The doping era when the wheels came off Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong won his final Tour de France in Paris in July 2005. At the presentation ceremony where he was presented with the yellow jersey for the seventh time, he stepped forward and took the race announcer's microphone so he could speak to the thousands of spectators on the Champs Elysees.

This was no valedictory farewell. By this stage, rumours were already beginning to circulate that Armstrong's Tour victories had not been achieved entirely naturally. From the podium, he addressed his critics, repudiating the doping accusations that were already beginning to gather at his feet.

This is what he said: "I am sorry for you. I am sorry you can't dream. I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles. But this is one hell of a race, and there are no secrets, this is a hard sport, and it is hard work that wins it."

It was Armstrong at his most grandiose and bombastic. Never was he more comfortable than when assuming the role of the conquering hero. Whether it was the Alpe D'Huez, a cynical pack of journalists or the testicular cancer with which he was diagnosed in 1996, Armstrong treated every challenge with the same unequivocal bullishness. Yet those words seem to ring hollow today. The adulation that followed in the wake of Armstrong's unique achievement - nobody has won the Tour de France as many times as he has - has been replaced in the intervening years by suspicion and slight.

Nobody who has followed the sport for the last decade should be surprised by Armstrong's decision not to contest the charges of the US Anti-Doping Agency that he used performance-enhancing drugs during his career, or by the subsequent revocation of his seven Tour titles (upon which the

Union Cycliste Internationale must agree). It is a move designed to give maximum succour to both his detractors and advocates.

Depending on your point of view, it is either a shameless admission of guilt or a dignified withdrawal from a process designed with the sole purpose of discrediting him. Armstrong continues to deny doping, but if the statement he issued on Friday proved one thing, it is that he has finally resigned himself to wearing the sackcloth of the drug cheat.

Armstrong thus joins the likes of Linford Christie and Michelle Smith, other sanctioned dopers who continued to protest their innocence long after retirement. Conviction without contrition. But Armstrong is a far more significant figure because between 1999 and 2005, when he won his seven consecutive Tours, he was professional road cycling, in a way few men have defined their sport.

In his pomp, Armstrong was not only a leader of races but also of men. His was a one-man empire, inspiring not just awe but fear, within the peloton and within the sport. Tales of his vindictive, bullying streak are manifest; just one will suffice here.

The Italian rider Filippo Simeoni is just one of the riders who found himself on the wrong end of Armstrong's strong-arm tactics. His crime had been to testify against Armstrong's doctor, Michele Ferrari, and then to take legal action after Armstrong repeatedly accused him of lying.

During the 18th stage of the 2004 Tour, when Simeoni attempted to bridge the gap to a breakaway, Armstrong chased him down himself - an extraordinary step for the yellow jersey to take. Armstrong warned him in no uncertain terms that any break of which Simeoni was a part would be pursued mercilessly, and ordered him to return to the peloton. When the Italian returned to the pack, he was abused and spat at by his fellow riders.

While Armstrong earns an estimated $10?million a year in endorsements, Simeoni now runs a coffee bar south of Rome. "It leaves me a bit perplexed," he said of Armstrong's decision to walk way from his accusers. "Someone like him, with all the fame and popularity and millions of dollars, he should fight to the end if he's innocent. But I guess he realised it was a useless fight. That entire decade was one big bluff." The fall of Armstrong must be interpreted in these terms, then: not simply as another athlete with whom the drug testers finally caught up, but as the final decaying remains of an era in which chemical adulteration of the human body was not just rife, but legitimated. We may never know whether or not Armstrong himself doped, but for almost a decade he was the leader of a peloton that did.

"I think that this news will make certain people happy," said Laurent Jalabert, one of the great French riders of the 1990s. "He had lots of success, lots of talent, but also a way of practising his sport that did not always please everyone. There are those who adored him and those who hated him because he was arrogant, because he liked to win by crushing his opponents."

One might well ask why any of this still matters, but it does, and not least in this country. The phenomenal success of British cyclists on road and track has given birth to a new generation of cycling fans, young and old, who are captivated by the spectacle but disenchanted by the taint of doping that has accompanied the sport for a century. The unfounded slurs that have been made against Team Sky and Bradley Wiggins are a direct repercussion of the scandal that ripped the sport apart a decade ago. With cycling at the apogee of its popularity, its cleanliness must be explicit. The conviction of Armstrong may, ironically, help in that respect by drawing a line under this murky chapter in cycling's recent past.

What now for Armstrong? His decision not to challenge the USADA severed his final ties with a sport that he had long since departed in spirit. He still has his endorsements - Nike is the most high-profile of the many corporate allies who have chosen to stick with him through the allegations. And yesterday he was back on his bike, competing in a Colarado mountain bike event.

But the reputation he built during those long years of dominance now lies in ruins. In 2009, shortly after Armstrong's brief return to road racing, he addressed the cases of Ivan Basso and Floyd Landis, former team-mates who had also been drug cheats. "Do we make mistakes, all of us?" he asked his questioner. "Absolutely. As a society, are we supposed to forgive and forget? Absolutely."

It will be a long time before the sport that gave him so much extends the same courtesy to him.