Now that Lance Armstrong has been exposed as perhaps the most doped athlete in history, the mainstream media and the public at large can’t stop talking about how “dirty” the sport of cycling is. Lance Armstrong proves it: “They’re all on drugs.” The Onion nicely summed up the global disdain last week by publishing “The Last Article Ever Written About Cycling.”

Already two major sponsors have given up on the sport, including the Dutch financial giant Rabobank, which has funded teams for decades. It seems unlikely that other major companies would want to risk the embarrassment suffered by longtime Armstrong sponsor Nike, which produced ads in which Armstrong self-righteously insisted he was clean, and even had a building on its corporate campus named after the disgraced cyclist. “There is no sport with a bigger credibility fight on its hands than cycling,” wrote Bonnie Ford of ESPN.com, one of the sport’s most astute commentators.

But the head-shakers and finger-waggers have it exactly wrong. Yes, the Armstrong scandal revealed systemic cheating in a sport that was corrupt to its core—a decade ago. In the landscape of professional sport right now, cycling may actually be one of the cleaner sports around.

No, really; stop laughing. And notice that I didn’t say “clean,” just cleaner. Because while cycling has a long, colorful history of cheating, it also pioneered the modern practice of drug-testing athletes. After the British cyclist Tom Simpson died of amphetamine-fueled heatstroke on the slopes of Mont Ventoux in 1967, riders have been subject to organized testing that been getting better and better, even during Armstrong’s reign of fraud between 1999 and 2005.

The advent in 2000 of a direct test for EPO, the notorious and ubiquitous blood-boosting drug, sparked a massive purge, as dozens of old-school dopers got caught and were suspended. Many retired outright, including several world champions. Armstrong himself is alleged to have returned a positive test for EPO in 2001, but according to his former teammate Tyler Hamilton, he laughed it off and said it would be “taken care of” by his powerful allies in the sport’s governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale, or UCI. (Stay tuned for their ouster/resignations.)