​I've discussed this issue with many other riders. Some agree with me and many don't. I thought some disagreed partly because Americans are so moralistic about public life-- or have such high standards for public figures, if you prefer to put it that way. But some Australians were even more negative. Of course, Australians tend to be super American is some ways.
So let me lay out the argument.
First, let's establish what Armstrong did and has admitted to: four forms of doping. He blood doped by reinfusing his own red blood cells to enhance his blood's oxygen carrying capacity. He took anabolic steroids to increase strength and muscle. He took Epoetin to manufacture extra red blood cells. And he used anti-inflammatories and steroids to tamp down on soreness and inflammation while he was riding the Tour de France, to enhance his short term recovery.
Then he lied about it.
He also attacked, sometimes in court, ex-colleagues and employees who ratted him out.
So why forgive all this?
Let's start with the fact that in the Armstrong era, all professional riders doped in this same way. The playing field was level, and he was not taking unfair advantage of anything except superior expertise in not getting caught.
That seems like a big charge to make. How do we know this? First, it's common knowledge among everyone in the cycling community. Professional bike racing was a chemically enhanced sport in those times, and may have been since it's inception. The greatest racer of all time, Eddie Merckx, was caught using amphetamines.
At the time, there was some discussion among the Tour directorate about leaving the sport like that, as doping is so hard to prevent. Wiser heads prevailed, or at least were swayed by financial considerations about the public's opinion of their sport. That is, the officials and governing bodies bear most of the responsibility for this state of affairs, in my opinion. If everyone knew about it, so did they, and yet they elected to look the other way, or to rely on ineffectual, purely cosmetic attempts to regulate doping.
The riders, like Armstrong, were young kids who wanted to win bike races, which is a noble ambition in my opinion. It's a dangerous and demanding sport. They had to obey their coaches, like all athletes. Their choices were to give up the sport, or ride as amateurs, or to dope, which was the only way to win. The Tour de France is won by minutes, after 2000 miles of racing and three weeks of riding. Even a tiny edge is decisive and doping was a big edge. One of the reasons so many people were convinced Armstrong doped, even though he passed all his drug tests, was that it was thought to be impossible to compete that successfully at that level against riders who did dope. And the coaches, the directeurs sportif, had to go along with doping to stay in business.
Blaming only the riders is yet another way for coaches, reporters, team owners to bully the actual athletes, whose prowess they may resent. The old fart with the money is the alpha dog. And don't you forget it.
Second, the speed of the peloton, the main group of riders in a race, has dropped by a couple miles per hour since effective anti-doping strategies have been in force. Course records or climb times set during the doping era have never been equaled, despite the facts that the bikes are lighter and faster, there are more competitors from all over the world, and the training is more intense than ever.
Now, that is, riders are tested as soon as they turn pro to establish baseline blood chemistry; they are tested multiple times a year, and at unannounced times. A rider who came in second one year was disqualified for the following year because he said he was abroad when the tester come to find him, but a reliable witness said he saw him in Italy, not abroad. He never tested positive, but that was enough. Riders and their vehicles are searched at borders. Moles are planted in their entourages. People are followed. Garbage is examined.
Third, almost without exception, the riders who came in second and third to Armstrong in the Tours he won, and the riders who won just before and after his string of eight victories, have admitted to or been caught doping. In fact, usually when someone is disqualified, the runner up is given the title. But not in this case, because the Tour direction has no confidence that the riders who came in second, and have not undergone the kind of scrutiny and investigation that Armstrong has, were not equally guilty.
And yet no one but Armstrong has been banned for life from professional sports. The rest got suspended for a season, mostly.
You could say that punishing him severely has a deterrent effect, but I do not believe that. Present day riders look on the Armstrong years as ancient history, with different mores, different forms of testing and even different chemicals available. The deterrent is the focus on present day riders and teams discussed above.
Well, what about lying about it? Kind of the way Nixon and Clinton got busted not for the original offense but for lying under oath, obstruction of justice, suborning witnesses and the like.
Not comparable. Taking prescribed performance enhancing drugs is not illegal. It's against the regulations of the sport, but had Armstrong not been an athlete he could have taken all the drugs his doctor prescribed him without any penalty. Besides, he ain't President of the United States.
And if you are going to do it, you have to lie about it. It's the same act. You can't dope and then say you doped. What would be the point? I regard this second offense as a kind of entrapment, though it does bear out the old Catholic dogma that once you commit one sin, the others follow.
I don't really have any excuse for him attacking other riders and ex-employees who squealed. They went along with him until it wasn't convenient, so I can't say I'm very sympathetic to their plight, but it was pretty vicious on his part too.
What I can say is that winners are not always nice guys. You can admire their athletic ability, their drive, their determination and their focus, but to expect all of them to be exemplary in all other ways is probably too much to ask. A certain amount of narcissism and selfishness kind of comes with the territory. Me first.
The Australian said I was justifying someone acting like a mafia don enforcing omerta. I admit he had a point.
Still, I feel at this point that Armstrong has been punished enough. He's been out of professional competition for years, suffered financially, lost prestige. No matter what happens his reputation will never be the same.
In fact, given the good work his cancer institute was doing, and the exemplary, if illusory, role model he was providing, it would have been better if his prosecutors had looked to the present day sport instead of digging around in the past. The lawyer who chased him down, spending years and millions of dollars, said Armstrong showed a win at all costs mentality which he found reprehensible, but, as so often, he was describing himself.
A very useful and essential, and much neglected, concept for my conclusion here is one only known to people who study history seriously or professionally. It is called historicity. You cannot judge people and events from other eras and cultures as though they were living in your world. George Washington owned slaves. Today that would earn him opprobrium and jail time. And you can't say he didn't know it was not kosher even then. You can look at statements he made, and the abolition of the slave trade in other countries from much earlier than his period.
But while condemning slavery unequivocally, you have to give him a pass on that. It was accepted in his time. He was a very great man and a very admirable figure in very many and very important ways. You hope someone will transcend his time but it is unreasonable to expect he will in every way. Washington certainly did in so many other ways. It is intellectually and morally incorrect to pretend that the standards which hold in your time are eternal truths. It's provincial and arrogant. Things change, and they keep changing.
​So the Armstrong era was the era when professional bike racing was a chemically enhanced sport. You can't change history. The races he rode and won were great triumphs. They belong in the glorious history of the Tour. He won 8 Tours by his own efforts, skill, determination, strategy and physical prowess, adhering to the standards of bike racing which prevailed in his time.
So it's time to prevent doping in the sport now, not in the past. And to give Armstrong back the honors he won on the road, mano a mano.
He was, I believe, the greatest Tour rider ever. Perhaps not the greatest racer, as Merckx won so many other races besides his 5 Tours, including the hour record--in fact one third of all the races he ever entered; but Armstrong, besides winning 8 tours by defeating on an equal paying field all the riders competing in the environment as it was then, was the only Tour victor who was the best both in the mountains and in the time trials. That is, most Tour champions are time trial specialists who can limit their losses on the climbs, riders like Merckx, Hinault, Induran or Anqueteil. Sometimes a great climber who can limit his losses in the time trials will win. But only Armstrong consistently won both. He was the best time trialer of his time and also the best climber. Laurent Fignon only achieved that once, and only won two Tours total.
You can ask questions, like, would Armstrong have won if he and the other riders had not been doping? This is like, could he have beaten Merckx if they both rode at the same time? The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein laid that one to rest early in the last century. He said questions based on hypotheticals have no answer. As he put it, "If I were a duck, would I lay eggs? I have no idea. I'm not a duck." It's hard enough to answer real questions.
We can continue to sanction riders who dope, and enforce and enhance anti-doping measures without trying to rectify the sport's past. As the second placed Oscar Pereiro said, less than enthused about the first place the Tour direction offered him after first place Floyd Landis had been disqualified for testosterone, "You win the Tour on the road." Not in a law court. Or as another rider put it, though concerning an entirely different kind of case, involving Bernard Hinault ( AKA le Blaireau, the Badger). "Pour nous, dans le peloton, c'est le Blaireau qui porte le maillot. For us, in the peloton, it's the Badger who's wearing the jersey."
So the prosecutors and bureaucrats may have taken Lance's 8 yellow jerseys away from him, but for at least some of us who have actually turned a crank in anger, pour nous dans le peloton, c'est Lance qui porte les maillots. He's already paid whatever debt he owes for participating in the toxic culture of the 90's Tours de France.

​A similar thing has happened to journalism. Journalists bemoan the demise or at least weakening of print journalism, saying the reduced readerships means the research staffs, editors and journalists have become fewer and that therefore the public will become increasingly poorly informed. Well, the demise or weakening of the NY times and the like is indeed a bad thing. But there is an up side. The problem with the old print system was "the boys on the bus" syndrome. That is, if there was a crisis in Egypt, large numbers of journalists would assemble in Cairo, all stay in the same hotel, and all report more or less the same story. None of them would speak Arabic, none of them would have a deeper long term knowledge of the country, and then the next week they would all fly to Paris to cover the next crisis, stay in the same hotel etc. At present, blogs on the internet are written by Egyptians. In fact many Egyptians, living in many parts of Egypt and speaking all the local languages. They are university professors, politicians, everything, and they have a huge experience of the local history, customs and intimate familiarity with the principal players. It's difficult for an outsider to filter out who to listen to, but there are also links, blog editors and increasing mechanisms to lead interested readers to the best sources. It's really hard to maintain that readers are less informed now than they were in the heyday of the Times.

I should write a whole book about household rituals.  Scholars of the history of religion tell us that rituals come before their ideational content.  So too speak, Masses were said even before there were words about Jesus.  Even animals have rituals.  Besides bower building birds and the like, ethnologists observed a recently captured dolphin pair, from a group that only ate squid, their specialization,  swimming thrice around their tank with a fish they were fed held in both their mouths before consenting to eating it.  Everyone has obsessions and compulsions that are pretty ritualized too, whether to "poor marriage choices" or shopping or eating or whatever.
Some of these rituals are cultural determined.  One would be the placing of washed dishes in a special ritual container called a "dishwasher."  It does not actually wash dishes, at least none of the ones I have seen do. You have to rinse the dish, remove all the particles or stuck on bits of food, wash off the grease, and then the "dishwasher" will perform a water based ritual, after which you "unload" it.  The process is not any quicker or more convenient than washing the dishes "by hand," which is the ritual phrase for not using a dishwasher, which of course equally requires hands on.
Then there is urinating in the bathroom or rest room, formerly called the WC or water closet, signifying "toilet" in ritual terms, as actual references to urinating or defecating are taboo.  The room in question is of course not for resting or bathing in this context.  And I no one even knows what a water closet would be.  
​After urinating, the ritual is completed by washing your hands, formerly known as an ablution, a term of art for ritual washing.  I'm not speaking here of defecating, as there are sound hygienic reasons for washing our hands after that exercise.  Urine however is sterile.  Unless you have a UTI, urinary tract infection. (You would know if you had a UTI.)  Further, the bathroom itself is probably the cleanest room in your house, with surfaces deliberately designed for antiseptization.  And if you bathed in the morning before putting on clean clothes, as most do, the organ in question may be he cleanest part of your body.  It would make more sense to wash our hands before touching it. Not mush more sense though. So, in short, the exercise is a ritual.  That is to say, an activity which has a symbolic meaning but no actual practical function.