It is about the bike

Day job: Seven-times Tour de France champion
Day off: Harley-Davidson biker

'Stick a motor on it!' As a cyclist you hear it so often, bawled from passing cars as you labour up a hill, that you wonder whether the word combinations available to humanity are running out. Having spent more time speeding up hills on a bike than most of us, Lance Armstrong must have heard it more, too, and it may have got to him. Something, anyway, has to explain his passion for big motorbikes.

Armstrong's fascination with fast machines is a lifelong passion. At the age of 16 he was already earning $20,000 a year as a triathlon prodigy. The money bought his first car - a Fiat, used and red - which he used to drag-race home from his nightshift at Toys 'R' Us. Lance traded in the Fiat for a Camaro Iroc Z28 (Iroc is short for International Race of the Champions, a Nascar-like motorsport series). The Camaro went when his cycling sponsor, the owner of a bike shop in Texas, who was Lance's credit guarantor, found out about the midnight races and stripped him of his prize motor. Lance was still only 17.

Fast forward to spring 1998, when he was beginning his comeback after cancer. During the Paris-Nice race, in cold, wet conditions, he coasted to a halt at the roadside, abandoned the race and decided he would never cycle again. On the flight back to his French home in Cap Ferrat, he saw a Harley-Davidson advertisement in the in-flight magazine. The slogan was a quotation from the poem 'If I could live my life again, I'd ... ?' One of the things was, 'see more sunsets'. He tore the page out and showed it to his then wife, Kristin. 'This is what's wrong with cycling,' he said, reflecting on the ad's message. 'It's not what my life should be.'

But Armstrong didn't take the Harley-Davidson route out of professional sport, and the following year, he won the first of his seven Tours de France. Even so, the Californian motorbike manufacturer has still been part of his life. The entrance to his home in Austin, Texas, has long been guarded by two Harley Davidsons, while viewers of Discovery channel's American Chopper series will have seen the engineers of Orange County Choppers create a mean machine for the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which he dutifully collected in the presence of his then significant other, Sheryl Crow.

That relationship has now been consigned to history; so too, has Armstrong's cycling career, despite intermittent comeback threats delivered to annoy the French. Now, when he's not appearing on the media as the nation's chief cancer pundit on occasions such as the death of Christopher Reeves's wife Dana, working with the Discovery Channel cycling team (of which he's part-owner), tending to the various court cases he's involved with, and generally managing the millions his career earned him, he can be seen low-riding the Texas hill country - this time, with motor attached.