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   Before he won five straight Tours de France, before he beat cancer, before he started dating Sheryl Crow or denying doping charges, Lance Armstrong was the talk of Roanoke.

    Before he became synonymous with the Champs Elysee, Armstrong had his own personal Arc de Triomphe outside the Patrick Henry Hotel.

    Think Lance remembers Roanoke? As Sheryl might say, "Does the sun come up over Santa Monica Boulevard?"

    As I "celebrate" the 30th anniversary of my first day at The Roanoke Times, I am reminded of memorable sporting events I have covered during my tenure. Some people would be surprised to find cycling on the list. Maybe it's the time of year.

    The Tour DuPont, billed as America's premier cycling event, came through Southwest Virginia for five years in the mid-1990s. A computer search for the Tour DuPont and Lance Armstrong and Roanoke turns up 134 entries in The Roanoke Times' archives.

    Seldom has so much been written with such authority on a subject about which so many knew so little.

    "That's what we do here," said Ralph Berrier Jr., whose Tour DuPont coverage landed him a cushy job in the features department of The Roanoke Times.

    The Tour DuPont didn't come to Roanoke until 1994, after it had made stops in Blacksburg and Hot Springs the previous year. In 1993, neophyte reporter Michael Stowe spent a day watching from the weeds of Allisonia, perhaps the assignment that began his meteoric rise to sports editor.

    The Roanoke Times' first full-time female sports reporter, Andie Kuhn, spent two years as the lead reporter for Tour DuPont coverage. Now designing Web sites from her Smith Mountain Lake home, she doesn't remember Armstrong as fondly as she does Greg LeMond, whom she describes as "a gem of a guy."

    Before Armstrong came along, LeMond defined American cycling. A three-time Tour de France winner, he had won the Tour DuPont when it skirted Bath County in 1992. He was 32 when he came through Roanoke in 1994, the final season before his retirement.

    Armstrong was 20 when he finished 12th in the 1992 Tour DuPont. He was second in 1993, briefly taking the lead when winner Raul Alcala had a flat tire. After finishing third in 1994, Armstrong spent three days in Roanoke in April 1995, training for a 23-mile time trial in May.

    "I like it here," he told Kuhn. "This is a cool place - not a lot to do, but it's a cool place."

    Armstrong won the Roanoke time trial, with climbs over Twelve O'Clock Knob and Mount Chestnut, and captured his first Tour DuPont crown six days later. In 1996, he became the Tour DuPont's first repeat winner, thanks in part to victory in Stage5, a 113-mile race from Mt.Airy, N.C., to Roanoke that ended in a wicked thunderstorm.

    There had been much media second-guessing, of course, when the time trial had been replaced by a road race. However, the new Stage5 provided Roanoke with its most memorable Tour DuPont moments. Armstrong was trailing when leaders Tony Rominger and Laurent Madouas skidded in the rain and hail at the corner of Ninth Street and Jamison Avenue S.E.

    I had been assigned a "sidebar," preferably on some aspect of the race not involving the winner. However, if I thought football and basketball players were often unapproachable, this was no comparison. No sportswriter was going to outrun a bicycle and its disgruntled rider.

    So, there we were in the Patrick Henry Ballroom - reporters, columnists, sidebar writers, TV commentators and other assorted hangers-on from all over the globe - all waiting for Lance Armstrong. However, they did throw us a bone and also brought in German rider Marcel Wust, recognized as "King of the Mountains" for his work earlier in the stage.

    "When I came in, everybody was like, 'Marcel, Marcel,'" Wust said. "I was like, 'Hey, I'm a legend here. I've never been here and everybody knows my name.'"

    That was from my story. Before looking it up, I had no recollection of interviewing, quoting or ever having heard the name Marcel Wust.

    Frequently, my children and others will ask me who the most famous person I've ever interviewed is. I'm sure that I talked to Michael Jordan in a group setting when he was playing basketball at North Carolina, but the answer might have to be Lance Armstrong. I might have asked the question that brought the following response:

    "I lived here for about a week last year and I thought for a while I recognized some of these roads we were doing here today, but that wasn't the case. It's typical of this area. Never flat. Really never flat. I'll say it again, I always liked that old time trial, but I wouldn't have wanted to do that in the rain, either."

    It wasn't great stuff, but it wasn't bad. It's a good thing for us that Armstrong wasn't involved in the fleshpile at Ninth and Jamison because he was cooperative and engaging, almost charming. Andie Kuhn, had she been there, might have described him "as a gem of a guy."

    If he thought we were cool, those sentiments, as far as I'm concerned, are mutual.

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