No, python, there isn't and knowing what I've read from you over time, I know you know it too
All I can say is I've learned from some of the frighteningly knowledgeable users of this forum that it takes hard work and long preparation to dope well.
In another life, I worked in a criminal law practice and I worked with people who were not dissimilar to some of our friends in lycra. They lived comfortably enough with an inner truth inside a hard shell. They were folks who knew the angles that helped them get on. Didn't matter that it hurt someone.
Now depending on the facts, to get manslaughter instead of murder (another sort of lifetime ban) you need to show that something happened that broke the link between you and total responsibility for your crime. This is called a
novus actus interveniens and the bar is set pretty damned high. So a guy who beat somebody and ran away laughing - only for the victim to come around dazed, stagger and fall off a cliff, then die of exposure hours later at the bottom - could still be responsible for murder.
Now turn from that edifying image to cycling. Ignorance in the face of evil doctors was once able to break the chain of responsibility. Or a lack of schooling in basic biology. Then it was contaminated supplements and, ooh, those
pesky cortisone creams.
All of these for me are just weak excuses for those who have knowingly harmed their society. When you show off in front of a public that has increasingly few other things in life to enjoy, when you have kids growing up looking to you for examples, when you have the reputations of real-world companies on your jersey to uphold. When, like Vino and many others, you have a family to support and instead you've booked a seat on the express to Fignonville.
No, I'm sorry, I think these people know exactly what they're doing. The intent to harm is there. The society of cycling could and probably should be better than real society because it is theoretically simpler. When I'm watching it with my cheese-on-sticks and a glass of Westmalle Triple, I'm as simple as that and I won't apologise for it. I'm just a small-hearted, small-headed oaf whose Sunday entertainment was spoiled because, for me anyway, a known cheater won. Otherwise I could have suspended disbelief like a movie and I'd spark open another bottle with a smile.