Armstrong Rides Into History With Seventh Tour Win

Lance Armstrong, the cancer survivor whose yellow wristbands are worn around the world by some 40 million contributors to his Livestrong charity, rode off the Champs-Elysees and into sporting history last night after fulfilling his ambition to become the first man to win the Tour de France seven times.

Armstrong was breaking a record he set a year ago, when he took himself clear of the four men - Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain - who had won the race five times. But the real record was established long ago, when he proved that it was possible to survive radical treatment for cancer and go on to victory in the world's most gruelling sporting event.

In the course of his seven consecutive victories, Armstrong pedalled more than 15,000 miles up and down the Alps and the Pyrenees, through the vineyards of Bordeaux and Provence, and past innumerable chateaux and sunflower fields. At 33, nine years after his testicular cancer was diagnosed, he is taking his trophies and his record into retirement.

His career has been studded with incident and controversy, and yesterday's rainstorms as the race approached the finish in Paris almost cost him his concluding appearance on the podium.

As the riders passed through the suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux, three members of his Discovery Channel team were involved in a crash. After narrowly avoiding the fallen riders, Armstrong ordered the field to ride more sensibly on the treacherous surface.

The readers of his two best-selling volumes of autobiography - Every Second Counts and It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life - are familiar with his approach to adversity. He was born in Texas, the child of a car salesman who disappeared when he was two years old and a teenage girl who worked with a single-minded devotion to bring up her son.

After making his first impact as a schoolboy swimmer and triathlete, he switched to bicycle racing and in 1993 the prickly, combative 21-year-old became the youngest man to win a stage of the Tour de France.

Three years later he was told that cancer had spread to his lungs and brain. His preparation for surgery and chemotherapy began at that moment and the intensity with which he approached his recovery ensured that 518 days after his last race he was competing again. The sequence of tour victories began a year later, and now forms one of the most remarkable stories in the history of sport.