The 1996 Tour when Armstrong abandoned feeling ill

This former world champion - the youngest in road racing history - was given the shock of his life - he had cancer.

Minutes later he was shown a chest x-ray that revealed tumours the size of golf balls in his lungs, as well as the testicular problem.

With post-operative sterility a real threat, he made a harrowing journey to a sperm bank and then faced surgery to remove the infected reproductive organ.

Road racing's youngest world champion in 1993

Doctors believed the cancer was so advanced that even delaying treatment by a week could prove fatal. Two lesions were then found on his brain.

This mentally numbing process took just 10 days- half the time it takes to win a Tour de France. Within the three- week time span of the race he would later conquer, Armstrong had successfully undergone brain surgery.

The book's description of this experience, and the cyclist's four intensive courses of chemotherapy, is not for those with weak stomachs.

Much of Armstrong's muscle bulk was lost to chemotherapy....

That is nothing compared to the hatred reserved for Terry Amstrong, the stepfather who the author claims beat him and cheated on his mother.

As the marriage ended, Armstrong became a teenage rebel - albeit one who excelled at endurance sports and in particular the triathlon.

The account of his difficult adolescence is similar to the attitude displayed when the Texan arrived in Europe as a young professional cyclist, with little respect for authority and tradition.

...but the weight loss has helped his Tour climbing

This detail, and the way Armstrong has used the book to get back at those who have crossed him, reveals that he is no saint - for all his current charity work.

Some might call it a champion's self confidence, but others would regard the way he lays into past enemies as naked arrogance, if not petty score-settling.

Cofidis, the French team who signed him shortly before the cancer diagnosis and then attempted to renegotiate the contract, come in for severe abuse.

So do the French journalists who accused him of doping in the 1999 Tour, and his mother's two husbands - the men who supplied his DNA and surname.

Tour Dupont: On roads where Armstrong was later reborn as a rider

This year's mid-Tour spat with Marco Pantani also proved that Armstrong has not mellowed sufficiently to shy away from a good public row, and recent success has come with a return of his more outspoken nature.

However the book is also generous - both to what Armstrong calls "the cancer community" - both victims and medical staff - and his family.

He met his wife Kristin while setting up the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which works to alleviate cancer suffering, and typically, Armstrong started a row with her well before he began the relationship.

He also admits that his post-recovery behaviour was unfair on a woman who had given up a well-paid job to follow him to Europe and then back to Texas again.

At that stage of 1998 he wanted to retire, and spent time drinking beer and playing golf before being shaken from his lethargy by two old friends.

Wife Kristin and mother Linda with the double Tour winner

They took him and his bike into the mountains where he once dominated America's biggest race, the Tour Dupont, and from that point there was no looking back down the road.

Armstrong's rise back to glory was not as quick as the 10-day fall, but in just over a year he would be married, a Tour winner and a father.

With it all came stardom, including audiences with President Bill Clinton and talk show king David Letterman in a nation with little time for the sport of cycling.

But despite the glory Armstrong's greatest happiness is Luke David, the son created by IVF using that sperm he banked during his darkest hour.

With son Luke David Armstrong during the Tour

It is another tale of hope coming from struggle. Just like winning the Tour de France in fact.

But it is one which puts sport and the yellow jersey into perspective. Because as the book's title says, for this champion, It's not About the Bike.

It's Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins is published by Yellow Jersey press.