As there is no evidence for your “quite clear” opinion, it’s hard to see how you define “fantasy world”.
In order for you to be correct, several improbable things must be true:
- Lance Armstrong has cheated for years, and no riders other than the occasional known cheater years later have ever thought to say anything, even though many of them hate Armstrong.
- Lance Armstrong has access to drugs that nobody else has which is what made him better than the rest (your “just as good, if not better than the cheaters”).
- Armstrong has managed to fool every drug test ever done on him, even though he is tested randomly, constantly, and in many times prejudicially. The only drug test ever to indicate anything was on an uncontrolled sample of old blood, and that wasn’t conclusive.
- Armstrong has also managed to pay off or cajole the silence of the doctors who developed this wonder-drug, the people who supplied it, the supposed testers who lied about the occasional bad result, his entire set of teammates who were taking drugs with him, and apparently the wife who he cheated on and left for Cheryl Crow.
- (OR, he did this cheating for years without the knowledge of his wife).
On the other hand, to believe Armstrong, I just need to believe in one seemingly improbable thing, which isn’t really improbable if you understand probability:
- Lance Armstrong managed to be better than every other rider, even cheaters, for 7 years.
The reason that’s not really improbable is that each year, SOMEONE has to be the best rider. It was also likely that at some point, someone would put enough effort in that they might well be a dominant rider for years in a row.
If it hadn’t been Armstrong, it might have been Contador, or one of the other riders. And whatever rider it was, the same “improbability” would be applied to suggest they must have been using drugs.
Armstrong didn’t just suddenly get better. He had cancer, and as a result, focused intense effort on getting better, which taught him focus for the intense effort of winning the Tour De France. He was always good at climbing, and the rest is teachable. He didn’t need the money, nor is he like most european riders, so he focused on the single race, saving his body.
Sure, he COULD be taking drugs. I don’t think there is something especially nobel about Armstrong. But you don’t need drugs to explain his success, and in the absense of any evidence whatsoever, and with the wealth of evidence (drug tests) and lack of contrary evidence (the testimony of a single reliable source), it is a fantasy to be certain about something none of us has the ability to know.
Landis is an entirely unreliable source who lied under oath, and as recently as a couple of years ago was still insisting he had no evidence Armstrong had used drugs.
Which itself points out a flaw in the argument: Landis was trying very hard to convince the world that he was innocent. The last thing he could risk was to have one of his OTHER statements found to be false.
In that environment, why lie about other riders, when they are still riding and could be caught at any time? Landis would be a fool to convincingly lie about his own innocence only to be tripped up because Armstrong gets a bad blood test and decides to tell all and proves that Landis was lying.
I know this is all logic, not knowledge. But we don’t have the truth. We can’t mind-read, we don’t have access to the “facts”. We have what we know, so the only things we can really use to shape our opinion is what we know and how it logically fits.
If you find it impossible to believe that a man could rise from adversity, and reshape his life to be the best at something, you are stuck with “drug use”. I don’t choose to be so constrained.