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In October 1996, by which time the painful swelling made it hard to mount his cycle, Armstrong went to the doctor and learned he had testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and brain. That set the ball rolling, as it were, and it ended up in one of the most remarkable comebacks of sport and medical history. Armstrong lost a testicle, underwent four chemotherapy sessions and seven hours of brain surgery. But he rode 30 miles a day between chemo sessions, and within 18 months he was back in the velodrome. Sunday he finished the most famous bike race in the world, a grueling three-week tour of France's mountains and valleys, with the fastest time in race history.

But this wouldn't have happened if Armstrong had gotten testicular cancer 25 years ago. He'd probably be dead. If he'd gotten it 20 years ago, he wouldn't have competed in a Tour de France three years later. In the late 1970s, chemotherapy for testicular cancer lasted up to two years -- as opposed to today's three months -- and was as close to hell as anything imaginable. "I threw up every seven to eight minutes for 12 hours in a row, once every three weeks for a year," recalls Peter Acquaviva of Cincinnati, who beat the cancer in 1979. "You feel like you've been hit by a garbage truck. Your feet and hands tingle. You're so fatigued."

Advances in chemotherapy and other treatment nearly assure survival for most of the patients diagnosed with testicular cancer nowadays, a fact obscured by Armstrong -- and most of the press -- when they proclaimed his accomplishment as downright miraculous.

But "it is absolutely not a miracle," says Dr. Bruce Roth, an oncologist at Vanderbilt University, who was on the team that treated Armstrong at Indiana University. In fact, although he had 40 tumors in his lungs and two in his brain, Armstrong's chances were good from the start -- a counterintuitive statement, but testicular cancer is a counterintuitive cancer. This year, 171,000 people will get lung cancer and 159,000 will die of it; 176,000 women will be diagnosed for breast cancer, and 43,000 will die of it. The survival rate for testicular cancer is currently 95 percent overall, and 50 percent even when the cancer is as widespread as Armstrong's. Ask an oncologist why testicular cancer responds so well to chemotherapy when other cancers do not and the inevitable answer is, "If I knew that, I'd have a Nobel Prize."

Only about 7,500 Americans get testicular cancer every year, but it is the leading cancer among men ages 15 to 35. The survivors owe their lives to a couple of fortuitous research discoveries. In 1965, a biophysicist named Barnett Rosenberg published a paper in Nature noting that the heavy metal platinum killed tumors. Oncologists began trying it out on their intractable cases, but success was mixed and the metal induced horrible bouts of nausea and kidney damage. (Saddam Hussein has used similar poisons to slowly kill his opponents.) The cancer world had largely written off platinum by 1974 when Lawrence Einhorn, a young oncologist at Indiana University, began using it -- in combination with two other potent drugs -- on testicular cancer tumors.

Einhorn, who directed Armstrong's treatment, recalls what happened next: "When they came in for their second chemotherapy treatments, three weeks after the first, the radiologist was just amazed to see that their tumors had melted away. He kept saying, 'What are you doing to these people?'" When Einhorn nervously presented his findings to the American Society of Clinical Oncology in May 1976 (he is currently president-elect of the society), "it led to optimism about all cancers."

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