Watching Lance Armstrong...

... on Larry King, and I have to say he comes across as highly credible, to me at least. Obviously there are a lot of questions still to be answered about the L'Equipe story, but here's one way to think about the whole affair. The issue is not just whether Armstrong cheated in one or all of his seven Tour de France victories, but whether the cyclists he beat did. Everyone knows that doping is rampant in cycling, right? Yet every year scores of riders complete the Tour, pass their urine tests, and are declared clean. That either means that they were clean, or they were just able to beat the tests. We don't know for sure. So there are four possible scenarios, depending on whether you think a) Armstrong is doping or b) the field is. Scenario 1. Call this the "naive" scenario. Armstrong is clean, and so is the rest of the field. If that's the case, then Armstrong is full value for his seven victories. Scenario 2. The "cynical" scenario. Armstrong's doping, but so is everybody else. In which case, it's a level playing field. Everyone's doped up, but Armstrong is consistently faster than everyone else. Say what you like about his character, but again his record stands. Scenario 3. The "hero" scenario. Armstrong competes and wins, clean, against a bunch of performance-enhanced dopers. His record looks all the more impressive in this light. Scenario 4. The "L'Equipe" scenario. Armstrong's the only one doping, stealing an unfair advantage over his honest, upstanding rivals. This scenario would certainly be grounds for stripping him of his trophies (or whatever they give the Tour winner). But it's also the least plausible. After all, if Armstrong's been doping, despite passing the tests each year, that suggests the tests aren't much good. But if they aren't, then we have no reason to believe he's the only one who's been cheating. He's just the only one who got caught. So in three of the four possible scenarios -- and the only three that have any likelihood -- he comes out a winner, at least in the sense of being genuinely faster than his rivals, on the basis of his own effort and ability.