friend. 'He had to beat cancer with his brain,' says Knaggs. 'He was instrumental in the way he was treated. That's when he started to trust his own noggin. He went, "Wow, holy shit! Maybe I am smart." He moved from a boxer's mentality to a marathoner's mentality.'

Lance Armstrong has built a rigidly ordered world for himself that turns on hard work, perfectionism, and a loathing for the forces of chaos. He compartmentalises the disparate aspects of his life and shifts gears between them on the spot, rarely looking back. Certainly it's an advantage that he has a crystal-clear goal, but what enables him to operate with such singular purpose is the protective shield of his inner circle. He runs this informal organisation like a CEO, handpicking smart and successful people to orbit him like satellites.

'I'm careful and wary of new people,' he says. 'I have a close circle of friends and advisers, and I try to keep it that way.'

There's a certain type of man he's always sought out: older, wealthy, and wise. Men like Thomas Weisel, 62, the maverick San Francisco financier who put together the Postal Service team and manages a lot of Armstrong's investments. Or Jeff Garvey, 54, founding chairman of the Lance Armstrong Foundation and a venture capitalist who used to manage a $1.5 billion hedge fund. Or Jim Ochowicz, 51, Armstrong's former team director (at Motorola) and Luke's godfather, who is a broker for Weisel.

Slightly closer to the nucleus are a few friends - young, raw, determined guys willing to be groomed for service. These he calls 'brother'. Foremost among them is 37-year-old Bill Stapleton, Armstrong's agent and confidant, who founded Capital Sports & Entertainment not too long after landing Lance as his first client, eight years ago.

Six feet tall, with loosely swept-back black hair and a broad face, Stapleton is a former Olympic swimmer who was working in an Austin law firm and hating it when, in 1995, he approached Armstrong about representing him. Armstrong met him, considered the pitch for five months, and chose him because he didn't want to be 'swallowed up' by a larger firm.

These days, Stapleton is inseparable from his client, serving as advocate, personal secretary, and the bad cop who shuts down photo shoots on time, since Lance hates them. He travels with him on every business trip, working out schedules on the plane, usually a private jet (Armstrong has a 100-hour time-share).

Their relationship is a testament to the loyalty Lance demands of his posse. The two men are bound by a simple two-page contract that either side can terminate on 30 days' notice. And loyalty pays well. Considering that the typical sports agent's cut is 15 to 25 percent of a client's salary, Stapleton makes roughly $2 million a year.

'What I like is that when Lance needs something, I'm the go-to guy,' Stapleton says. 'I have a tremendous respect and admiration for this guy. To have someone I admire look to me for advice and counsel means a lot. I mean, I'm a fan. I'm not a freaked-out fan. I'm not a geeked-out fan. But I believe in this guy.'

Busy as Armstrong is, he remains diligent about responding to the 50-plus emails and phone calls he receives each day: queries from Carmichael, checking in on his training regimen; from his mother, asking about the new cancer centre in Dallas that is naming a surgery room after him; from Johan Bruyneel, the director of the USPS team, confirming his racing schedule; from U2 frontman Bono, asking if he can speak at an Aids benefit in Omaha this weekend; from Kristin, about when they should move into their new house in Austin; from Sally Jenkins, wondering if he's read the latest chapter of the second book; from Stapleton, asking if he can sign 600 posters for charity; and from John Korioth, a cycling brother, wondering when he wants to meet tomorrow to ride.

There is one fear that everyone in the inner circle shares: disappointing Lance. 'There are examples of guys who have endured with Lance and there are guys that haven't,' says Bart Knaggs. 'Very few of us are the best in the world at what we do. You're at pretty big risk of not living up to Lance Armstrong's standards. Shit, Lance just expects as much out of everybody else as he does of himself.'

If Lance senses the slightest hint of disloyalty or lack of dedication, you're gone. 'The world is black-and-white to him,' says Korioth, 36, an old friend who now sells insurance for a living. 'And it's a lot easier to make decisions when it's that way.'

Shortly before he was diagnosed, Armstrong had signed a two-year, $2.5m contract with the French cycling team Cofidis. When his illness forced him to sit out the 1997 season, Cofidis dumped him. For Armstrong, it was an ignominious, disloyal move and an incredible blow to his fast-healing ego. (On the other hand, Armstrong has vowed to stick with Nike and Oakley for life, because they honoured their deals with him.) Newly unemployed, he showed up with Stapleton at the Interbike trade show in Anaheim, California, that August and announced that he was about to make 'the greatest comeback in the history of sports'. Then the two sat back and waited for the offers to roll in. Nobody responded.

Armstrong was furious. It didn't register that potential sponsors might see him as a risk, or even damaged goods. He had survived cancer and decided to race again. What more did they need to know? Even Weisel, who had bankrolled Armstrong's first pro-am team, Subaru-Montgomery, and had just started the USPS squad, was lukewarm. Lance took it out on his agent. Stapleton had finally decided to quit the law firm and was working at home for his one and only client when he got the scare of his career.

'It was like "I've made my comeback, and I want all this stuff, I want all these deals, and they're not happening",' he recalls, sounding a little queasy. 'He sent me an email and told me I had a deadline of three months to get some stuff done or he was going to find somebody else. I was sick to my stomach. I was physically ill. I was like "I've put so much into this and I'm going to lose him." It was a real test for me.'

Stapleton passed, nailing down the Postal Service contract in six weeks, with Lance getting $200,000 a year and huge winning bonuses to start. The experience cemented their relationship, but the way it played out - make this happen, or adios - showed how calculating Lance had become. Combined with his ruthless dedication to his schedule, such episodes have led those outside the inner circle to characterise Armstrong as a machine. But Knaggs says the guy he's got to know over the past 12 years does indeed have a soul. 'His assessment of talent, his insight, is not formulaic,' Knaggs says. 'The gut hunch is very good.'

Armstrong's relationship with John Korioth also shows that he's human. Korioth had gone from brother to persona non grata after being forced out of his post at the foundation in 1998. The two didn't talk again until Korioth popped up in a July 2001 Texas Monthly article, defending Armstrong against long-percolating accusations that he used EPO - erythropoietin, a drug that boosts oxygen levels in blood and is banned from use in cycling. Armstrong was astonished that Korioth had stood up for him, and rekindled their friendship by flying him over for the last week of the Tour.

'It was just two dumbass guys holding a grudge,' says Korioth. Now, when Armstrong is in Austin, the two ride together every day.

For every example like Stapleton's brush with unemployment or Korioth's deep freeze, there are instances of Armstrong reaching out and giving people a lift. Stephanie McIlvain has been his liaison at Oakley, his sunglasses sponsor, for 12 years. When her three-year-old son was diagnosed with autism two years ago, she left her job to care for him. Armstrong wouldn't have it. He told Oakley he wouldn't work with anyone else, so the company rehired her and let her work from home, with the sole responsibility of tending to Lance. It dramatically improved her quality of life.

'He sent me this email the other day that actually made me cry,' she told me. 'I don't remember why, but he just said, "Steph, you're an awesome person, you're a great mother, and for that you're a hero."'

Lee Walker, 62, a key adviser who has taken over as chairman of the foundation, praises Armstrong's 'emotional intelligence.'

'Lance has a great capacity for making you like him,' says Walker, who is six foot ten and wears a black cowboy hat that he calls his 'air bag.' 'So it's no surprise that he's got a devoted band of eclectic, kindred souls who would do anything for him, and I think him for us. He attends to his friends.' Walker gives this example: One day, Lance noticed Walker's toes poking out of a ratty pair of shoes. 'Next thing I know, I've got seven pairs of new Nikes'-in size 17. 'Who else does that?'

It's one thing to talk about how Lance Armstrong organises every inch of his life around winning the Tour. It's another thing to watch him do it. He hates to gamble, but when he's keeping pace with the best climbers in the world on some hideous mountain stage and then raises the effort another notch.

Like he did on Luz-Ardiden. 'I was a little bit desperate because I knew that I needed to make the race today in order to put some more time into Jan before the final time trial,' Armstrong said. He also said, 'I guess I was a little bit angry. But that's sometimes the best way for me to ride.'

The thing is, he knew he was going to attack on Luz-Ardiden. He just didn't know that he'd have to do it on a bike with a broken chainstay after crashing. He knows how to put it all on the line.

Beyond the inner circle, the most important people to Armstrong are the eight guys who ride with him in Europe. During the 2002 Tour, the cycling magazine VeloNews calculated that Armstrong spent no more than 14 miles of the race out front, a remarkable testament to the Postal team's professionalism.

Armstrong is the boss on and off the bike. Thom Weisel's company, Tailwind Sports, owns the USPS squad, and he has formal authority, but his star rider more or less handpicks his teammates (only George Hincapie remains from 1999). It was Armstrong who insisted on keeping the entire 2002 squad for this year. He even chose the coach, Bruyneel, a master tactician who raced for the Spanish cycling team once.

Traditionally, to win the Tour a rider must either excel in the time trials and persevere in the mountains, or vice versa. In his first four Tour wins, Armstrong dominated both disciplines. This year, with Ullrich challenging at every stage, it was a different story. If anything, he is better in the mountains, where he can watch the faces of his competitors. And of all the mountains Armstrong has faced in the Tour - Sestriere, L'Alpe d'Huez, La Mongie, to name but a few soul-crushers - only one has withstood his willpower: 6,273-foot Mont Ventoux.

The stats and history of this limestone slag heap are impressive in their own right. Ventoux rises 5,251 feet in 13 miles, with some stretches graded as steep as 15 percent. A mile from the top sits a stone memorial to British cyclist Tom Simpson, who, in 1967, collapsed and died of heatstroke, presumably induced by amphetamines and the half-bottle of cognac he slugged down in a café at the base to refresh himself. In 1970, the indomitable Belgian rider Eddy Merckx, another five-time winner, had to be given oxygen at the finish. In 2000, Armstrong led Marco Pantani over the last two miles and then, in a show of respect for one of the Tour's finest climbers, let the Italian dart across the finish line first. Pantani denied that his victory was a gift, making Armstrong's graciousness look foolish. Ever since, both Pantani and Ventoux have been high on his shit list.

In 2002, Stage 14 of the 22-day, 2,036-mile race featured Ventoux, looming up out of the vineyards of Provence at the end of a 137-mile shot over windswept plains. It had already hit 90 degrees on 21 July when a group of 11 riders broke away from the pack and built a lead. One of them was Richard Virenque, a Frenchman who had won the Tour's 'King of the Mountains' mantle five times and was back after a suspension for using EPO. When this bunch reached the base of the mountain, Virenque surged away. He was seven minutes clear of the peloton, which was being towed by the Postal Service boys, frantic to get their man what he wanted.

Armstrong sat in second position, conserving energy as one teammate after another came to the front. Soon he found himself in a group of five, two of whom -Joseba Beloki and José Azevedo - were riders for the Once/Eroski team. As they switchbacked across the shady lower flanks of Ventoux, the Spaniards took turns setting the pace, trying to crack Armstrong. Slogging up the steepest section of the climb, Armstrong slipped to the back of the group, perhaps baiting them. Beloki went for it. He downshifted, stood up, and cranked ahead, tacking sharply to one side of the road to keep anyone from catching his slipstream. Armstrong followed his move a split second later, motoring around the others and up behind Beloki as if he were being winched out of a ditch. Beloki never looked back to see if he'd been followed, and as soon as he sat down, Armstrong rocketed around him, hunching low over the handlebars in a fury of blind grace.

Beloki didn't so much as flinch. His elastic had snapped. He stayed seated, shaking his head in resignation, knowing that his chance to gain time on the race leader had gone. The only drama left was the race between Virenque, who was still four miles from the top, and Armstrong, four minutes and 30 seconds behind him. The contrast between their riding styles was stark: Lance sat, shoulders still, lips barely parted, legs spinning like a flywheel; Virenque stood up for much of the climb. Armstrong made up 32 seconds a mile over the last four miles, no doubt spurred on by several fans booing him and yelling, 'DopÀ! DopÀ!' In the end, Virenque took the stage, but Armstrong destroyed the peloton, climbing Ventoux in 58 minutes, the fastest ever in the Tour.

Afterward, he said, 'I didn't come here to win the Mont Ventoux, I came here to win the Tour de France. And I have to remember that, and everyone on the team has to remember that.'

Armstrong's ability to crush competitors is attributable to the various measurements of his physiology. Add them up and the sum explains things, such as how he can win without drugs.

For a start, his heart is a third larger than the average male's; his anaerobic threshold, the point at which lactic acid kicks in, is freakishly high; and when he attacks, he pedals at 90 to 120 rpm, a cadence 10 to 20 per cent higher (and more efficient) than most cyclists can maintain.

Armstrong's numbers have been mythologised like no other rider's. But cycling is not arithmetic. Knaggs, who has cycled many times alongside Armstrong, gives what may be the most astute appraisal of his friend's ability to win whatever the cost. 'He was this triathlon wonder child, and for 10 years that's been the story on him - his big engine, blah, blah, blah,' he told me. 'But the genetics is just the ante to get you into the room. He knows all these guys have good numbers; they're all good enough physically. To Lance, it's a test of wills.'

What underlies his willpower is the knowledge that he has trained as hard as possible. The moment he arrives in Girona each February, he officially goes into monk mode. 'I just go from eating and drinking whatever - from having two beers or two glasses of wine with dinner - to absolutely zero,' he says. 'The strategy is you have to get on the scale every morning. I'll start the season at 79 kilos. I need to lose a kilo every month so I can be at 74 at the start of the Tour. A kilo a month isn't that hard.'

He rides for five to six hours most days. No music. No conversation. 'I'll answer my phone if it rings. But I prefer not to talk to anybody.' It's a formidable regimen, to be sure. But there are those who think he gets help in not-so-wholesome ways.

Cycling journalists have always gossiped about Armstrong and doping - as is inevitable with any champion in a sport whose traditions of drug abuse are as rich as its history, particularly when that champion has performed so magically. But most journalists who cover the Tour are reluctant to ask about doping, either because they don't want to taint their love of the sport or because they're simply afraid of getting frozen out by the Armstrong camp. On the opening weekend of the 2001 Tour, David Walsh wrote a detailed account in the Sunday Times of Armstrong's visits to an Italian sports doctor called Michele Ferrari. Ferrari specialises in working with pro cyclists and has been vilified for allegedly administering performance-enhancing drugs. (He once reportedly said that EPO - which can thicken the blood and cause heart trouble - was no more harmful than five litres of orange juice.) He is currently on trial in Bologna, charged with providing EPO to professional riders and managing their use. Until Walsh's article, Armstrong hadn't acknowledged his relationship with Ferrari. Walsh never directly accused Armstrong of doping, but he amassed alarming circumstantial evidence, gleaned from the Italian carabinieri, detailing whom Ferrari has treated; on-the -record quotes from a former Motorola rider and USPS doctor asserting the teams were pro-dope; and accusations of drug use on the US Cycling team. Asked by Walsh if he'd ever visited Ferrari, Armstrong was coy. 'Have I been tested by him, gone there and consulted on certain things? Perhaps.' Walsh then listed details of exactly when and where Armstrong had met with Ferrari.

The article caused a small firestorm, and when Walsh confronted Armstrong about Ferrari at a press conference a few days before the finish of the Tour that year, Armstrong glared at him and said that he had never denied his relationship with Ferrari, had never discussed doping with him, and that the doctor was innocent until proven guilty.

The question is, why not take a break from Ferrari if his reputation is under question? Regardless of whether the doctor is a scoundrel or a scapegoat, don't appearances matter? I asked Armstrong this. 'First of all,' he said, 'I've never heard anybody - a team, a sponsor, anybody who has the power and influence to tell me what to do - say, "You need to get away from that guy." Never once. Number two, he's the best there is.' Armstrong now says he works on altitude preparation, nutrition, and power output with Ferrari when he is in Europe. The thing to remember in the 'Does Lance dope?' debate is that Armstrong's blood and urine are tested more than that of any athlete in the Tour, and he has come up clean. The other thing to remember, however, is that it's extremely hard to bust someone on EPO. The Tour instituted a conclusive test in 2001, but it only detects EPO that's been taken within one week. There is no test yet for human growth hormone, which is thought to be the latest scourge of the peloton. 'I don't know that any cyclist will ever be free of suspicion,' Armstrong says. 'And for that matter, I think it's like a plague that will spread to other sports. So when somebody does anything, from cycling to the long jump to swimming to baseball, they're going to question it. I've been there and I know - it just gets old.

'If you think about what they're doing with genetic doping, I mean, if that happens, it's done,' he adds. 'I don't think they can test for that. And that will be a real shame.'

Aside from his difficulty in the 2003 Tour, his biggest challenge this year has been keeping his marriage on track. Though Lance gives no public indication of tears in the exquisitely controlled scrim of his personal life, his separation from Kristin in February has been hard to handle, for both of them. 'It wasn't a big ugly slam, how we got to where we are,' she told me in April, dispelling reports that they'd had a row. 'We had a serious conversation. You've got a couple that's been together four and a half years, and we've had six homes, three languages, three countries, one cancer comeback, three children, four Tour de France wins, and one rise to celebrity. You're not supposed to cram such a huge amount of events into such a small period of time.'

They seem to have patched things up, though it's hard to see what's going on from outside the inner circle. In late March, after Lance had already decamped to train in Spain, they met in Nice. 'We spent time alone,' she said. 'We really haven't had that. When we were together, it was great.' When I last spoke to her, the plan was for her, the kids, the nanny, and the pets to head to Girona and stay through the Tour. 'We're going to take the month of August and play,' she said. 'Spend some time alone. Have some fun. I think it's going to be OK.' As for his chances of winning a sixth Tour, I don't think even Armstrong himself would take a bet yet. He's changing his routine slightly, however. He started training for 2003 immediately - on the Monday after the 2002 Tour ended. By April he said he was a month ahead of schedule in terms of his fitness. Perhaps he peaked too early. This year, he has taken August off, presumably spending time with his family.

'The longer you try to continue a streak, it's mathematically and historically less and less likely,' Armstrong says. 'I don't think it's any freakish accident that nobody's won more than five. The numbers, the variables, the bad luck - you would think they would start to catch up to you.'

Although he will not comment on retirement, that's one clear indication that the kid from Plano, who has had to fight all his life, believes victory number six could be his last battle.