Can Lance rebuild his battered reputation?

Oh dear, dear me.  Lance.  What can you say? Having read some of the USADA's evidence against Lance, it's impossible not to come to the conclusion that he did it.  They've pretty much got him bang to rights.  
Of all the testimony, it's George Hincape's which is most damning.
While Lance and his team of lawyers have tried to swat away allegations from those they considered untrustworthy, having your chief lieutenant point the finger too, demolishes any shred of doubt there may have been.
Rather than analyse the quotes and testimony from the Reasoned Decision of the USADA - principally because other people have already done it and done it better than I would elsewhere - I'm going to explore what it could mean for Lance now.
Lance's moves thus far have been true to form: abrasive, dismissive and acerbic.  But now he's played those cards and its all blown up in his face, what options does he have to salvage a reputation which has fallen further than Jimmy Saville's - admittedly from a higher starting point.
Let's just imagine that I'm advising Lance on his reputation, what would I advise he do now?
Well, presuming he is as guilty as the evidence suggests, my advice would be to simply come clean.

Top half of Team Battenburg 

Lance's story remains a fascinating one and he can actually use the doping to his advantage by building the next stage of his life around it. As well as being driven to win, Lance could well point out pressures from sponsors like Nike and Trek and the requirement of the UCI to have a global figure for the sport which would build on the foundations set by Greg Lemond and sell the sport to the biggest market in the world.
These pressures, Lance could say, led him into a spiral of doping which had to be maintained to prevent the whole façade from crumbling. With each race, each transfusion and each denial, he was painting himself into a corner from which there was no escape but only denial.
An 'I did it and I'm sorry' followed with a pledge to continue raising money for his cancer charity, would be the first step toward his public rehabilitation.
The next steps from the UCI and Lance himself will be fascinating to watch. Whether he digs his heels in or comes clean, Lance will remain a divisive figure in the sport and while his record is still recognised by the UCI, he continues to cast a long shadow over it.

Retro cycling jerseys

What would the Tour de France be without the Malliot Jaune?  And the Giro without the Maglia Rosa? These are among the most recognisable jerseys in sport.  In the case of the tour's yellow, it's right up there with Brazil's famous football strip and the intimidating All Blacks kit: instantly recognisable around the world.
The design of the current crop of pro-team kit is quite interesting to read.  The obvious purpose of the design is to afford the sponsor as clear a platform as possible to build their profile.
It's odd that from my seat in the UK that exotic sounding teams are in fact just sponsorship platforms for the most mundane corporate activities.  I don't know what I was expecting but to find out that FDJ is the French equivalent of the National Lottery and that PMU, sponsors of the Tour's Malliot Vert is a bookies where French blokes go to have a flutter on the nags, kind of destroys the magic.
The nicest kit in the Peleton of le Tour this year was, in my view, Saxo / Tinkoff Bank, closely followed by Europecar's green.
However, it was defiantly Team Sky shirt which fulfilled its sponsorship objective most successfully.
It's retro styling is clean and neat and judging by the amount of people you see out wearing it, the sales of replicas have been strong for them.
I started watching the tour in the late 1980s - in the days of Channel 4 coverage and I really love some of the jerseys from that era.
Sean Kelly in the yellow of Kas, Roche in Carrera Jeans, the superb Systeme U shirt worn by, among others Lauren Fignon and Luis Hererra's Cafe de Columbia.  My favourite however, was the La Vie Claire top worn by Hinault and LeMond.
The Molteni shirt made famous by Merckx is a classic too which still looks fantastic.
Designs of almost everything go through a period of being naff before acquiring a retro cool and I think this is where some of the 1990s cycling shirts are now.

So whereas you can buy a new reproduction of the Merckx Moltenti and La Vie Claire from the superb Prendas Ciclismo, you can't get US Postal, T Mobile or Mercatone Uno.  But their time will probably come.