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When you consider how many of the elite TDF riders of the past 10 years ended up with positive tests (Ulrich, Landis, Vinokourov, Basso, Rasmussen, Contador, Mayo, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.), I’ve always admitted that I was using willing suspension of disbelief with Armstrong since he never was caught. It sure seems like the whole sport was doing it and it was simply a cat and mouse game. Armstrong was the best mouse perhaps.

My biggest problem with the whole Armstrong situation now isn’t 60 Minutes (it’s cool if they unearth new stuff) - it’s that my tax dollars are paying for the DOJ to spend millions of dollars investigating Armstrong for conduct that is a decade old and that hangs by the slender reed of his association with the Postal Service. Defrauding the US government is the hook. Really? I’d rather have the DOJ going after real criminals rather than a retired cyclist. Felt the same way about the Barry Bonds case, but that’s another story.

In one sense, you could claim that he isn’t a doper because by the rules of the game, he hasn’t been found to be a doper. Just like a foul in basketball is whatever is called, and if the referee says it’s a catch, it’s a catch — not whether it was really a catch.

So Armstrong competed in a sport that included constant and pervasive drug testing, and he was never found to fail any of those tests. Others competed in football as linemen, and they didn’t hold because the referee didn’t say the held — it makes no difference if you or I think they were holding on every down, or that every professional basketball player takes 3 steps to the hoop.

For my part, until someone provides EVIDENCE, I’m not going to concede that a particular person was using drugs. Other druggies saying “he did it to”, no matter how “sincere” they appear to be, isn’t evidence, unless they give us a syringe with Armstrong’s fingerprints on it.

I will note that Hamilton is trying to salvage what he seems to admit is a lucrative coaching career, something that should end with his admission that his best coaching advice seems to be to take drugs — it is to his benefit to claim that he HAD to do it because everybody was.

Look at his letter, with the protests of how HARD it was for him to have to take drugs, and how he hopes to protect others from his fate — all the words of a person who blames others for their own actions.