Add to the long list of this life's inexplicables the fact that poker, bowling and Regis Philbin are on television but the Floyd Landis hearings are not.

Apparently, no one anticipated that people would watch 10 days of scientific analysis and expert medical testimony, including the interpretation of "A samples," "B samples," the ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone and how it all related to riding a bicycle, but that was before Greg LeMond showed up.

Now they could probably go pay-per-view.

Lance Armstrong always said that Greg LeMond was crazy, but I thought that was just because LeMond implied that Armstrong's medical associations probably made him a doper, and everyone knows that's ridiculous.

Armstrong is the great American cancer-surviving seven-time Tour de France-winning inspirational blahpity blahptiy blahp. Never mind that, according to former teammate Frankie Andreu, Armstrong told a doctor he used the blood-booster EPO, among other drugs.

Andreu must be crazy. Andreu's wife, Betsy, who gave similar testimony, is obviously crazy, too.

But back to the action.

Landis, the defending Tour de France champion, remains somewhere in the cultural limbo between two media labels: fun-loving Pennsylvania Mennonite and slam-doping fraud cyclist.

Hey, who hasn't been there?

On Thursday of this week, LeMond, another former Tour de France winner, showed up to testify at hearings in California that will determine whether Landis will be banned from the sport for two years for doping or exonerated on the basis of faulty lab work on his "A sample," which turned up positive for testosterone after he won the Tour de France last year.

In my view, this is a colossal time-waster, as most veteran observers chronicling the unfathomable hill climb that took Landis from 11th place to first last year couldn't resist using terms like "super-human" and "other-worldly."

Hmmm.

Anyway, LeMond walks into the hearing and drops two bombs: He was sexually abused as a child, and Landis knew it and tried to use that information to intimidate him into not showing up at the hearings.

"I think they didn't want me coming here today," LeMond told Eddie Pells, of The Associated Press. "I don't know why. If you didn't do anything wrong, why would you mind me coming here today?"

Good one.

What Landis didn't want LeMond telling was that LeMond contacted him last year and urged him to come clean on the doping charge for the good of cycling (too late) and for his own good (probably too late).

"What good would it do?" LeMond quoted Landis as pleading. "If I did, it would destroy a lot of my friends and hurt a lot of people."

LeMond said he told Landis that keeping the secret of his childhood sexual abuse had nearly destroyed him, that such a burden is acutely unhealthy.

Sometime Wednesday night, LeMond got a call from someone claiming to be his uncle, saying he knew of the sexual abuse.

The call was traced to the cell phone of Landis' manager, Will Geoghegan, who apologized to LeMond at the hearing and was instantaneously trumped by Landis' attorney, Maurice Suh, who fired him on the spot.

"I apologize to Greg LeMond and his family for the distress I caused by my call," Geoghegan said through his own attorney Friday. "I acted on my own, impulsively, after a beer or two. I never thought about keeping Greg from testifying. If I had, I would have concluded that, since Greg is such a fierce competitor, my stunt would likely make him more resolved to testify. What I did was wrong and very unfair to Greg."

LeMond, of course, already had framed his own scenario, that Landis had put Geoghegan up to it.

"It was a real threat. It was real creepy, and I think it shows the extent of who it is," LeMond told Pells. "I think there's another side of Floyd that the public hasn't seen."

Worse for Landis, the cross-examination of LeMond was called off because he refused to answer questions about, all together now, Lance Armstrong.

Did I mention that Lance won the Tour de France seven times?

Oh, yes, I did.

Seems almost super-human doesn't it? Other-wordly in fact.

But I must be crazy.