The quote below is from an ESPN interview with Floyd Landis, shortly after his confessions/revelations about doping, and my response, below, comes from a cycling newsgroup, rec.bicycles.racing

> Floyd: Performance-enhancing drugs don’t make as big a difference as
> most people would like to think they do. Nevertheless, I used them to
> do what I was able to do, so I guess it really doesn’t matter. At the
> time, it was part of the game, and like I say, I don’t regret it at
> all.

Floyd says “it really doesn’t matter” to a lot of things we have questions about. Maybe that’s the point. Floyd, today as yesterday, cares only about what matters to himself. Everything remains situational and personal. There is no bigger picture to these guys, whether it’s Floyd or Tyler or Lance. Even, or perhaps especially so, after their “confessions.” Whomever you had cause to believe before, go on believing. Whomever you did not, there is not reason (yet) to change that view.

We continue our search for the truly repentant, or even simply someone who is at the center of things and has all the “dope” on what went on, including solid forensic evidence.

In the meantime, everybody, including myself, has 3rd-party evidence, actually just stuff people said about what was going on to someone else, that doping went on. In my case it was somebody in a position to know who told me in 2001 that, when Tyler was brought on, long before Lance “reached out” to him (as claimed in the 60 minutes piece), he was the guy who could bring down the house. I had a conversation last week with someone who knows a former member of USPS who thinks this is all crazy because of course it went on and why the fuss? But no forensic evidence, nothing tying him into something that was an important part of his life for some time. One is left wondering how many of these people, in a perverse way, want to maintain their connection to “something bigger than themselves” by trying to keep themselves connected to it with embellished stories. Certainly Floyd has done so.

The “truth” is not enough, and perhaps not even obvious, to these guys. Living with their lies for so long, creating the world in which they wish to be viewed, a perverse ethical construct that allows them to rationalize their decisions, robs them of clear vision. It would likely
take a lobotomy to get past the deviant personality traits that have become such a necessary part of their lives over the years.