Lance Armstrong is cycling’s acknowledged international champion, but on this July day, as the TV cameras followed him to the starting line of a crucial, brutally tough mountain ascent in the 2001 Tour de France, something seemed wrong.

Lance wasn’t walking his championship walk, and his usual good-natured banter with the crowds that had followed him across France wasn’t just subdued, it was missing.

Word spread quickly among his teammates, and then among the other racers: Lance was looking down.

Well, perhaps it was understandable, some said. Diagnosed with advanced testicular cancer in 1996, he had not been given good odds even to survive, much less to race again.

But Armstrong had beaten the cancer then, and after some time off to think, had returned to training and racing with renewed spirit, everyone knew.

He’d even started an organization to help other cancer survivors. In between races and training, he’d gotten married and he and his wife Kristin now had a four-year-old child, Luke.

But maybe — heaven forbid — the cancer had come back, some speculated.

Germany’s Jan Ullrich, Lance’s main rival, decided to press hard this possible advantage, going out fast from the start and spinning his high gears into overdrive early on. He rose steadily up the steep mountainside.

Armstrong lagged miles behind.

But only, it turned out, long enough to get Ullrich to spend himself too early.

A roar broke out from the roadside crowd and the TV cameras spun back to Lance.

Standing on his pedals, pumping furiously, Lance was flying up the mountainside, his pained expression replaced by a sly grin.

Armstrong flashed past the startled Ullrich and speed-sprinted the rest of the way to the mountaintop finish line. He crossed it far ahead of any rivals and caused the roadside crowds to go wild, and left some sportscasters grabbing at the air for words.

Maintaining the lead he gained that day, Armstrong rode into Paris on July 29, 2001, to claim his third straight Tour de France win, a first for any American.

Not bad, some said, for a man once not expected to live.

Returning from Europe in August, Armstrong flew with President Bush aboard Air Force One back to Texas, to attend a huge party thrown in his honor by his adopted hometown of Austin.

In the cooling evening dusk, thousands of Austinites — many arriving on bicycles and in yellow “Vive Le Lance!” t-shirts — flocked into Austin’s Town Lake park to dance to well-known rock bands, eat chips and salsa, and party with favorite son Lance Armstrong, while spiraling fireworks blossomed overhead.

On the periphery of the crowd, ACS News Today spoke with another bicycling cancer survivor about what makes Armstrong so inspiring as the date approaches — October 2001 — that marks the champion’s fifth full year free of any sign of cancer, a milestone beyond which the chances of most cancers recurring diminish substantially.

“When I was first diagnosed, I was in shock,” said B.D. Byrd, diagnosed with melanoma skin cancer two months earlier. “But I knew Lance had beat the odds, and I thought I’d try his approach,” he added.

Byrd says he used information from the American Cancer Society to get the treatment shown best for the stage and kind of cancer he had.

And Byrd says that like Armstrong, he too found emotional support from family and friends to be crucial.

But it was how fully Armstrong embraced living after his cancer diagnosis — getting married, fathering a child, coming back a better racer than before — that Byrd says really impressed him.

“I’m not a professional athlete,” says Byrd. “But you look at Lance Armstrong and you realize: I can do more than just survive after cancer — I can thrive,” he says. “That’s what’s inspiring, really,” he adds.