Time & Perspective Quote by Kelli White

"It sounded good" is the tell: not a defense built on truth, but on plausibility. Kelli White isn’t narrating innocence so much as narrating how a cover story gets manufactured in real time. The sentence has the flat affect of someone who has repeated the line often enough that it turns procedural, almost boring. That boredom is the point. Doping scandals aren’t usually sustained by elaborate conspiracies; they’re sustained by mundane, rehearsed explanations that can survive a casual question and die only under real scrutiny.

Conte’s role matters. By crediting Victor Conte with supplying the story, White shifts the center of agency away from herself and toward the ecosystem around elite performance: the coach, the supplier, the fixer. It’s a subtle redistribution of blame that still reads as confession. The passive construction - "I was contacted" - keeps her slightly out of frame, as if events happen to her rather than being chosen by her. That rhetorical distancing is what people reach for when they’re trying to be honest about the facts while minimizing the self.

Then there’s Dr. Goldman, invoked like a credential. Name-dropping a doctor provides legitimacy, the aura of medical oversight, the suggestion that whatever happened had a sanctioned, scientific rationale. But the final line punctures it: "my first time ever meeting, or speaking, to Dr. Goldman". The authority was theatrical. The subtext is bleakly modern: in high-stakes sport, the narrative is part of the performance, and the cleanest stories are often the ones assembled by the same machinery that made the cheating possible.