Front door makes a much better exit

Chris Carmichael has been Lance Armstrong's coach since 1990, guiding him to seven straight Tour de France titles. He wrote columns for The Associated Press during the race.

When Lance Armstrong asked for a microphone on the Champs-Elysees on Sunday to say goodbye to millions of cycling fans around the world, I suddenly remembered that his whole journey began with a discussion about retirement in the spring of 1998.

A few weeks earlier, Lance had dropped out of the Paris-Nice stage race in France in the first hour of the first day of the race. It was cold and raining, and Lance was soaked to the bone and miserable. Bad weather used to make him even bolder in races; he won at the 1993 world championships by attacking solo, and picking himself up from two crashes, in the rain in Norway. But in the spring of 1998, he was no longer interested. He pulled over, tore the race number off his jersey, and told the mechanic he was going home.

When I walked through his garage after arriving in Austin, Texas, I noticed his bike was still packed in its travel case. He said he was through, that there was more to life than suffering in a pack of bike racers, eating bad food and living out of a suitcase in a series of dingy hotels. He had nothing to prove and life was too short to be spent racing bicycles.

After everything he'd accomplished, his cycling career wasn't supposed to end with an anonymous exit from the back of the pack in an early season stage race in Europe. He was a world champion, an Olympian and a cancer survivor who had returned from death's doorstep to the European professional peloton. He was a champion, and when it's time to call it a day, champions don't sneak out the back door.

By the end of that weekend, Lance agreed to do one more race, the USPRO Championships in Philadelphia. He was going to go out on his terms. In his news conference to announce his cancer diagnosis, he said he intended to race again as a professional cyclist, and he'd done that. He was going to do one more race and then retire in June of 1998.

To prepare for his last race, Lance, Bob Roll and I traveled to Boone, N.C., for a 10-day training camp. Lance still had reasonable fitness from his time in Europe, but he needed one good block of training to go out in style in Philadelphia. Rain again factored into the equation. It rained for 10 days straight, but this time Lance wasn't climbing off his bike. He rode next to Bob, talking about life and bike racing, for hours.

Toward the end of the camp, I had Bob and Lance head over the same route the Tour DuPont had covered years before, to where Lance had won the hardest stage of America's premier stage race atop Beech Mountain. Somewhere on that mountain, the champion within Armstrong finally won the battle that had been raging in his mind and body. He wasn't going out like this.

Lance's battle against cancer was the biggest fight of his life. It took every ounce of his strength and his will, but he prevailed. Cancer showed Lance how much he was really capable of, and how little of his capacity he had actually been using.

Now he had a second chance, but for what? You don't build a race car to run errands, and Lance decided he could only apply the lessons he learned from cancer to a goal of immense value. For a bike racer, the Tour de France is the biggest, hardest, most prestigious race you can win, so that's where he directed the full force of his newly found focus.

Over the past seven years, Lance's year-round focus on every detail of his Tour de France preparation set him head and shoulders above his competition. He changed the way cyclists prepare for major events, altered the way athletes approach nutrition and body weight, and had a big impact on the technology and equipment used in the professional peloton. He grew into a consummate professional and weathered the scrutiny of the media and skeptics.

More than that, he honored his own battle against cancer, and the battles fought by others, by showing the world that cancer survivors aren't fragile or broken. He's inspired millions to realize that cancer can't kill the champion inside and that survivors can achieve as much, and often more, than they could before cancer.

Though we will all miss watching Lance dance up mountain passes and power through time trials at the Tour de France, the sport is bigger than any one man. Lance has added his chapter to cycling's history book, and now it's time for the next chapter to begin and for new champions to emerge.

As for Lance, he won't quietly fade into the background. He is simply redirecting his focus to a new set of goals, and his children, Sheryl (Crow) and the Lance Armstrong Foundation are his top priorities right now. I don't know exactly what the future holds for Lance, but I'm confident his future successes will rival or exceed his success as a cyclist.

One of the hardest parts of being a professional athlete is knowing that it's not a job you keep for the rest of your life. As a result, it's important to consider how and when you want to walk away.

Lance wanted to retire before his performance started to decline, before he was referred to as the former champion who was now languishing in 70th place in the Tour of Whoknowswhere. Champions don't sneak out the back; they deliver one last great performance, say their goodbyes and walk out the front door.

That's what we talked about way back in 1998, and Lance just walked out the front door.