Trying to untangle cycling’s long history of performance-enhancing drugs raises more questions than it settles.

On the Great Divide Race, which starts at the Canadian border and ends 2,500 miles later at the Mexican line.

“Landis thinks there should be a scorched-earth approach to cleaning up cycling,” says Ben, noting that the whole thing reminds him of the movie Fight Club, in which Tyler Durden, a crusader with multiple-personality disorder, assembles an army of nameless, tight-lipped followers to spread mayhem around the country.

On Canadian cyclist Ryder Hesjedal:

A man from British Columbia finishes top ten in the Tour de France, he should automatically be in the running for Canadian athlete of the year and all the other “best of” accolades handed out to bobsledders and ice dancers and Sidney Crosby. Currently, maddeningly, Ryder Hesjedal is not a star. Cycling, when it isn’t about doping, is SportsCentre filler, something to show right before the Frisbee-catching seal, or the lawn bowling carp.

On Lance Armstrong’s return to the Tour de France after cancer:

Because Armstrong is the best cyclist in the world, there is an assumption among some of those who follow the sport that he, too, must use drugs. Armstrong has never failed a drug test, however, and he may well be the most frequently examined athlete in the history of sports. Whenever he wins a day’s stage, or finishes as one of the top cyclists in a longer race, he is required to provide a urine sample. Like other professionals, Armstrong is also tested randomly throughout the year. (The World Anti-Doping Agency, which regularly tests athletes, has even appeared at his home, in Austin, Texas, at dawn, to demand a urine sample.) Nobody questions Armstrong’s excellence. And yet doubts remain: is he really so gifted that, like Secretariat, he easily dominates even his most talented competitors?

Inside the twisted, half-conscious world of Jure Robic, the Slovene soldier who might be the world’s best ultra-endurance athlete.

Does the best thing you do in your life make up for the worst thing you’ve ever done? This cycling hero–and convicted felon–might get closer to an answer than any of us.