Armstrong, true to form, seems disappointed he didn’t win the charity race. “I did awful,” he says, crestfallen. “But look at Harper. He’s in great shape. He wrote the best Katrina song, ‘Black Rain.’ I asked him to play it at the end.” Every few minutes, rather healthy-looking women come over to give Armstrong platonic hugs. “I’ve got to get to bed soon,” he says, almost relieved at the concert’s end. “Up tomorrow before dawn.”

I ask him what he misses most now that he’s in monkish training mode. “Salsa and chips,” he says. “That’s it.”

Two days later, I sit in on an Armstrong workout session in his two-and-a-half-car home garage. Even with the garage door open, it’s 100 degrees. The brown indoor-outdoor carpeting makes the setting seem like Wayne’s World. Free weights are all around. Dressed in baggy green Nike shorts, Armstrong, shirtless, runs through a sick set of pull-ups, medicine-ball exercises, and crunches, all executed at a rapid pace. Conversation is clipped with grunts and groans. I notice a scar on his upper chest where the catheter was inserted during cancer surgery.

The White Stripes are playing on the stereo. You can feel that music is a fuel to him. “From Lyle Lovett to Led Zeppelin,” he says of his musical tastes. “When I’m in the garage, I put on satellite radio, like adult alternative. Elvis Costello, great, you can train with that. The next song might be Bob Dylan, great. Next song might be Coldplay, great. Next song might be Foo Fighters, great.… I’ve got 4,000 or 5,000 songs on my iPod.”

Nearby, he has his separate bike garage, where cycles, including kids’ bikes, hang from the wall in all shapes and sizes. There’s also a 1970 black GTO convertible. He has me pick up a Madone 6.9 black cycle, a custom vehicle for riding around New York. “It’s light as a feather,” he says, admiringly, lifting it with ease. “Weighs about 13 or 14 pounds, due to the carbon-fiber fork.”

Team Armstrong says their leader is asymmetrically negative; that is, on a scale of 1 to 10, if Lance wins the Tour de France, he’ll only achieve the status of a two or three. But if he loses, he’ll be a minus 1,000. Worst of all, there is no guarantee that the Tour’s mandarins at the A.S.O. will allow him to race. Plagued by doping dilemmas, rider departures, team withdrawals, and chronic bickering between participants, the A.S.O. has become hyper-selective about who races. If the A.S.O. balks, there’s no telling how low he’ll sink.

High on top of his bookshelves, in special alcoves, are his seven blue Tour trophies. Desperately, he wants an eighth. And if for some strange reason the A.S.O. doesn’t “invite” Armstrong and his team to the Tour de France, he plans on pleading his case directly to the current French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. “I’ve already put a call in to him,” Armstrong says. “Look it up. He’s said strong things about me in the past.”

A couple of hours later, I do look it up. And, sure enough, Sarkozy has praised Lance Armstrong. Back in 2003, while serving as French interior minister, Sarkozy commented on how inspired he was that Armstrong had overcome cancer to repeatedly win the Tour de France. Armstrong’s courage moved him. There are about eight million cancer deaths in the world annually, and Armstrong is leading the way to a new consciousness about the disease. “If we don’t applaud and support him,” Sarkozy once said, “who should we applaud and support?”

“I fear failure,” Armstrong admits, during a quiet moment. “I have a huge phobia around failure. And that’s probably a good thing. The thought of losing this thing—anything—I mean, it could be the Tour, it could be Proposition 15. We’re down at the state capitol [and] these guys are debating it back and forth, amending the bill. The thing looks like it’s gonna die. I mean, the tension was so high. Doug [Ulman] looks at me and goes [whisper voice], ‘Man, this is fun!’ And I said ‘Doug, it is only fun if we win.’ And for me, I think a lot of that stems from just the illness and the diagnosis and the process there. Because failure there is death. Loss there is death. And victory is living. Which people just assume they’re going to do. I mean, most people—cancer survivors—don’t always assume that. But I was scared. You know, from that point on, I associated loss with death. And so I didn’t. It was burned in my mind forever.

“I don’t like to lose in anything. Anything.”

Contributing editor Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University.