Polish said:
I vaquely remember a work meeting I was at in 1996, 15years ago. VLSI Technology - custom integrated circuit maker. I seem to recall it was an important meeting. At least at the time it seemed important.
Today, in my minds eye, I can not remember the faces of half the attendees. Cannot remember the names of all of the other half lol. Geez, trying to recall what was said back then is impossible now. C'mon, we are talking about 1996.
First, being in a hospital room with a friend who has cancer is memorable, especially when you hear him admit that he's used a variety of performance enhancing drugs.
I imagine that every time from then on that you hear him say he's clean, you think back to that day. The same goes for when he wins his first Tour de France - it would be natural to remember that day and wonder if this athlete who represents your company is clean, especially when he has a positive test after the very first stage.
Then there are all the times that she had conversations about it since - testifying under oath during a lawsuit, in conversation with LeMond, leaving voice mails of apology to Betsy, etc.
This is like Lance when that photo came up of him bullying Contador during the Tour this year. Lance said he hadn't spoken to him in a year, then said they had chatted when the picture was taken but couldn't remember what was said. VeloNews called him on it, and said that if they had just had a chat with an arch rival they hadn't seen in a year, they would darn well remember the conversation. Bruyneel chimed in by saying that Contador and Armstrong talk together in the peloton all the time, and would again (this was after Alberto delivered watches to the RS bus). These are people you defend, day in and day out. Did Lance tell the truth when he said he hadn't spoken to Contador, or did Bruyneel tell the truth when he said the two riders talk all the time? Or did they both lie, again? Like when Lance said there was zero truth to the TT wheel story, Bruyneel agreed with him in the English speaking press, then later told Marca that Contador did buy the wheel (and he made up an unbelievable story to try to cover their butts).
Stephanie seems to have the same kind of selective memory failure as other members of Armstrong's network.
These people, including McIlvain, are going down. They're going down hard. There will be public humiliation, and loss of assets, and jail time. They're going to be exposed for cheating, crimes, bribes, etc. Hell, they already have, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. And yet you devote your time to defending them to people who don't believe a word you say. And if Lance met you in real life, he wouldn't even say hello, or thank you, because that's the kind of guy he is. He'd probably make fun of it behind your back, if he became aware of you existence.
I can give you a hard example. When he first started his comeback, I was unemployed and suffering severe depression. I started reading all the news articles about the return, and left comments to articles that had attacks by LeMond and Bordry. I also decided that since I was spending time researching, I might as well start a blog with links to articles, videos, twitpics, etc.
His twitter following was small then. I sent him a link, and also posted it in comments on the old LA website. I could tell from stats counter how people accessed the blog, and someone came from the twitter link (I kept that account at zero followers). Anyway, he and other people at Livestrong knew about the blog, as did Chris Brewer (followed my BloggingLance on twitter).
Not long after, he did an interview in the UK Guardian. He was asked about forums and article comments. He said that if you look closely at article comments, you can tell that a lot of them are from just one person (I copied and pasted), and that THAT HAD NO VALUE. Then he added this gem:
But go online and, to this day, Betsy blogs 24 hours a day about me. If that ain't sick, what is?
He killed two birds with one stone on that one. He got me by saying that me blogging about him was sick, and since he likes to take bits of unrelated info and combine them in sad and pathetic ways, he took the existence of my blog and decided to use it to attack Betsy, and her testimony from the SCA lawsuit.
So, I was a guy with a blog that was a hundred percent positive about his racing and training, sharing positive articles and hard to find videos with people who would have not had time to find them on their own. I also made some pretty logical defenses against attacks against him in articles. Then I found out that he thought the comments were useless, and that a person must be sick to put that much effort into a blog about him.
Trust me, if he knew what you and flicker do here, he'd have zero respect for it, and he'd make fun of you behind your back. He wouldn't like you, or appreciate you. He would accept your money.
I deleted my blog after that article. A week or two later,I noticed that it was cached in Google, so I recreated it, because I wasn't doing it for him, I was doing it because I like to write, needed a project to work on, and wanted to help out other fans. I stopped after he showed his true colors during Santa Rosa training camp and ATOC. I blocked him om twitter during the Giro. I was proud a few months back when I Googled his account to follow up on something mentioned here, and found out that he'd blocked me back, even though I never used @LanceArmstrong in my tweets.