When one person cheats, he has an unfair advantage over the rest of the field. But when the majority of the field cheats, you have to do the same in order to keep up. Whoever is in charge of enforcing the laws of cycling is obviously doing a woefully inadequate job. This isn't necessarily their fault; I realize that new drugs and doping methods are invented all the time and it's impossible to test for everything. Still, it comes down to the fact that someone who wants to ride clean (and I'm not saying Armstrong was one of those) can't rely on his sport's authority to maintain a level playing field. It is, quite literally, cheat or lose.

I'm not saying that doping is the right thing to do, but it's a problem that needs to be solved at the institutional level. Riders who want to win currently have little choice.