Lance Armstrong.
CYCLING
Cycling's world governing body the UCI remain under intense scrutiny, despite endorsing the lifetime ban for Lance Armstrong.
The biggest doping scandal in sports history will have ongoing ramifications, with world anti-doping boss John Fahey calling on the UCI to thoroughly examine its role in the debacle.
Armstrong himself is unlikely to give into widespread pleas that he admit to his cheating because the legal and financial repercussions of a confession are too great for him.
But hours after the UCI endorsed the US Anti-Doping Agency's lifetime ban on Monday night, Armstrong removed a reference to winning seven Tour de France titles from 1999-2005 from his Twitter account.
Given so many of Armstrong's rivals were also doping during those Tours, the likely outcome is there will be no official winners.
Now that Armstrong's disgrace is official, the focus becomes what role the UCI played in his long-term doping program.
Fahey, the World Anti-Doping Agency president, warned the UCI that accepting the USADA ban was far from the end of the saga.
"It's not a question of simply saying we'll rule off the line and go on," Fahey said.
"They clearly have to take the blinkers off, look at the past, examine the people who are there, ask themselves the questions: 'are those same people still in the sport and can they proceed forward with those people remaining?'.
"I don't think there's any credibility if they don't do that and I think they need to get confidence back into the sport so that its millions of supporters around the world will watch and support the sport going forward."
Fahey gave a withering assessment of the sport, saying "everyone" doped during the Armstrong era.
Asked to clarify his comment, Fahey said: "The evidence that was given by those riders who are teammates of Lance Armstrong, one after the other, they said the same thing - that you could not compete unless you were doping."
Senior UCI officials will meet on Friday to discuss the fallout from the Armstrong case.
But Australian Mike Turtur, the UCI Oceania chief, shared the opinion of his president, Pat McQuaid, that there was no point digging up the past.
"It's an opportunity now for sport to really start with a clean slate and then draw a line in the sand and say 'from this point on, we're going to do all these things that will be in place to try to detect cheats in the sport and make it a better environment for everyone'," said Turtur.
But serious questions remain - for example, the circumstances surrounding Armstrong's donations to the UCI in the early 2000s, and others involved. AAP