Lance Armstrong is right. It is not about the bike. Now all the news is about the drugs that he was taking. Yet, it is not about the drugs either.

His fans are bitterly disappointed by the lies.

His enemies are happy that they have been proved correct. The journalists finally have some juicy news to write about, prime time gets a boost and a few more newspapers are sold.

The number crunchers are trying to work out how much more speed Lance got out of his Performance Enhancing Drugs. And the cycling bodies are worried about the damage (read loss of money) that it will do to their events.

In the George Bush era, it was supposed to be about the ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. Now we know that it was a lie. It is all about money, the oil and USA world dominance.

Illusions are reinforced by the use of objects that divert our attention away from the REAL thing. The best demonstrators of this art are stage magicians. They draw the audience’s attention away from what is really happening and in doing so, make magic happen.

The difference between a magician’s show and the reality shows that our lives are made up of is this: In life, we expect the real things to be REAL. And this is where we all get into all sorts of trouble. We expect a bike race to be about real riders playing a fair game on a level playing field – and may the best rider on the day win.

Bike races are never about this.

Bike racing is a business. The riders are just the workers who get paid.

So is life. It is not about going to school, getting a job, falling in love, bringing up a family, making money, retiring and finding the right religion to get into the afterlife. Few people actually get to know what life is all about. Just like very few get to see the illusion from the magician’s view point.

If the latest Lance story is about the drugs – then where is all the investigative journalism and public interest about exactly what the PED’s were and how much they affected the rider’s performance?