I’ve conferred with my resident medical expert and have learned two salient facts regarding the pending B test of Landis’s urine. First, alcohol is rapidly metabolized in the human body; it’s metabolized essentially first. So all the talk about testing Landis’s sample for alcohol is bullshit. If he still had alcohol in his urine after the first pee of the day, let alone after a six hour ride and 70 bidons later, then he was drinking jack daniels during the stage. Second, there is no known immediate physiological benefit to taking testosterone if one is concerned about recovery. However, there is a slight chance that enough excess testosterone would be taken up to increase the systemic level of anger in a person. So…now we have three scenarios by which to judge pretty body Floyd.

 (1) The conspiracy theory. Landis is clean. The French can’t stand that an American won the Tour again and somebody spikes the sample after it is collected.

(2) The pragmatic acceptance theory. Everybody in the sport of cycling is dirty. Witness Boonen’s near confession in the NY Times today where he blames the Tour itself for doping. Too hard…of course everybody is on the juice when “they” make the parcourse so difficult. So in that climate…Landis’s rather eloquent statement about not being happy about Basso and Ullrich’s ejection and his decision to eat testosterone gummi bears (like Calci Bears for those of you with small children who hate milk) are both part of Landis’s clear conscience about his role in the sport. The short form is this: We are all doping. This is a level playing field. Another name for this is the Greg Lemond thesis which, I have to say, carries more weight than it might because a three-time tour champion believes that it is impossible to be a pro cyclist today without being on a doping program. (This is also the reason that CSC hasn’t dumped Basso. Believe me, Bjarne understands….)

(3) The crestfallen nightmare theory. This is the ugly one, the Shakespearean tragedy. And it goes like this: Post-bonk and utterly devastated, Floyd asks celebrity chef Michael Chiarello (oops, I mean Robbie Ventura) what he can do to recover for the next day and go on the attack. Ventura recommends an osso buco recipe that includes a testosterone froth. Then he explains to Floyd that some Swedish scientists mis-used some government money to buy a lot of aquavit and then designed a study to show that alcohol consumption screws with the T/ET ratio as a way to justify the expenditure. Ventura instructs Floyd to cook up a story about drinking beer and to keep mentioning that he had a few/several/more than he could count beers until columnists at velonews starting writing about his beer drinking as a way to create a cover story. Ventura knows enough to know that the testosterone won’t help Floyd physically but he doesn’t tell Floyd that. He says merely, “this shit will make you so fucking angry that you’ll eat the tape off your handle bars while on the joux tomorrow!” And then Floyd spends the rest of the night listening to “Alice’s Restaurant” and eating titanium screws.

Where’s the tragedy? Floyd could have done what he did anyway without the drugs…all he needed was for someone to find a way to arrange for a mennonite minister to call him a “weak pussy shit” in the few minutes before Stage 17.