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.

Never suspended for drinking.

Team director Bjarne Riis, who has acknowledged winning the Tour de France in 1996 while doping fer cryin’ out loud, must want to set a squeaky-clean agenda for Saxo next season. We’ve never heard of an elite pro rider being sent home for having a nip after dinner, but it’s probably there in the Saxo Guide to Inappropriate Behavior somewhere.

In any case, Riis hasn’t been happy with Andy and brother Frank since they announced they were leaving to form a new Luxembourg team (their home country) right before the Tour de France. Riis was, however, gracious enough to say Andy’s disciplining “had nothing to do” with doping. Just in case some members of the cycling public don’t know the difference between Tanqueray and testosterone.

No word on what Andy’s poison was, but — recalling W.C. Fields’ great line, “Who put orange juice in my orange juice?” — we hope it was something more, uh, invigorating than a Budweiser.

Underlining the “everybody did it” argument we ultimately feel Lance Armstrong will legitimately adopt, Pevenage says, “Back then I wasn’t under the impression we were doing anything wrong.” That he can say it with a straight face shows how ingrained — and tolerated — the doping culture was for so many years in pro cycling.

Key line: “But the Belgian also hit out at riders who, he claims, have spoken out against doping having also been clients of Fuentes.”

Pevenage named no names in this report, but you have to wonder if he hasn’t been visited by investigators following up on the Floyd Landis allegations.

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Landis has for the first time fully acknowledged using performance-enhancing substances, i.e. blood doping, and says he is naming names re others’ use. The biggest on the list of course would be the King himself, Lance Armstrong.

Armstrong has been implicated repeatedly over the years, in documents, books, court testimony and by association with physicians linked to doping. But he has managed to raise enough doubts to deflect suspicion. And for the record, he has never actually been caught — or at least if he was, it was never made public.

The list of names already disclosed in Landis’ accusations, which comprise a series of emails to cycling officials, is depressing, sad and unsettling: George Hincapie, another rider considered straight and narrow. Levi Leipheimer, currently favored to win the Amgen Tour of California (where Lance is riding in his support). Johan Bruyneel, Lance’s longtime team manager and confidante, currently head of Team Radio Shack in the Tour of California. David Zabriskie, the current leader of the Tour of California. All American riders, considered all-American riders as well.

If true, Landis’ accusations mark the potential passing of an era similar to what baseball went through a couple of years ago with congressional hearings and all-star confessions regarding use of steroids. No one knows if usage has really been stopped. But the aura of sportsmanship for the “roids era” of baseball has been forever tarnished.

If there’s been a pattern to doping in any sport, it’s that athletes need assistance to pull it off. And typically the cover gets blown when someone steps forward. In Lance’s case, his inner circle has been consistently tight over the years. We always guessed his former wife would be the one to finally state the case. But Landis beat her to it. [See Joe Papp's post on this point.]

Lance has been subdued in the Tour of California and uncharacteristically muted about his racing form and ambitions so far this season. If he had any inkling of Landis’ action, it might explain his low profile. Now the cycling world will be in an uproar — the equivalent of the BP Gulf oil spill — while news media continue to probe and investigate Landis’ allegations. It will hardly be a copacetic environment for pursuing racing glory this season.

Our stance on Lance has always been that his charisma, commercial drawing power and huge international following put doping authorities in an impossible bind. Even if they did manage to test him positive, what would it mean for them to disqualify him from an event like the Tour de France? It would cost the event and the sport millions in lost sponsorships, American disenchantment, TV and media coverage, advertising and general tainting of the grand and glorious sport of cycling.

Our theory has always been that mum was the word. Now, as details emerge from the Landis confessions, we may see if our suspicions were correct.

Our hope is that Lance will make a clean breast of it and move on, so that his foundation and his worthy work all over the globe for fighting cancer and bringing fans and attention to cycling can continue without a morbid cloud hanging over it. It takes a true champion to own up to his or her faults. People like to forgive and forget, and if Lance comports himself moving forward as well as he has in the past, he can put all this behind him with an “everybody did it” defense. In that sense he can rise above Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds “syndrome” — stars who were jerks before they were accused and remained jerks afterward.

One last thing: We can only hope that Lance was clean last August when he rode away from the field in the Leadville 100 to deprive local hero Dave Wiens of a 7th straight championship. To think that Wiens, a true sportsman and humanitarian, was deprived of a legitimate win on the basis of drug cheating would be one of the more depressing circumstances we’ve encountered in our lifetime of cycling obsession.

His HTC team perhaps led out a bit early for Cav, who faded within an eye’s blink of the finish line on the carpenter’s-level-flat streets of Modesto. Or as we’ve noted earlier the season got off to a late start for Mark the Mouth and he may not be in seasonal form yet.

But halfway across the world, the Northwest’s own Tyler Farrar may be taking heart. Farrar has locked horns on a number of occasions with Cavendish in the world’s biggest races — and usually lost. But Farrar is having a ripping Giro d’Italia, including two stage wins and the current points leadership, and may be in position to reverse his past pattern vs. the Cav.

For the stage, it was Francesco Chicchi (Liquigas), J.J. Haedo of Saxo Bank and Cavendish (HTC). The general classification stayed the same: Zabriskie, Rogers and Leipheimer.

Not much excitement is expected before Friday’s stage climb up Big Bear Lake, and on Sunday the whole thing is over.

But some perspective is in order.

Lance and Vaughters are former teammates, so there’s that history. Then, a couple of years ago, a Vaughters IM about potential doping in the Tour wound up in a lawsuit involving Lance and got widely circulated.

In cycling circles, the word is that so little love is lost between Lance and Vaughters you couldn’t find it with the Hubble Telescope.

Even so, Vaughters shows he has lost little of his cycling form, at least when it comes to backpedaling … a bit, anyway.

To be continued, to be sure.

Bicycle.net: Does it really, in the overall scheme of things, when the universe is shrinking and expanding … does it really matter if cyclists cheat?

Cyclelicio.us: Judging from hit counts, cycling is way more drug-drenched than, say, pro football. Which we all knew, right? I mean, why would football players, starting in middle school, ever take steroids or whatever? What would there be in it for them?

BikePure.org: Anyone up for gene doping?

One point I’d like to see Joe or someone else close to pro cycling address: Just how much looking the other way goes on. I’ve discussed this before, that even if Tour officials found Contador or Lance doping, would they take action? The consequences to the sport would be beyond devastating. Better to just look the other way and beat up on the smaller guys in an attempt to 1) show you’re doing SOMEthing about doping and 2) present an illusion of cleaning up the sport.

We remain convinced that doping is a political and financial, not physical or athletic, issue, and must be dealt with on those terms.

When the Euro revolution was just starting to sink in, Hoffacker’s Palo Alto Bicycles and Ric and Jon Hjertberg’s Wheelsmith a couple blocks away made Palo Alto one of the coolest places on earth. Palo Alto Bicycles had the classiest mail order catalog anywhere, helping to fuel the bike boom of the ’70s, and its posters of Tour legends and local wheel-building icon Jobst Brandt riding the Swiss Alps still hang in my basement.

Where PA Bikes and Wheelsmith really rocked was during the Tour de France. You have to remember, there was no TV coverage or even mention of the Tour on newscasts. Local newspapers ran nothing, not even results.

The only way to track Tour progress was to swing by Palo Alto Bicycles or Wheelsmith for results, usually posted on a small piece of paper tacked to a bulletin board or wall. And then we’d debate about who was going to win and fantasize what it would be like to be following the peloton through the mountains.

We asked Ric, who runs Wheel Fanatyk in Seattle these days, to refresh our memory on how Wheelsmith got the results.

“Tour results, in the early days, came from the Manchester Guardian we copped at Mac’s Smoke Shop,” Ric noted. “You needed to wait until opening because they only got 3 copies. We rushed it to our store, clipped the results, and posted them. Dozens of riders would come by over the day, or call, to learn the standings.”

By today’s standards, it sounds positively Stone Age.

“Whew,” Ric acknowledged. “Was it really that primitive? Well, actually, it was!”

We never thought we’d get live coverage of the Tour each day, or be able to chatter on our keyboards via blogs and the Internet. (Thank you, Jacques, Greg and Lance!) We were happy just for the names of the stage winners and Top 10 overalls, with respective times. Thanks to Palo Alto Bicycles for feeding the mind, inspiring the soul and supplying the kit over the years. And yes Ric, we miss those days hanging out at Wheelsmith. Computers weren’t the only great things that sprang from garage shops in Silicon Valley!