I moved from Moscow to Rome with my family and two bicycles in 1998, and spent a lot of that year—and the next—obsessed, I am sorry to admit, with the bicycles. Italy, after all, was a place where thousands of middle-aged men felt perfectly comfortable spending many hours a week in brightly colored spandex. I rode most days, (often, idiotically enough, on the highways that ringed the city) and by the next summer, when I wasn’t on my bike I was often parked in front of the television, mesmerized by a man who hardly seemed human.

Lance Armstrong—could a Hollywood screenwriter come up with a better name for an American hero?—had returned that year to the world’s most gruelling test of endurance, the Tour de France. He had spent the previous two years being treated for testicular cancer that had spread throughout his body, which, at the time, was more often than not a death sentence. The chemotherapy Armstrong received was so powerful and so toxic that he suffered burns on his arms from the inside. How could somebody even ride a bicycle after that, let alone win a race that lasted a month, scaled the highest peaks in Europe, and covered more than two thousand miles?

But he not only rode—he won. Again and again and again. Each victory seemingly more thrilling than the last. Seven Tours in all; a feat unmatched in sports. Cycling had long been tainted by the abuse of performance-enhancing drugs, and Armstrong’s achievement was so astounding that many people simply assumed he relied on them just as others had. The French were the loudest and most persistent critics (reason alone, in my book, to feel for the man). But others wondered, too. As I wrote in my lengthy and adulatory Profile of Armstrong, Greg LeMond, America’s first Tour de France champion (he won three times), put it well, if somewhat uncharitably, after Armstrong won his third straight Tour, in 2001: “If Lance is clean, it is the greatest comeback in the history of sport. If he isn’t, it would be the greatest fraud.” But who could pull off a fraud like that? Armstrong was, and remains, one of the only top cyclists never to be caught doping. He almost certainly received more drug tests than any other athlete: he was tested whenever he finished among the top three riders in a race (most days). In addition, representatives of the World Anti-Doping Agency would periodically show up at his house in Austin, during the off season, with vials he was forced to fill. He seemed perfectly justified in making a famous (now infamous) Nike commercial ridiculing his detractors. (“Everybody wants to know what I’m on. What am I on? I’m on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?”)

I have already conceded that I was, perhaps, overly beguiled by Lance’s excellence. And there is little left to do but lament what we have lost. It’s worth pointing out that the enormity of his achievement, even with drugs, can hardly be overstated. There has never been a more visible symbol in American sports of a man who just won’t quit.

That is why I am so deeply appalled by his announcement yesterday that he would no longer fight the charges against him. He said he was tired of the fight. Tired? Really? Armstrong made it clear on several occasions he would fight to the death. (My favorite Lance quote about pain, clearly applicable to the accusations, is, “Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.”)

Yes, quitting lasts forever. And he did not even have the decency to admit his guilt. Oddly, two of my colleagues—both of whom had ridiculed me mercilessly for supporting Lance—wrote to me today to say that they actually felt sorry for the guy.

I do not. Lance Armstrong stood for something. He was a man who, despite the hatred, the envy, and the odds, would never quit, would never concede. He was the great American—a man of principle who also won. Now, I am afraid, he is nothing.

Photograph by Martin Schoeller.