Here's something that bothers me about this whole deal:

I used to be a Pro race car driver. Granted, about as far down the totum pole as you could possibly get and still call yourself "Pro" with a straight face, but still Pro. Our series travelled the US; we'd go to Florida, Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, Colorado, Michigan, Kansas etc in a sanctioned series where each event earned series points for an overall title. Nowhere NEAR (like, not even a tiny fraction) of the kind of coverage or money that the TdF generates, but we had similar issues and challenges, just on a (much) smaller scale.

PEDs (unless you count Red Bull) not so much of a problem with us. But mechanical cheating? Oh hell yeah.

I never cheated. That's not me trying to protect an image or project an air of sainthood - I'm long gone from the sport and have nothing to lose from the truth. I was very good at finding and exploiting legal means of obtaining a a performance advantage, so I didn't need to cheat. I had a sponsor or two who wanted me to cheat, but I refused, as I didn't want to cheat and was doing just fine without cheating.

Some of my competitors were not so scrupulous. Some of those cars were as illegal as hell. But amusingly, all of the cheating I was aware of was done so ineptly that it either had no positive effect on performance, or actually hurt performance. Plus, with their attention focussed on cheating and not getting caught, their attention was diverted from the very effective, legal modifications they could have been making with a similar effort level. I was more than happy to see them proceeding up some of the blind alleys they were in, rather than discover (for example) what a shock dyno would say about their shocks, or a proper tire testing regimen about their tires.

But boy howdy, nobody was quicker to cry "CHEATER!" than the worst offenders. There was a very real mindset amongst these guys of "I'm cheating, and you're faster than me, so you must be cheating too!". And oddly, the cheaters would work the hardest to try and catch other cheaters. The guys who filed the most technical protests were the guys that cheated the most.

I had an outstanding first Pro race, and my car was IMMEDIATELY protested and partly torn down, because there was no way a newbie could be that fast without cheating.

I never lost a protest, and in fact I made a big deal about showing off my latest work to my competitors so they could see it - that went a long way to staving off the protests, which were annoying.

There are parallels here to LA. Lance passed all his doping tests, both in and out of competition. The UCI says he is clean. And he had a LOT of doping tests. The people accusing Lance of cheating are cheaters themselves, and I know from personal experience that the guys quickest to accuse people of cheating are other cheaters. And I know that cheaters have accused "clean" guys of cheating, because the cheaters are getting beaten.

Granted, that's a parallel, not a congruency. There is way more potential for legal performance improvement in a car than in a human being. There is way more pressure to win in the TdF than in my little pissant "Pro" series. I am categorically NOT LA.

But based on this, I think it is entirely possible that Lance never doped. It is possible that all his Tour wins are 100% legit. I think it is possible that his accusers are only doing so because THEY cheated, Lance beat them, so therefore Lance must have cheated.

I think it is possible, even plausible, that Lance was aware of doping going on around him, maybe even within his own team. But I do not think that "Lance Doped" is anywhere near a slam dunk.

DG