What a pity Barry Bonds didn't have a yellow piece of plastic dangling around his wrist. It's proven to be quite the force field, capable of deflecting both truth and accusations lobbed by enemy forces.

Look at what it's done for Lance Armstrong. That sliver of a bracelet has inspired an army of devotees to wave their pitchforks and pound their computer keys in defense of their fair hero. Livestrong, they scream! Inspiration, they type! To speak negatively or even skeptically about him is to speak in support of cancer, and what dolt wants to be on the side of the dreaded C-word?

So yes, Bonds should have slipped the yellow accessory above his batting gloves and maybe visited a pediatric ward filled with ill children; he probably should have tirelessly raised millions to combat the disease and certainly hired public relations firms to promote his good deeds and definitely employed a lobbyist to represent his foundation and visit Congress whenever it appeared truth and accusations were getting a little too close.

Alas, Bonds failed to do any of the above, and thus never was asked to make a guest star appearance in the movie DodgeBall.

"I guess if a person never quit when the going got tough, they wouldn't have anything to regret for the rest of their life," Armstrong says to Peter La Fleur, the movie's protagonist, who is having a crisis of faith.

It was a line meant to cement Armstrong's resilience, the toughness he exuded not just while fighting testicular cancer, but during those treacherous hors catégorie climbs in the Tour de France. It's now a line that prompts some rolling of the eyes.

In retirement, Bonds has developed an obsessive love of road cycling, an activity that has drastically slimmed his body and shrunken his skull. There are pictures of him in spandex, standing next to his bike while taking a breather atop various mountain passes, and he looks nothing like the man who once ruled baseball. He's even smiling, the most shocking transformation of all.

Both Armstrong and Bonds cheated their way to the summit of their chosen sports. But when the swirling charges of illegal steroid use around Bonds were at Category 5, and when the federal government pursued him on indictments related to that use, he didn't have an ounce of Armstrong's goodwill. He did have two things on his side: a sport that had long proven itself spineless when it came to exposing the charlatans; and teammates who for whatever reason chose to honor the code of omerta.

As to the first, baseball players are lucky they don't fall under jurisdiction of the relentless (and frighteningly omnipotent) U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. It's the USADA that on Friday stripped Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles and declared him to be guilty of charges that have not yet been proven in a court of law.

Armstrong, like all cyclists, granted the government agency authority and jurisdiction over him every time he signed into a race. It's akin to the NCAA's overlording of college athletes, who implicitly agree to abide by the agency's rules every time they play. Rather than battle in court the USADA's contention that he used the banned-blood booster EPO and blood transfusions, along with masking the use of illegal performance enhancing drugs such as human growth hormone with saline and plasma infusions, Armstrong has waved the white flag.

He and his lawyers and his lobbyist can insist they backed away because of the enormous cost and time it would take to fight these scurrilous claims against a fine citizen who, you might have heard, has raised nearly half a billion dollars to fight cancer. It's a neat trick, considering the USADA has made it clear it had 10-plus witnesses lined up to testify against the guy they once rode with.

Bonds never had many friends in the clubhouse. He was a party of one, surly and sometimes even despised. The image of his San Francisco Giants teammates remaining on the bench, all but silent, when he hit his 500th home run says it all. But good lord, 10-plus prosecution witnesses? Not even Jeff Kent would testify under oath against Bonds, who did not have a foundation to fight cancer.

(And can we all agree that cancer is evil? Some of us have survived it; many of us have lost loved ones to it. It shouldn't be waved about as a defense.)

Undoubtedly the details about what those 10-plus prosecution witnesses planned to say will eventually leak. Armstrong had to know his secrets were about to be divulged. Already a pair of disgraced champions—Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton—had turned state's witness on Armstrong, but then the USADA wrangled George Hincapie, Armstrong's road captain and most faithful lieutenant, and the walls closed in.

How fascinating it would have been to hear of the mass organized doping conspiracy that dates back to 1998, when Armstrong tested positive for corticosteroids. One person familiar with USADA's case told me witnesses planned to testify about observing Armstrong doping, or hearing him admit it, or being encouraged to dope and having their doping endeavors facilitated by Armstrong.

Imagine Armstrong sitting at the defense table and listening day after day after day to testimony about how he was able to pass hundreds of doping tests. Only the ignorant or reckless users get caught these days, because the dopers are always ahead of the testers, as Marion Jones can attest. It still would have been fascinating to hear of the complexities, the full range of duplicities, perhaps even the Swiss bank account connections.

Everyone on the tour doped, the domestiques to not lose their jobs, the stars to keep burning bright. In Armstrong's seven Tour victories, 41 of the 70 top 10 finishers have tested positive for illegal performance-enhancing drugs. To unearth fully the systemic doping on Armstrong's teams, the USADA had to convince Hincapie to come forward.

In a sport defined by loyalty, Hincapie is widely respected as a standup guy, his word unimpeachable. Other riders came and went, some tiring of Armstrong's bullying, some testing positive for drugs, but Hincapie remained Armstrong's professed "best bro."

Having been at Armstrong's side for every one of his Tour victories, Hincapie also knows where the bodies are buried.

Writes Armstrong in his book, "Every Second Counts": "There have been times when I've practically lived out of the same suitcase with George Hincapie. In cycling we're on the side of a mountain for weeks, in small hotel rooms, sharing every ache, and pain, and meal. You get to know everything about each other, including things you'd rather not."

Armstrong and his army of lawyers had to know the testimony of Hincapie and the other teammates would cause irreparable damage. It was thus decided that rather than face his accusers, Armstrong would rant about procedural issues—the same procedural issues he agrees to every time he signs a race waiver—and halt the fight in order to "spend time with his family."

"I think it was our expectation from the beginning," Travis Tygart, the chief executive of USADA, told the cycling website Velonation. "He knows all the evidence as well and he knows the truth, and so the smarter move on his part is to attempt to hide behind baseless accusations of process."

Like Bonds, Armstrong was dedicated to a grueling training regime along with being blessed with natural freakish genes. Nobody dominated their respective sports quite like these two. Both were superhuman physical specimens who did things that made us mere mortals gawk in astonishment.

But only one survived a lethal form of cancer and then built a foundation so others could continue the fight. Only one engenders support and sympathy bordering on hysteria. Those yellow bracelets are some kind of powerful.