Six Tour de France wins in a row. Just how hard is that?

The man from Austin, Texas, is now without peer on this planet - at least, in cycling's toughest race.

As Lance Armstrong cruised to an unprecedented sixth victory here Sunday, he made it look easy. But by winning the 2,119-mile, three-week bike race, he triumphs in what endurance experts say is the greatest test of human strength and stamina in sports today.

By winning six in a row, he scales the heights of athletic achievement enjoyed by other giants such as Michael Jordan and Pete Sampras. But he had to work a lot harder physically to get there.

"The tour is the toughest man-to-man sporting event in the world," says Steve Bauer, a Canadian who rode the race 11 times. "There is nothing like it. It's a monster."

Compared by competitors to running 20 marathons back to back, the world's premier bicycle race is more than just a supreme physical test of endurance.

With millions of fans lining the route, hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money at stake, obsessive media attention, and persistent allegations of cheating, mental strength is as important as muscle.

A champion "has to have the physical gift from God," says Jonathan Boyer, the first American to ride the Tour. "But he also needs the mental stamina and drive and emotional stability" to win the race.

Armstrong, who defeated cancer to come back and win the Tour six times, has stamina and drive in spades. At an age when many cycling greats start to fade, Armstrong took this year's event decisively, winning five individual stages, the most he's ever done.

The single-mindedness of his pursuit of repeated victories has astonished fellow competitors and spectators alike. "I like to control things, like to win things, like to take things to the limit," he wrote simply in his recent book "Every Second Counts."

The Tour de France takes riders to the limit, and beyond. A 120-mile ride at an average speed of 28 mph is considered an easy stage. To sort the men from the boys, the Tour goes through the Pyrenees and the Alps, up 8-percent gradients mile after grueling mile, and many riders simply can't take it: 41 of the 188 riders who began this year's race dropped out.

"The Tour pushes your body further than it has ever gone," says Mr. Boyer, who has taken his own body to extraordinary lengths: In 1985 he won the 3,120-mile 'Race Across America' in nine days, two hours, and six seconds, sleeping for a couple of hours each night.

That sounds hard, but "the Tour is so much more intense," says Boyer. The Race Across America "is long and difficult, but you don't go fast enough to build up real fatigue in your muscles." Every evening on the Tour, though, the riders spend time in the hands of masseurs, dissipating the lactic acid in their legs.

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