‘Lance Armstrong’ said Pat McQuaid, President of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), ‘“has no place in cycling, and he deserves to be forgotten in cycling”’. The king is dead, it seems. Yet while Armstrong was being anathematised another sports star has been proving himself great: Frankel the race horse.

On the 20th of October, Frankel lined up at the Champion Stakes at Ascot with 32,000 spectators anticipating the creation of a moment in history. The race started and Frankel was the last out of the blocks. He didn’t lead until the home straight. But having given his competitors the start, he reeled them in. They rounded the final bend and came into the straight. Frankel’s jockey, Tom Queally, opened the taps and for one last time the greatest race horse of our age burst for the line. He won comfortably; his 14th win from his 14th start.

Armstrong and Frankel vied for media attention and unsurprisingly, Armstrong won. Armstrong’s fall mattered more to us than Frankel’s rise. People had really invested in Armstrong: they believed in him; they felt inspired by him.

Frankel will never influence in the way Armstrong did. I asked nine Blues captains if they felt inspired by him and out of the seven who replied, six said no. The problem for Frankel is that he is a horse and thus unmotivated by the desire to win – and because of this, he does not have a proper story to connect with. Armstrong had the ultimate story: the man who beat cancer, then beat one of the sporting world’s greatest challenges seven times. Sally Jenkins, a sports columists with the Washington Post who has written two books with Armstrong said that for Armstrong winning was just an expression of the fighting’.

But this is the crux of the problem. We believed in Armstrong because he seemed so human – but he also cheated for this very reason. We wanted Armstrong to win and Armstrong himself wanted to win. He cheated and we all got what we wanted. We revelled in his glory. The revelations of Armstrong’s doping leave us with a dilemma. We want the human story but not the human character. Frankel could not provide us with the former. So he ran and ran, but we just could not connect with him. Armstrong’s star may be fading, but in its prime, it burned bright. And we loved it.