With Lance Armstrong finally confessing the way we advised him all along …

The question now is: Besides confessing, will Lance apologize?

For us at BikeIntelligencer, an apology would be the final nail in the Lance Armstrong image reconstruction project.

The doping we always understood. Lance led cycling into professional sport’s most endemic doping era and was its best and highest practitioner — or worst and lowest, depending on how you look at it.

To win, Lance had to dope. But so did virtually every other cyclist at Tour de France levels. The ones who didn’t dope, didn’t win. Simple as that.

That’s why we always argued that Lance should just come clean, with the “Everybody did it” excuse. Then we could all move on.

With a confession, the issue becomes Lance’s behavior to his fans, the media and his fellow cyclists over the years. Armstrong not only bullied other cyclists into doping, he bullied anyone who challenged his honesty.

A confession won’t fully make amends. Only a full, heartfelt, believable apology will provide closure and allow us all to go forward with peace of mind.

With an apology, we can get back to focusing on Lance’s amazing athletic accomplishments and the admirable work his foundation has done and is doing. With an apology, we can close the door on all the bad karma Lance fomented over the years.

With an apology, maybe Lance can become a hero again.

After getting beat up in Tour, why push it?

A Lance spokesperson cites “lingering effects” of hip injuries suffered in this year’s Tour de France. But if we had mounting legal problems from a widening federal doping investigation, if every time we appeared in public we would have to answer doping allegations, and if the media were hounding us for comment on doping charges … well, our hip would hurt too!

Key indicator: No tweets from Lance. Usually he’s pretty up front about something as big as withdrawing from Leadville, yet the Lance Twitter has gone dark.

Much of his public interfacing these days is being done through spokespersons, a sign of lawyerly caution.

Normally we’d give the nod to Mr. Clean, Dave Wiens, in this year’s race, since he won it six straight times before Lance’s victory last year.

But Wiens said last fall he wasn’t going to follow intense training for this year’s race. And Lance’s Tour de France teammate, Levi Leipheimer, is looking fit and ready (although doping allegations are descending on him as well).

Should be a good race. You can follow it real time here.

“Armstrong: The real Tour starts Sunday.”

Lance was both right and wrong. For most other General Classification favorites, the real Tour did start Sunday.

For Lance himself, it ended.

Anyone who has raced in a bunch knows the difference between crashing and staying upright is mere chance. There are things you can do to lower your odds — correct positioning in the pack, fierce concentration, lightning reflexes, expert bike-handling skills — and Lance certainly had them over the years. But with a weaker Team Radio Shack this year than the dominant ensembles of Tours past, and the inevitable march of gravity against his conditioning and skills, Lance’s chances of eluding disaster were lowered out of the gate.

Lance’s 2010 season never seemed to get rolling. In early April he pulled out of the 4-day Circuit de la Sarthe with gastro-intestinal problems. He crashed out of May’s week-long Tour of California. Adding in his many promotional engagements and Livestrong commitments, Lance seemed to be spending too much time off the bike during critical training junctures.

The other question, of course, had to do with doping. If this really is, as we’ve suggested, the first post-doping era Tour de France, the difference between a near-39 year-old and next-gen racers in their late-20s prime could not be masked by artificial aids. The weight of growing allegations had to have bowed Lance’s shoulders as much as yesterday’s crash at around 40 miles an hour.

Lance just hasn’t seemed right in this year’s still-young Tour. His clipped and muted public statements have lacked confidence, his on-bike demeanor has missed the flinty focus and swagger, and excuses and shrugs have made their way into the Armstrong lexicon for the first time. Even before yesterday’s stage he had ridden unimpressively and lost major time on Stage 3′s cobblestones. As early as the Tour is, Lance looked haggard and distracted, as though he knew things the rest of us did not.

All the above said, this could still be a triumphant Tour de Lance. Freed from having to focus on winning, or even competing, Lance can finally lighten up and show some of the personality that those who have spent time with him say he reveals once the Klieg lights of celebrity are off — and which we’ve seen glimmers of in the Radio Shack commercials. Final rock-star tours aren’t the best they ever do, or even the most memorable. But they do conjure lots of great feelings from memories past. And that’s really their whole point.

It’s probably unrealistic to expect in the current Tour, but we look forward to future commentary from Lance during TV coverage. As one of the smartest and most strategically sophisticated riders ever to win the Tour, Armstrong can provide cycling insights akin to Andre Agassi in tennis, Charles Barkley in basketball and John Madden in football. He has never shown much inclination for the microphone, but his public profile has not been his primary concern either.

Whatever the future holds for Lance, and however bad his fortunes have been the past week, the next fortnight presents a golden opportunity to ride into the sunset smiling and waving his helmet as befits the greatest Tour champion of all time.

Lance Armstrong in contemplative mode

In any case, the Tour so far this year is not the rock-star farewell that Lance might have expected when he announced this would be his final go. There’s still plenty of time for the situation to change, but if the Tour keeps serving up twists and turns on a daily basis — as happened with the Giro this year — then the mere unpredictability and excitement of the stages will distract the press corps and public attention from Lance, especially if he isn’t in the thick of things.

We love Lance’s classiness and sense of moment, using Twitter rather than a press conference or some other corny old-school platform for saying goodbye. He knows where his fan base resides, and how to most effectively get the word out.

We’ve suspected since the Landis accusations broke that Lance — who has been fairly restrained in his defense, in contrast to team manager and longtime Armstrong confidante Johan Bruyneel — would make this Tour his swan song. It should also be clear that Lance is no Brett Favre — although he came out of retirement before, he truly won’t be back again. Strategically, it makes all the sense in the world, and there’s really no downside.

First, he’ll have the whole world on his side, akin to any rock star’s “final tour.” The doping cloud will all but dissipate in the rising tide of well-wishing over the coming three weeks.

Second, the pressure is completely off in terms of winning, or even placing well. Under the circumstances, Lance merely has to show up and perform respectably (and hopefully not crash out) to provide a memorable final ride. Sure it would be great to win, or even podium. But with the odds against either, this is the next best thing Lance could do to ensure the attention and celebrity he’s used to on the Tour, and which befits a champion’s exit.

Without the farewell theme, chances are this Tour would still have been his final one — and leave lingering disappointment in an “out with a whimper” kind of way rather than a celebration of all the great memories Lance has provided over the years.

Finally, Lance’s retirement (of sorts; he’ll probably keep racing selectively) paves the way for what we also suspect is an ulterior motive here: He’ll finally acknowledge doping during the “everybody did it” years in an attempt to wipe clean the slate and put the whole sorry doping-era mess behind not only himself but — far more significantly — the sport of cycling.

With too many people cooperating with investigators, with his retirement in force, and with a sense that his admiring public is behind him no matter what, the upside of a full confession will have finally surmounted the downside.

This is really the only contribution to the sport he and we all love so much that remains for Lance to do. As savvy, charismatic and entertaining as The King has been over the years, making a clean breast of it would be a champion’s way to put the final touch on a glorious career.

In the meantime, Lance’s announcement is one more reason to believe this could be a Tour for the ages.

[Lance himself downplays his chances in this video.]

A dope-free Giro would have been a laughable prospect just a couple of years ago. Italian racing legacy is full of substance abusers, most notoriously the sad case of Marco Pantani.

Yet a clean Giro is apparently (so far) what happened this May. And it was two former banned riders — eventual winner (and Italian) Ivan Basso and leading contender Alexander Vinokourov — who led the way (additional contender Cadel Evans has maintained a clean record and anti-doping stance all along) in saying they wanted a clean slate.

But the post-doping era is about to get its toughest test with the upcoming Tour de France. The Tour is where the biggest dollars get invested, and where the stakes are far and away so much higher that the temptations are irrevocably greater.

Still, there is reason to suspect that this will be the cleanest Tour in years as well.

Not only is the pressure on from within the ranks of the athletes themselves, the French anti-doping authorities are upping their administrative role. The French long have clashed with the official cycling governance body (and doping regulator), the UCI, whom they accuse of being intentionally lax and sloppy in testing and oversight. In this Tour the French have promised to conduct their own testing above and beyond the UCI’s.

Then there’s the issue of the doping cloud hanging over several Team Radio Shack competitors, notably Lance Armstrong, as well as team manager Johan Bruyneel. As charming as Bruyneel can be, he’s been a bit thin-skinned lately in responding not only to the doping allegations but in mishandling Team Radio Shack’s rejection by Tour of Spain officialdom. He and TRS will be even more in the glare during the Tour and need a bit more aplomb if they want to deflect scrutiny and curry fandom.

For his part, Armstrong already has embarked on his tried-and-true “I’m not worthy” strategy after finishing a surprising and impressive second in the Tour of Switzerland.

For Lance, who answers doping allegations by patiently pointing out he’s never tested positive, the Tour is a damned-if-you-do-and-don’t scenario.

The guy is closing in on 39. The oldest Tour winner in history was 36, and that was nearly a century ago. If Lance somehow were to win or even fiercely contend, he will face more brutal scrutiny and suspicion than ever in his storied career.

If he fails to contend, however, cynics will suggest it merely goes to show that in a post-doping environment, Lance cannot win.

We doubt Lance will be in the thick of this year’s race, but it may have nothing to do with doping. He has not done enough riding this spring to be competition-hardened. Other contenders, notably Contador and Andy Schleck, have the same problem. But the Giro headliners of Basso, Vinokourov, Evans and Vincenzo Nibali, this year’s surprise star, do not have that excuse, and there are enough other toned riders to challenge that Lance may find himself a victim of training and youth.

We also wonder if this isn’t Lance’s final Tour. The doping investigation is bound to take a toll eventually, and Team Radio Shack’s disinvites from the Giro and the Vuelta have sent a pretty clear message that something is awry with TRS’s reputation.

Even if Lance emerges from the drug scandals unscathed (or at least unindicted), he doesn’t strike us as a middle-of–the-pack guy.

We’re going to enjoy watching The King and that hunkered out-of-the-saddle style of his and his black socks and steely eyes on this Tour, figuring it may well be our last chance to do so in the world’s primo cycling event.

Alas, it was wet and sloppy, just like … Italy! Today’s Giro was a spigot slog as well.

Brett Lancaster (Cervélo TestTeam) won the second stage, right before a group of 27 riders that included Lance the King.

The big shakeup should happen tomorrow, with some nasty serial climbs along the spine of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Back in my racing days I would train daily on these routes along narrow, steep and winding two-lane roads with no shoulders, killer views and near non-existent traffic. I loved it. There’s no place on earth like the sky-to-sea climbs and descents of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

But it should test the peloton plenty. We may get an indication for the first time in 2010 of what kind of shape Lance Armstrong really is in.

More from VeloNews, where you can also find a video replay of the stage.

As we’ve said practically from Day 1, this year’s Giro d’Italia has been a joy to watch, setting a new standard for early-on stage racing thrills and spills. VeloNews provides a nice retrospective of Week 1.

Meanwhile, Lance Armstrong awaits tomorrow’s start of the Tour of California while expressing doubt that 2010 will be a banner year for The King. The problem is simple logistics: He’s not getting into racing form so far this year. He’s missed some big spring classics and not doing the Giro so he can compete in the Tour of California, a far lesser event. And then there’s all the promotional stuff, and a new baby on the way, and on and on…

We’ve all been there. So perhaps Lance can be forgiven if this story is true.