As Hog says, if you want to see genuine Lance fans in action, go into the comments section of the latest Lance article in the Huffington Post. Unbelievable stuff. Here's a few, but it could have been any:
First, let's put aside for the moment whether Lance Armstrong doped during his career. Now, let's consider the motivation of a man who helped lead Americans into the Tour de France and who should be content with his own palmares (honors) in that area: Greg LeMond. Taping a phone conversation and lying about doing it to the person on the other end of the line---who does he imagine himself to be? Elliot Ness? I doubt it. What everyone else has been saying about LeMond springs to mind: jealousy. Would I trust his motivation? Would I trust him not to fake the tape? How can I trust a tape that someone has held onto for six odd years? Motivation again! Couldn't bring it up when Armstrong was winning all those Tours, now could he? Maybe it just wouldn't have held up..They say revenge is a dish best served cold....maybe the tape is, too.
More importantly, I want to get at the motivation of the then so-called friends who claimed they heard Armstrong tell his doctors about doping. Let me get this right: You're in the hospital room of someone fighting cancer. You're there as friend, support, life-line in a life or death crisis in order to see your friend through it. Even if that friendship goes bust, you should have the human decency to keep that time sacred. It's the old rule about not hitting a guy when he's down. Human decency. Period. Even if it was said, you should "never have heard it." Conversations between a patient and his doctors are privileged. Same should go for anyone in a sick room. Anything else is inhuman, pure and simple.
Personally, I believe Lance Armstrong never doped after cancer. As he said in his first book, why would anyone in his right mind, after chemo, pour more poison into himself?
Did he dope before cancer? I don't know and choose to believe he didn't, out of respect for the life he has lived in raising money for cancer research, helping new patients and their families, and for survivorship. A man has a right to be judged on the record of his older self. "He who is without sin, let him throw the first stone."