If you follow cycling and all the related drama you are well aware of the interview that Floyd Landis recently did with Paul Kimmage. I would post the link to the entire 30,000 word un-edited transcript, but, like most things that speak ill of Lance Armstrong, it has been taken down. Or, at least I can't get to it anymore.
When I started reading it I thought there's no way anything new will be said. It'll be the same old Floyd sounding a little bit crazy, but there were parts that completely blew me away. Without access to actually quote them, I'll be paraphrasing as best I can remember so, bear with me.
First, I've always thought that Lance Armstrong doped his way to 7 Tours de France victories. I've had conversations with people as far back as 2004 where I took that exact stance. Whenever he was questioned about it he always took the exact same stance that I did when I was questioned about my fake ID at the age of 19. I would pretend to be completely outraged that anyone would question me. I would act tired of reciting my birth date and address. I would then grab the idea back from the person and insist that I would take my business elsewhere. Sound a bit familiar?
What I didn't ever say was that I blamed him for it, just like I don't blame Floyd, or any other guy who wants to race, much less win, the Tour de France. I've always taken the stance that every single one of us makes some sort of decision at work because that's what we're expected to do or even what we think we have to do to keep our jobs. For some of us those decisions are easy, for others, they are not. One could obviously make comparisons to other professions decisions that need to be made, but that's neither here nor there. For a Pro Tour level cyclist, that's the decision you have to make and I am not about to point the finger at anyone, whichever direction they decide on. So again, I've always thought that Lance doped, just like I always thought everyone else did also, but I never realized how corrupt and just how much of an asshole he is.
There were two main pieces of that interview that stunned me.
1) When Mercury stopped paying Floyd and the UCI wouldn't force the team to pay him out of the bank guarantee and Lance stepped in to tell Floyd to quite down and even apologize because down the road they'd need a favor, ie., make a positive go away like (maybe just like Lance's 1999 test), I was pretty blown away.
So that's how you do it? Wow. Tough to fault anybody for doping when you proceed under the impression that the guys who are meant to govern the sport are complicit in the act. It's one thing if everybody dopes and everybody has the same access to all the same drugs. Then, essentially the playing field is leveled. But, if only the biggest and richest stars can dope without having to worry about a positive test because it can be made to disappear, then the playing field's not really so level is it?
2) People always talk about how much of a difference the dope makes. I've always found that the people talking about this difference aren't the people on the juice and therefore don't have a first hand experience of just how effective the stuff is. The reason for this is pretty obvious; if you are juiced up you can't exactly come out and say how much better you’re riding thanks to the extra blood bag you just shot up the night before. But, in this case, we have Floyd, who has stopped pretending like he was clean and flat out said, it's helpful, but probably not 40% more helpful, which is the made up statistic that is generally thrown around.
Floyd says in the interview that the stuff helps, but you still have good days and bad days. It's no surprise that his incredible ride in stage 17 on the way to Morzine at the 2006 Tour was the day after a transfusion, but, the wattage numbers have been looked at from that day, and it wasn't exactly impressive from the standards of a guy with double the fresh red blood cells in his veins. So, who knows, maybe everybody else was just too tired to chase?
In fact, Floyd says that the guys in the peloton speak pretty openly about what they're doing and that he knew, from speaking to Oscar Pereiro (who denies all of this, obviously) that he still had half a bag of blood to transfuse before the final time trial. If you remember, Floyd ended up beating Pereiro in that time trial by enough to take the yellow jersey back and win the 2006 Tour de France. Floyd doesn't specifically say that he didn't juice more before that last day, but he does say that he knew Pereiro had the bag and that he still wasn't worried because he knew he was just a better time trialist.
Again, this is pretty useful because if the stuff is going to make you 40% better and the guy I need to beat basically has a turbo button and I don't, I'm pretty nervous about my chances. Even with knowing that Pereiro would be juiced up for the final TT, Floyd still knew he could beat him. So is the stuff effective? Of course, but it's probably not the turbo button that everybody thinks it is. Especially if you just go ahead and admit to yourself that everybody else is doing it too.
So again, I believe Floyd. Why? That'd be a good question because he did write a book that I bought that was 100% about how he didn't use drugs. But I believe him because at this point he's giving this information away. We live in a world where TMZ and all the other smut rags are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get first pictures of celebrities kids. This morning I watched another 20 minute piece on GMA about Charlie Sheen. If Floyd wanted to, he could make all of his money back by selling this information to those news outlets about how everybody's cancer hero used drugs. If the person that Floyd is essentially accusing of doping all these years wasn’t a huge celebrity, then there’d be no opportunity to sell it and, there obviously is. But that's not what he's doing. Instead, he sat down with a journalist, answered a ton of questions and then allowed the unedited transcript to be posted online for anybody who was interested to read it.
I'm not sure what implications this has for cycling in America or the world or if at all. The more of this stuff that comes out the more convinced I am that Lance Armstrong is in a ton of trouble. And I also have a feeling that Lance isn't a guy that's going to go down alone which means that all his boys from all of those postal days, which makes up most of the popular US Cyclist (Hincapie, Zabriskie, Vande Velde) probably aren’t sleeping so well either.
I do know that the more I read about all of these exceptions being made of Lance recently it adds a ton of credibility to what Floyd's saying about his power to have the higher ups make positives go away. What exceptions you might ask? When Lance came out of retirement the UCI waived his biological passport requirement so he could race the Tour Down Under. At this year's Tour of California there's another doping requirement being waived for Lance if he wants to race there. I get that race directors would be foolish not to push to have Lance at their race. Any race with Lance is bigger than without. But if the UCI and WADA and any other governing body wants the public to believe that they were and are anything but complicit in the doping issue, these would be good times to tell even Mr. Armstrong that he's not above the law. Or, maybe he is?
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