Armstrong still dusting everyone in his newest fight

	Lance Armstrong isn't resting in his post-Tour life. He's spearheading a worldwide fund-raising campaign to battle cancer. Michael O'Neill/SI
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Before he took the pictures that would be considered for the cover of this week's Sports Illustrated, Michael O'Neill asked a favor of the cancer survivors arrayed before him: Show me, with your eyes, your experience with cancer.

Allan Goldberg, 38, flashed to a dark room 27 years ago. His rare form of childhood cancer was in remission. But doctors studying an X-ray spied a "shadow" on one of his lungs. To this day he remembers "lying on a table for the CAT scan that would tell me whether I was going to live or die." He lived.

Angela Maciel didn't think about her two brain surgeries. She thought about her hair. "It was long, light brown and curly," says Maciel, 27. "People used to tell me how beautiful it was." It was gone two weeks after her first chemo treatment. "It seems like such a small thing now," she allows. "But when you're 17, it's a really big deal."

Despite posing for O'Neill, neither Allan nor Angela -- not to mention a dozen other cancer survivors who were kind enough to respond to our summons -- ended up on the cover, which Lance Armstrong shares with a trio of children. I apologize for the disappointment this must have caused them. And I thank them for sharing their stories, for reminding me -- as I was repeatedly reminded throughout the reporting of this story -- that sportswriters truly do work in the toy department of life.

I spent four days with Armstrong in late January, trying to get a handle on what his focus will be now that he's off the bike. I learned, among other things, that he's not off the bike. On Day 4, we hit the single-track he's carved into his ranch west of Austin, Texas. Armstrong was kind enough to lend me his backup mountain bike, whose chain I snapped during our second loop. This after crashing and bloodying myself during Loop 1: I hit a rock while trying to get a tape recorder out of my jersey pocket. Lance, I think, was underwhelmed by my skills.

Where does Armstrong go from here? Driving back to Austin with him after that misadventure on the mountain bike, the answer seemed clear. From here, at the bottom of this dip in the ribbon of road connecting his ranch to Highway 290, he goes hurtling wheels-up into a nearby culvert.

Right? There should be a price to be paid for taking 70-some mph into a downhill, off-camber, un-guard-railed curve. On that overcast afternoon in central Texas, Armstrong did not pay it. He stayed on the road.

"This thing's got traction control," he said of his new rig, a black, 500-horsepower BMW M5 that strikes me as kind of a scaled-down Batmobile. When the car's brain senses that one of its wheels is losing traction, "it backs off that wheel," Armstrong explains, "so you'll never fishtail, even in the rain."

Merging onto the freeway recently at a milquetoast 50 mph, Armstrong admitted, the back end did whipsaw before he regained control. The traction control had been switched off. "Sheryl was in the car," he recalled, referring to his then-fiancée, Sheryl Crow. "She was like, 'Whoa!'" Did she get mad? "Nah. She drives the same way I do. She's crazy, man. [We're] two peas in a pod."

A week later they were history, announcing their breakup in a joint statement. Sad news begat sad news: On February 25, Crow revealed that she'd been diagnosed with breast cancer and undergone "minimally invasive" surgery. After undergoing a series of radiation treatments, according to her Web site, she will begin touring next month.

During my time with him, Armstrong opened up on his feuds with other riders, active and retired, and on the breakdown of custody for the three children he has with his ex-wife. He spoke unprompted of his love for his twin 4-year-olds: "I get up on 'em, smell their hair, and it's just like, My God, I can't love someone more than this."