Lance Armstrong... greatest doper there was or ever will be

It's subtle, but what he means to say is that 'Floyd has lied', or, better still, 'has been lying' to the public for years...

Many American vernaculars use simple past tenses instead of the perfect past alternatives* you offer, so I wouldn't be too swift to draw that conclusion about the subtle use of language indicating intent.

*Sorry I don't have a reference to hand for this, but you can hear it very often, e.g. "did you eat (en-US) already?" vs "have you eaten already?" (en-GB). My anecdotal observation is that among younger people in the UK there is a shift towards dropping the perfect for the simple past.