"I believe the pendulum has swung the other way," Tyler Hamilton says on a quiet afternoon at home in Montana as he considers the shift of momentum in the case of Lance Armstrong and the dirty truth of road cycling. "The Omertà – the code of silence – still exists but a lot of riders in the peloton, a lot of directors, know so much about Lance. They've not said a lot because they're scared. But the truth is coming out now. I've heard that the stuff coming out in the next couple of weeks from other riders is going to make front page news in the sports sections."

Hamilton pauses in the midst of a continuing storm. The recent publication of his book The Secret Race marked a gripping and grimy return to his past as an elite cyclist and former team-mate of Armstrong. In a story swollen with blood bags and discarded needles, with furtively constant use of EPO, Hamilton has placed Armstrong near the centre of his narrative.

A mordant humour sometimes frames the shooting up and downbeat cheating. In his team they named EPO after Edgar Allan Poe, a novelist of mystery whose final words on his deathbed were reputedly: "Lord, help my poor soul." If they usually called their performance-enhancing drug of choice "Edgar", being on first-name terms with EPO, Hamilton claims to have also asked Armstrong a simple question about "Poe". They were in Armstrong's villa in Nice, in the spring of 1999, preparing for the Tour de France – and the first of his seven wins.

"Hey dude, you got any Poe I can borrow?" Hamilton supposedly asked Armstrong. "Lance pointed casually to the fridge," Hamilton writes. "I opened it and there, on the door, next to a carton of milk was a carton of EPO, each stoppered vial standing upright, little soldiers in their cardboard cells. I was surprised that Lance would be so cavalier." Unlike Hamilton and other paranoid members of the peloton, "Lance acted like he was invulnerable."

The façade has crumbled – and last month Armstrong abandoned any further challenge to the US Anti-doping Agency's allegations that he had taken performance-enhancing drugs between 1999 and 2005. A day later Usada gave itself the right to strip Armstrong of all his Tour victories. They will soon send a report to the Union Cycliste Internationale, containing riders's testimonies, which is both critical of cycling's governing body and a justification of their action against Armstrong. Travis Tygart, the director of Usada, has received three death threats since beginning his investigation – with the French newspaper L'Equipe suggesting this week that the evidence against Armstrong will be "terrible" and "30 times" more damning than anything published so far.

"I was initially surprised," Hamilton claims of Armstrong's decision, "because Lance never backs down from a fight. It's the first time we've seen that happen. But then I wasn't surprised because the information is so comprehensive it would have been a long, slow death for him. The public would have found out eventually so I think he decided to quit while he was ahead."

Hamilton believes the dam of deceit is about to burst and he stresses that Tygart "deserves a good medal. Hopefully all the testimonies coming out in the next few weeks will encourage others currently in cycling to speak out. If a director or soigneur wants to tell the truth I'm not sure they should be penalised. They should allow a period of time when they can be transparent without worrying about their futures."

Hamilton's suggested amnesty echoes the call made by Jonathan Vaughters for cycling to emulate South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission after apartheid. Vaughters, an anti-doping campaigner who now manages the Garmin-Sharp team, used to be a team-mate of Armstrong and Hamilton at US Postal. He has also admitted his doping past.

"You can say I'm lying," Hamilton murmurs, "but you can't say all 10 of us are lying. So Lance is in a tough spot right now. If I could make a recommendation to him it would be to tell the truth. I've been through this. I lied for years and years. And the thing about lies and secrets is that they eat you alive from the inside. I would not wish that pain on anyone."

Hamilton's deception finally ended after 13 years when, in June 2010, he was contacted by Jeff Novitsky, a federal investigator. Hamilton could have refused to admit his doping but, instead, he spoke for four hours before a grand jury as he explained all he had done, and seen, in professional cycling. Novitsky then allowed him to speak for another three hours. Hamilton compares himself to a fist unclenching as the truth flowed out of his mouth.

"I feel that a hundred times more now," he says. "It's a massive release but I also feel obliged to admit that I did dope. No-one put a gun to my head. I knew the difference between right and wrong. But I'd like people to understand how we started small and got trapped. I was just a couple of months away from riding in my first Tour de France. I was in a vulnerable position and they put a subtle pressure on me to make a poor decision."

Hamilton was invited to join "the white bag club" in 1997 and he suggests that most cyclists have "a thousand days" before their youthful idealism subsides and it just seems easier to dope. Three years of riding huge and terrible mountains paniagua [Spanish for "on bread and water"], according to Hamilton, produces a thousand days of crushed hope as doped cyclists sail past with apparently little effort.

Yet pages in Hamilton's book still jar. In 2003 a long solo breakaway resulted in Hamilton winning a stage to Bayonne in the Tour de France and he writes this disconcerting passage: "You can call me a cheater and doper until the cows come home. But the fact remains that in a race where everybody had equal opportunity I played the game and I played it well."

This kind of smug zeal is fuelled by a bogus claim that, even at its worst, cycling offered a "level playing field." It peddles the hollow deceit that underpins the entire twisted culture of doping. If it's surprising that Hamilton should have used it again, he backtracks now. "That's how we looked at it then but to be honest with you it really wasn't a level playing field. If you weren't a risk-taker you were always going to be a step behind. You could be the best cyclist in the world but if you weren't a risk-taker you weren't going to win the Tour de France. It takes money and connections to doctors."

False boldness bolsters the doping "risk-taker". Instead, the boldest and bravest man in Hamilton's book makes just a fleeting appearance. Christophe Bassons was called Mr Clean. He not only refused to dope but during the 1999 Tour he wrote a column for Le Parisien in which he said the notorious Festina Affair had changed nothing. Despite arrests and bans, cycling remained as crooked as ever. Hamilton claims he saw Armstrong threaten and then isolate Bassons.

"No one defended him," Hamilton writes of Bassons. "No one would talk to him, not even on his own team. Bassons understood and dropped out the following day." Asked about Bassons now, Hamilton sounds mortified. "I feel awful about the way he was treated. I always knew the peloton would not talk to Christophe after Lance singled him out – but shame on me for doing the same. We succumbed to the pressure that Lance exerted.

"Around 2004, when I was racing against the big beasts, there were only two riders who spoke out against doping: Christophe and Filippo Simeoni, the Italian rider. They were both quickly knocked to the floor and shut down by Lance. Their careers just went downhill and they were ushered out of the sport. At the time people were happy to see them leave. Now I think: 'How tragic.' I'd love to let them know how I feel. They were just two small fish in a huge pond filled with hundreds of fishermen – they had little chance."

One of Hamilton's most serious allegations in his book is that the UCI not only did so little to combat doping but that he was summoned to their headquarters and given a quiet warning about his blood-test results after he out-climbed Armstrong on Mont Ventoux during the Dauphiné Libéré classic in 2004. Floyd Landis, who has since also admitted to doping, apparently told Hamilton that "Lance called the UCI on you … and said … you were on some new shit." Hamilton confronted Armstrong – who denied the allegation.

The UCI, meanwhile, has come in for a deluge of criticism in the media since announcing last week that it would sue Paul Kimmage, the renowned anti-doping writer, in relation to the publication of the transcript of a 2011 interview with Landis. "It's mind-boggling," Hamilton says. "I just hope journalists keep asking the tough questions and we stick up for Paul Kimmage and others fighting for a clean sport.

"I've never got my head fully around the UCI and I've never been comfortable with it. There is absolutely no doubt that the UCI could do much, much more. Obviously the sport has changed and testing has got much better but we're trying to figure out what happened in the past. We need to answer those questions before the sport can move on. It's cleaner but it still has bad elements. There are people running teams and cyclists who are not still fully transparent."

If Hamilton believes that the victory of Bradley Wiggins and Team Sky in this year's Tour is a triumph for clean riding, he remains "sceptical about cycling at the elite level. There's still a lot of denial. Times have slowed down a lot from 10 years ago and testing is getting a lot better. But it still feels as if there's not much transparency. That worries me."

Hamilton argues that the full story of Armstrong would bestow freedom on everyone. "I'd like to say to him, 'Lance, you are going to be way happier if you can take this heavy weight off your back.' But, right now, Lance is afraid. He's afraid to let down his family, his friends and the cancer community. It's a tough pill to swallow but people will forgive him. And even if Lance lost half his income he's still going to be fine.

Hamilton hesitates when asked if Armstrong will buckle under the weight of new information. "I don't know. Based on his recent actions he'll deny it. But I can't imagine he can maintain it. He's one hell of a tough son of a bitch but I can speak from experience that telling the truth feels so good. It's totally changed my life. I didn't have much to look forward to before I told the truth. I still wish I'd made the right choice but I'm really excited about moving forward with the second part of my life. I couldn't have said that two years ago. It's the same with Lance. His future is going to be so much greater if he tells the truth."

The Secret Race by Tyler Hamilton & Daniel Coyle [Bantam, £15.19] is available from guardianbookshop.co.uk