Lance Armstrong’s admission of doping to Oprah Winfrey in January did little to salvage his fallen reputation. Credit George Burns/Harpo Studios, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

After denying for more than a decade that he had ever doped, Lance Armstrong finally had the perfect opportunity to apologize for perpetuating a fairy tale that had been built on lies.

In January on Oprah Winfrey’s cable network, he sat a few feet from Winfrey and confessed that he had used banned drugs and blood transfusions to win all seven of his Tour de France titles. With millions of people watching, he could have dropped to his knees, wept and begged forgiveness — saying he had doped and lied about it to protect his cancer foundation — and it have might been the first step in salvaging his mangled reputation.

But to know Armstrong, an American sports superhero who had one of the quickest and most painful downfalls in history, is to know that he would never crack like that.

When I learned a week before Winfrey announced the interview that Armstrong was discussing with his advisers how to confess his drug use, I told them that his going on television would be a huge mistake. (And, of course, that he should first come clean to a written publication like The New York Times.) It was self-serving on my part, but true. I knew Armstrong enough to know that he couldn’t fake sincerity.

For years, Armstrong was an Oscar-winning liar. He was the guy who said that he would be crazy to put drugs into his body after surviving cancer, a reasoning that led many to believe he was clean. And he was the guy who said that he would never do anything to jeopardize the faith that millions of people had in him as their inspiration to fight cancer. He would never dope, he told the public again and again.

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He said all that without flinching.

But then he confessed on prime-time television, and look what that did for him. In what could most kindly be described as a public-relations disaster, Armstrong failed to offer his fans what they were seeking: genuine contrition. For a few minutes here and there, he seemed sorry, but only about being caught.

But for Armstrong, a defiant and strong-willed Texan, that was as good as he could give. Only in retrospect did he realize that he had dug his own grave.

He had been a dirty rider in a sport that had been dirty for more than 100 years. His greatest rival, the German rider Jan Ullrich, even came to his defense after the televised interview, saying that doping was so prevalent when Armstrong was winning that it would be wrong to erase him from the record books.

But now Armstrong is barred from Olympic sports forever. His greatest athletic pursuit these days is golf.

One of his friends told me that Armstrong loves the game partly because of its etiquette, which calls for players to police themselves when it comes to violations of the rules.

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