The Next Stage

It is Friday. After flying from Los Angeles to Vegas on Tuesday and Vegas to Austin on Wednesday, Armstrong will head back to the airport. He is due in Ojai, Calif., for a sponsors' dinner for the Discovery Channel cycling team. "I need to be more retired," he says. In truth, he does not seem worn out. He seems energized and engaged--liberated, at long last, to take on his life's work.

Before driving to the airport, he conducts a brief tour of the house next door, which he sometimes calls the Money Pit: the home that he and his children will soon occupy. The high point of the tour, for Armstrong, is the bedroom of his son, Luke. Its walls are adorned with dinosaurs: a pterodactyl, a triceratops, a T-Rex whose dull eyes and obvious voracity recall Armstrong's former cycling rival Alexander Vinokourov. "My son," he says, "has the coolest room of any six-year-old in the world."

The spacious house is luxurious in an unostentatious way. In the front yard, serving as a counterweight to the mansion's spanking brand-newness, is a massive oak, a tree that appears to have been on that spot for at least a century. Appearances, in this case, are deceiving. "That tree right there?" Armstrong says. "Used to be over there." He points to a lot 200 yards away. Arborists jacked it up with hydraulic lifts, slid a flatbed under it and rolled it over to its new home.

"I can't believe that was an option," says a visitor, and Armstrong responds in a tone suggesting the visitor has not been paying attention: "C'mon, man. Everything's an option."

SI.COM
Read more about Lance Armstrong and see a photo gallery from his cycling career at SI.com/moresports.