SIDELINE CUT:For years, he seemed to walk through life with a kind of invisible coat of Arthurian armour. He was a mythical figure. Now his key role in the corruption of a whole sport has been exposed

OF ALL the questions attached to Lance Armstrong’s plummeting star, one stands out: how did he ever believe that everyone would stay quiet forever? Armstrong has 3,750,000 followers on Twitter, more than Tiger Woods has and half as many as LeBron James, who is probably the most famous sportsman on the planet.

The public fascination with the Texan cyclist far exceeds the profile that his sport commands in the United States. For years, it seemed as if Lance was bigger than cycling.

His astonishing run of seven successive Tour de France victories from 1999-2005, when he effectively took ownership of one of the most savage races ever dreamed up, partly stoked that interest. But Armstrong’s appeal was always tied in with his remarkable personal tussle with cancer, when force of mind and positive thought proved instrumental in restoring a body ravaged with the illness not only to full health but to the point where he was regarded as one of the great athletes of modern times.

His personal charm – a quick smile and light Texan drawl and easy articulacy – also gave him an edge in an era when most elite athletes are guarded and uncomfortable in public situations. He sat as easily on the leather suites of iconic chat show hosts as he did on the saddles which carried him across the toughest roads in Europe.

On his Twitter account the other night, Armstrong posted a video which was not a reminder of his halcyon days as cycling’s great champion but a recording by the late, great Elliot Smith singing Coming Up Roses. It seemed like a blackly comic attempt to remain indifferent in the face of the most damning evidence that he corrupted not just his own sporting life with a programme of blood and substance doping but pressurised his fellow cyclists into doing the same.

The hefty report released by the United States Anti-Doping Agency presents the cold evidence of 11 of Armstrong’s former team-mates at the US Postal Services team. It is made clear that an ambitious, sophisticated and totally premeditated culture of drug and blood-doping was the framework around which the success of the team was built.

The sustained deliberation carries echoes of the sinister practices which ruined the lives of so many young athletes in the former German Democratic Republic. It is made clear that Armstrong helped “in running the US postal team as a doping conspiracy” and that they sought to “achieve their ambitions though a massive fraud now more fully exposed”.

For years, Armstrong seemed to walk through life with a kind of invisible coat of Arthurian armour. He was a mythical figure.

Now, that carefully constructed legend is on the brink of disintegration. He will probably ignore the content of the report and rely on the fact that he has never tested positive and suggest that all of this evidence amounts to the hearsay of others, the latest chorus in what he has called an “unconstitutional witch-hunt”.

But thousands for whom he was the last word in heroism must feel badly betrayed now.

Was it always going to end like this? If he had not decided to “retire from retirement” as he put it on the Late Show with David Letterman back in 2008, speaking about how his participation in the Leadville 100 in Colorado whetted his appetite, could he have sailed into the sunset and enjoyed the prestige that comes with being a feted champion?

Few wrongs provoke the language of biblical denunciation as quickly as cheating in sport. Given the appalling allegations now emerging from the decades when Jimmy Savile was regarded as the harmless showman of 1970s and 1980s pop culture, there is something jarring about the notion of cycling – a mere sport – as corrupted.

But lives have been ruined in the cycle game too. The tragic demise of Marco Pantani, the Italian cyclist whose life took a rapid turn for the worst after he was implicated in doping, became a metaphor for the loneliness of the sport. For years, it was clear there was something predatory at the heart of cycling and that the allure of success through cheating was too commonplace and too easy to resist.

The testimonies of Armstrong’s former team-mates make it plain that the pressure to commit to the prevailing ethos within the team soon eclipsed whatever principles or strength of character they may have believed they possessed. And it is not as if these allegations are brand new. As far back as 2010, Tyler Hamilton explained why he had not disclosed everything he knew about his USPS team after he had tested positive.

“If I told the truth: yeah, I took EPO and testosterone and an occasional transfusion of my own blood, then I would have had to open the doors and tell the whole truth and I would have taken down a lot of people in the sport. A lot of old friends – team-mates, co-workers staff members,” he said on the television programme 60 Minutes.

“And I kept my mouth shut for the sake of the sport. I didn’t want to hurt it any worse than it has been hurt.”

It was a strange logic: trying to protect the cycling game by the suppression of the fact that it had become a pharmaceutical basket-case. The high point of Hamilton’s career on the bike was the gold medal he won at the Athens Olympics. He soon became embroiled in drug controversies and finally retired in 2009 after he tested positive for a substance he claimed to have taken as part of a herbal supplement to help him cope with depression. The cost for him involves looking back at two decades as a sportsman which now feel and look hollow: he handed his Olympic medal back to Usada. He wasted the best years of his athletic life.

But Hamilton was ‘just’ a cyclist. Armstrong, through his epic personality and story was – and probably remains – a Christ -like figure for those whose lives he has touched through his work for cancer. It is understandable that there has been such a strong resistance to any voice which tarnished the Armstrong story.

People wanted and, in darkest hours which went beyond sport, needed to believe it.

His return to cycling was tied in with his ambitious Global Cancer Campaign. At that point, he was a like an athlete/saint. Hundreds of thousands believed, fervently. There were protest voices. Former champion Greg LeMond has spoken out against Armstrong when it would have been more prudent and easier to remain silent.

The Irish sportswriter and former cyclist Paul Kimmage has long pricked the conscience of professional cycling and now faces the bizarre – and frightening – scenario in which he is being sued – personally – by the UCI, cycling’s governing body, for articles he wrote in The Sunday Times.

Just a couple of days ago, Kimmage posted a message in his Twitter account which read: “This conflict with the UCI may seem like a game, and a game I’m enjoying but the truth is that it’s destroying my life.”

In the light of the shattering case presented by the Usada Reasoned Decision report, the most sensible thing for the UCI would be to surely forget about chasing an individual journalist around the courts and to assess openly and honestly where their sport went wrong and where it should go from here.

It is supposed to be one of the simple and enduring pleasures in life: cycling a bike. They all started out like that: kids on a bike, in love with the speed and solitude and the thrill of the race. But wrong turns were taken and it looks like Lance Armstrong has run out of road. Coming Up Roses is song number six on the eponymous album Elliot Smith, on which the last song, funnily, is called The Biggest Lie.