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.

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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.