BEFORE LEAVING, I ask Armstrong if I can see the gym where he's been working out regularly with his trainer, Peter Park. To get there, he leads me down a marble staircase that brings us to a small landing with two doors. One opens out to a side patio and a giant backyard. The other one, windowless and secured with an alarm keypad, is the entrance to the Lance Armstrong home gym, ground zero for the comeback. As he turns the knob, I expect the door to swing open to reveal the world's most well-appointed workout space, stocked with high-tech machines and 60-inch flat-panel TVs. Instead we enter a drab two-car garage lit by fluorescent bulbs and still smelling a little musty from a recent workout. There is hardly any equipment, and the only luxury is a booming stereo system. It's little more than a dungeon—and very bad news for Armstrong's competition. He still loves suffering.

When I was here two years ago, there was a lot of buzz about a movie about your life. Now, with the comeback, there'd be a new ending. What does that ending look like in your mind?
In a perfect world, if I could write the script, they would both be very successful—the racing and the campaign. I would race fast and I would win on the bike. And then on the other side, the message gets taken around the world and governments step up and commit. They commit dollars, they commit resources, they commit people, they commit passion. And those commitments are firm. But, look, there are seven of these blue cups sitting around here. To be honest, I don't need an eighth one. I'd rather have a newspaper article framed that writes how successful this was and how the cancer commitments were truly significant. If I had to pick one of the two, I'd pick that one.

But I wouldn't mind having both.