Dalrymple responds at the Library of Law and Liberty to a recent interview of Lance Armstrong in Le Monde:

Armstrong cheated his way to a fortune, lying either implicitly or explicitly to the sporting authorities, to the general public and to his commercial sponsors. By all accounts he was a bully towards anyone within his power. None of this is pleasant or excusable, but they are the crimes and misdemeanors appropriate to an age of hypercelebrity and to a culture in which people are supposedly influenced in their purchases by the patently mercenary endorsements of people no more qualified than themselves to pronounce upon the quality of products for purchase. The use of sportsmen as human advertisements is obviously dishonest and is an appeal to human stupidity, or at least gullibility. Being part of this fatuous but extremely lucrative circus, Armstrong (an intelligent man) could have formed no very high estimate of the honesty of the upper echelons of the world or the intelligence of the general public.