Editors note: This article is a follow-up to “Making the grandest tour,” by Robert Messenger (June, 2004).

It was pure physical domination. Lance Armstrong won his sixth Tour de France by humiliating his rivals. He can have left no one in doubt that he is worthy of being the race’s first six-time champion. It was frankly impossible to imagine anyone beating the champion rider on display in the last three weeks.

From the prologue in Liège, Belgium, Armstrong was always in the right place, a bit ahead of his chief rivals. At no time was he threatened, and only twice in the whole Tour did he seem in even the slightest difficulty: he finished second in the 6.1 kilometer prologue, down two seconds to the Swiss time-trial-specialist Fabian Cancellara, and in the first mountain stage, to La Mongie in the Pyrenées, Armstrong d ...

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