It’s not easy for athletes to go out on the biggest stage in their sport fighting for a championship, which is why it’s so enormously rare. And that’s one more reason to watch the Tour de France this year, for many Americans, maybe for the final time.

Lance Armstrong, the greatest champion the Tour has ever seen, has said he will push his last competitive pedal at the world’s most famous bike race this summer. That means he can end his final three weeks in the saddle with a triumphant last-day tour down the Champs Elysees, riding to his seventh straight championship.

It’s unlikely that most Americans comprehend the magnificence of what Armstrong has done. No one had ever won six Tours before, and to do it consecutively was supposed to be impossible.

I don’t even know what to compare it to. Maybe six straight Masters championships or six straight U.S. Opens — golf or tennis, take your pick. It’s more than six straight World Series — you’d have to win the Series MVP every year, too, to accomplish something comparable. Six straight New York Marathons don’t even equal the three-weeks of grueling toil that it takes to win the Tour.

FREE VIDEO Calling it quits April 19: Lance Armstrong talks with Matt Lauer of 'Today' about his decision to retire after this year's Tour de France. Today show

Regardless what you think of cycling as a sport, it’s hard to argue that Lance Armstrong is anything other than one of the greatest athletes this country has ever produced. And he’s become that in a sport foreign to Americans in a part of the world where national pride and ego has been severely bruised by the predations of this upstart American.

And now, Armstrong wants to make it seven and out.

That’s the game plan, he said, “to go out on top. That’s a big deal to me.”

Nine months ago, after he had won number six, setting a standard so high it will probably be generations before it’s broken, he waffled about whether he would come back. For a while he said he might take a year off, then return.

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It was understandable. He had set the hardest goal anyone could set in sports, and he had reached it. Where would the incentive be to put in the work necessary to win it again?

But now he has the incentive — a definite retirement date in Paris, on the stage he has owned.

As hard as the six prior wins were, this one will be a monumental task. Europe, to be frank, was annoyed at his first win; Americans have their own sports, why did they need to be stealing someone else’s?

As he piled up the victories, resentment grew with the magnitude of his stardom. Inevitably, the losers accused him of using drugs to get and keep his edge, charges he has vehemently denied.

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