Local Austin cycling legend and winner of every Tour de France from 1999 through 2005 Lance Armstrong has been implicated in a doping scandal in emails by fellow cyclist and 2006 Tour de France winner (before he had his title stripped for testing positive for synthetic testosterone) Floyd Landis to cycling and anti-doping officials over the past few weeks.

This comes as a total shock to me. I thought the reason Lance Armstrong was so good at sports was because of all the Michelob Ultra he apparently drinks. I mean he’s on their billboards all over town. Apparently all those Michelobs I’ve been drinking trying to become a world-renowned cyclist have all been for nothing. Oh well.

Seriously though, it’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out. We all knew Landis cheated in 2006, but what he’s now saying is that there was a large-scale long-standing systematic doping scheme involving athletes, officials, team owners and managers. Specifically, he is claiming that Lance Armstrong not only doped and tested positive in doping tests, but also bribed officials to cover them up.

At this point it’s Landis’ word against everybody else’s, including Lance Armstrong who has already appeared on ESPN vehemently denying Landis’ allegations. Personally, it wouldn’t surprise me either to hear either side is telling the truth.

Landis says that he’s simply trying to come clean. That he felt bad for his past wrongdoings and wants to make amends. That’s a possibility, but he has proven himself to be a liar and a cheat in the past and could be pulling a Jose Canseco (former major league baseball player and steroid enthusiast who wrote the book Juiced) and simply be trying to take down anybody and everybody because he felt “blackballed.”

At the same time, a lot of what Canseco claimed turned out to be true so it wouldn’t be surprising to find out the cycling world is just as crooked as baseball. Unless someone else comes forward and backs up Landis’ story with their own though it’s pretty much Landis vs. the world, and he’s not the most reputable character so that’s a battle he’ll likely be on the short end of.

My prediction (total opinion): Lance Armstrong really did dope but Landis’ claims are found to be greatly exaggerated and due to his shady history nothing ever really comes of these allegations. In a desperate cry for the attention he so craves, Landis takes another page from the book of Canseco and picks up MMA fighting where he is utterly dominated by a 7-foot-tall Korean. Something like this: