Armstrong's challenge was getting to the start

Bonnie DeSimone will be covering her sixth Tour de France this year.

I knocked on Lance Armstrong's hotel room door after his massage and before dinner, and he told me to come in.

The interview wasn't difficult to set up. All I had to do was ask. There wasn't a horde of reporters demanding face time with Armstrong in late January 1998 when I spent a couple of days in the sleepy inland town of Ramona, Calif., outside San Diego, where the US Postal Service team was holding its preseason training camp.

The world's attention was elsewhere. Lurid rumors were starting to filter out of Washington about President Bill Clinton and a young White House intern. Opening Ceremonies for the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, were two weeks away.

Few people outside of cycling knew or cared that a former precocious world champion was about to enter a professional bike race for the first time since cancer had rampaged through his body, attacking one organ after another.

Armstrong was 26. He was 15 pounds leaner than he had been two years before. He was engaged to be married that May. People contacted him every week to talk about surviving cancer -- the freshly diagnosed; the ones in treatment; the ones, like him, who were still sweating out their checkups every couple of months.

He didn't know whether he would hold together physically under the rigors of his sport, and he had allowed himself to contemplate the alternative.

''I'm going in with an open mind," he said. ''It might sound bad, but I don't really have any goals or any expectations.

''I don't need the sport of European cycling to be happy," he said a little later, with a faintly disdainful emphasis on the adjective. ''I didn't know that. I thought that was my life, and without it I would be devastated.

''My redemption is that I can walk away and be happy."

Armstrong has come around to where he began that training camp. Then as now, there was some doubt as to what would happen when he wheeled up to the start line. He was an unknown quantity in 1998, with his last victories quickly receding in the rearview mirror. He is a fully known quantity in 2005, but people are questioning whether he is too old and has devoured the Tour de France too many times to remain hungry.

He certainly doesn't need European cycling anymore. He could have walked away after last year having left that perfect image, the caught-in-amber Michael Jordan follow-through in the NBA Finals that would come later the same year.

Armstrong could have walked away happy after six Tour wins, presumably, having broken a record in a century-old event that Americans only gate-crashed 24 years ago. But there were practical reasons to ride again and they trumped the sentimental arguments against taking the chance.

There was a contract, a new team sponsor ponying up $30 million over three years, his future beyond cycling, his stated desire to see the team built around him continue to excel without him.

Armstrong decided not to hedge his bet. He upped it instead, making this Tour his last race, win or lose. He needed the motivation. Besides, he likes the odds. He's still the favorite. He is gambling, probably correctly, that although losing next month would be a little like adding a dissonant coda to a masterful symphony, it wouldn't drown out what he has accomplished.

Taking that risk is completely in character, and it does have something to do with the fact that he beat cancer. But Armstrong didn't spring from his hospital bed fully formed as a Tour de France champion.

He took more than a year to learn, and it started in Ramona when he had to live with uncertainty.

Back in his hotel room in January 1998, Armstrong sat on one bed and I sat across from him on the other. There probably weren't two chairs in the room. It was much like mine, which to the best of my recollection had wood paneling, a brown shag rug, and a television mounted on a floor stand and went for $65 a night.

I tried, and failed, to spend more than $10 on dinner in town. The riders were taking their meals at the Sizzler steakhouse across the parking lot and got a $20 per diem to cover incidentals. Postal wasn't the juggernaut it later became. The team would conduct its entire European campaign that season out of a cramped camping van rented from one of the mechanics.

We talked until the room got dark and I could only see Armstrong in silhouette. When I transcribed the tape of the interview in my peculiar shorthand, it filled five single-spaced pages.

I asked Armstrong about his fitness level. Later, when I typed his response, I inserted (big sigh).

''I feel as strong as I ever have in January," he said, somewhat unconvincingly. And then: ''I hate to even speculate, because I don't want to get into these races and get demoralized."

This was mere weeks before he would become discouraged, quit, and be persuaded to remount his bike on misty Beech Mountain in North Carolina in a now-fabled conversion scene.

It was mere months before the Festina doping scandal blew up the '98 Tour and ensured that any future cycling champion would be suspect, and that the biggest champion of all would have to deal with more allegations than anyone else.

Later that summer, Armstrong would finish fourth in the Tour of Spain and receive an encouraging e-mail from Johan Bruyneel, a savvy, ambitious ex-pro from Belgium who had just taken over the job of running Postal.

We all know what happened next.

Armstrong fell for a rock star only after he had essentially become one himself. He has built a story line of such primal magnetism that to date 50 million people have bought $1 rubber bracelets just to own a little piece of it.

I've interviewed him many times since. The hotels have gotten fancier. He's usually completely in control of the situation, but listening to him is never boring. Perhaps the only time I've ever wanted him to stop talking was when he appeared in the sauna-like press trailer after losing a time trial in extreme heat two years ago, clearly woozy with dehydration, not making sense.

I've heard him sound angry, defiant, philosophical, smug, calculating, proud, wisecracking, emotional, and, on rare occasions, frankly uncertain about everything but his own good fortune.

''I don't care what anybody thinks of me," he told me in 1998. ''I just don't. I've been through so much and I'm so happy just to have made it."

My chat with Armstrong in Ramona remains my favorite. Life was simple, because he had recently gotten it back. Life filled the container of whatever room he was in instead of spilling out over the windowsills and having to be watched and managed. Perhaps it will be more like that again when he retires.

Armstrong has had an odd, disjointed season thus far. If that's made him uncertain about how he's going to feel when he rolls down the start ramp Saturday, he has the advantage of having been in that tenuous place before.