The last time I saw Floyd Landis was at a bike shop in the city of Rialto, California. Might have been late 2007, early 2008.

He was the star of a one-man event to tell “his side” of the Tour de France drug-test story. He had been stripped of his 2006 championship after he failed a drug test, and he wanted it back. And spent lots and lots of money in legal fees.

I remember how avid the audience was, how sympathetic. A room crowded with people, sitting among bicycles and cycling gear, so eager to hear Floyd Landis tell them he was legal, he was legit, he was clean … and how the Powers That Be were out to destroy him.

And now,  some two years later, Floyd Landis has flipped and confessed to long-term abuse of performance-enhancing drugs. As nearly all druggies do.

Landis’s revelations come with a twist: He seems intent on taking down with him the whole rotten temple of professional cycling.

Again, I am reminded of how intense were the emotions of those who wanted to believe in Floyd Landis, at that shop in Rialto. I recall another reporter asking him a question about failed drug tests … which was not what the crowd wanted to hear … and wondering if it could turn into violence, as necks craned and angry glares were focused on the reporter.

Who, of course, was in the right, just as Landis was wrong.

I wrote a notes column, back in 2006, after Landis won the Tour de France, about how so many people in the Inland Empire area of Southern California felt a particular connection to Landis and his victory because he had ridden in the Redlands Bicycle Classic and because he lived in the city of Temecula for much of the time.

And when the doping bombshell hit, a few days later, I did a column about how we should all be thoroughly suspicious about a sports performance which is too good to be true — such as Landis’s Tour victory, which hinged on an unbelievable eight-minute blowout victory in an Alpine stage.

I can’t find internet history of the stories filed by the two reporters who were in Rialto that night. But I do remember the size of the crowd, and its enthusiam and blind faith in Floyd Landis, who couldn’t possibly be lying so long and so passionately.

But, he says now, he was.

Which Landis do we believe?

History shows, the athletes who confess are the ones telling the truth. History shows that those who cling to denials and obfuscations are the liars.

And back to the twist. (And I want to say, “twist of the knife.”) Landis’s claims that, basically, everyone in cycling is drugged and, apparently, that various and sundry federations and international bodies have known about it and overlooked it.

Here is a New York Times story that goes deeper into the issue … with the gist of it being that everyone else is still denying everything and suggesting that Landis is trying to destroy a bunch of innocent people, including Lance Armstrong.

This smacks of vengeance-seeking. But it also has a ring of truth. Cycling, more than any sport (aside from, perhaps, track and field), has been leaking drug revelations for years.

Someone could do the sport a favor by forcing it to clean up. (Assuming that is possible, since the cheats often are a step or five ahead of the testers.) If Landis can corroborate his claims, that will rock the sport. Again. Maybe finally it could produce champions who don’t cheat.

Meanwhile, the Landis sympathizers from that meeting in the Rialto bike store … I wonder how foolish — and how bitter — they feel now. When Floyd Landis is done confessing, maybe he can apologize, too, to those who believed in him.