The Armstrong Conspiracy and Moscow Riverbottom Commuting

While I don’t know if Lance Armstrong is guilty of doping or not, at this point, I’m absolutely convinced he’s the most powerful man in the world. We know now that the nearly two-year investigation by the Feds into potential crimes committed by Armstrong as a result of allegedly doping while riding for the government sponsored U.S. Postal team was dropped suddenly, and that the decision to drop the case came from one man, U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte Jr.. After that, as often seems to happen whenever Lance is on the ropes, things get surreal. Cyclingnews.com has posted an article containing the following:

The Wall Street Journal has alleged there was some debate within the US Attorney’s Office as to whether the two-year investigation into allegations of fraud and doping that involved the U.S. Postal Service Team and Lance Armstrong should have been closed last week. Armstrong has denied ever taking performance enhancing and welcomed the decision to close the case. He may still face investigation from USADA.

The report follows National Public Radio (NPR) revelations that sources in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and U.S. Postal Service were ‘shocked, surprised and angered’ and that federal authorities only had 30 minutes notice before the United States Attorney’s Office issued a press release to the media on Friday afternoon.”

Try as I might, I could not locate that NPR article to validate Cyclingnews. The closest I came was a transcript of NPR’s Tom Goldman reporting on the dropped case. The closest Goldman gets to implying anything nefarious is going on is a small mention of “another source who said investigators in this case stressed as recently as a week ago that the evidence was rock-solid.” That said, Cyclingnews clearly suggests the news that the case was being dropped was seen as extremely unusual–shocking, even, to the prosecution. As much as I enjoy Cyclingnews, they seem really fond of only linking to themselves (which makes for great search engine marketing, but creates an echo chamber around the Internet for the same article to be posted multiple places–generating a digital wild goose chase of fake citations). In short, depending on who you talk to, Attorney Birotte’s behavior was either highly unusual and suspicious, or pretty much par for the course. Quite a range, that. If anyone can actually cite and validate the statements Cyclingnews is attributing to NPR, well, then we have a truly weird story on our hands.

But don’t we already have a truly weird story on our hands?

For Lance to be blameless, an awful lot of people would have to be completely evil pricks, stark raving lunatics, or both–which I’m certainly willing to believe. Floyd Landis alone is enough crazy to power most cities.

But after a while, the sheer depth of the crazy going on all-around Armstrong starts to say something. And the weirdest part is the way the totally bizarre is always peppered with a little reality. Take this Wall Street Journal piece where Landis is blathering out his bizarre theory that the Postal team didn’t have proper working bikes, because all the spares were being sold off on the Internet to raise dope money. Obviously, that’s completely crazy, except that even Trek admits they were seeing the bikes show up for sale in weird places.

Why in the hell would they do that? Even if I’m willing to take Lance and Johan Bruyneel’s word for it that Lance doesn’t dope–like take that issue off the table completely–why would the team be selling off bikes while racing?

My theory is that Lance Armstrong is the Kevin Bacon of strange. He’s somehow connected to everyone who’s ever had something weird happen to them, and not usually in a good way. He might be the leader of the Knights Templar, or something. Alien. Robot. Something there is fucked up, at any rate, is all I’m saying. Whether it’s doping or not, weird shit is constantly going down all around Lance Armstrong, and nobody can do anything to stop it.

Another guy who seems well acquainted with shadowy, strange events is Vladimir Putin, but apparently one of the more innovative forms of protest in Russia these days consists of losing your bike in the river while trying to avoid traffic. According to the Wall Street Journal, a 42-year old homeless guy crashed through the ice covering the Moscow river, managing to survive, but losing his bike. How bad does the traffic have to be in your city before you risk death to avoid it? Apparently all the powerful people in need of actually getting anywhere around Moscow take helicopters. It’s that bad.

So there’s a homeless guy in Moscow who could really use a snowbike. There’s a viral marketing campaign in here somewhere for Salsa or Surly, though I imagine in the coming days we’ll learn this homeless guy was somehow a material witness in a suit against Lance Armstrong, and since falling through the ice he’s lost the power of speech and wants to race NASCAR.