mewmewmew13 said:Lance has, indeed, built his whole 'life' on his 'done it all clean' brand, and somehow I still feel that many will idiotically overlook that aspect and still think, "I know he doped but he still helped cancer patients...".
ugh, hope you are %100 correct on your prediction.
cheers
It is not idiotic to think "I know he doped, but he still helped cancer patients". When someone hears "cancer" as a diagnosis, it sounds like a death sentence. Sure, more people routinely survive skin cancers, and early detection saves a lot of other kinds of cancer, too, but realistically, for most people the emotional reaction to "You've got cancer" is "I'm gonna die soon". To survive cancer, or even to just prolong life before succumbing to cancer, people are willing to take all sorts of drugs, and endure all sorts of other painful and uncomfortable treatments. To know that you can survive it, to know that someone else has survived it, is extremely important. To know that cancer can be survived, and that life after cancer can not only be 'normal', but be championship caliber can be a very important emotional factor, and may in fact help some people survive otherwise grueling anti-cancer regimens. I suspect many cancer survivors are less concerned with Lance being drug-free, than they are with just having had an example of what can be done post-cancer, and how they too have a chance for excellence post-death-sentence.
And, frankly, when Lance is proved to have doped, if people continue to think "I don't care that he doped, he's still proof that life can be lived at a high level post-cancer", that will greatly outweigh the harm that he's doing to cycling. I won't like it (hell, I'll hardly be able to stand it) when Lance proclaims that he doped in order to provide hope to cancer patients. But having seen first-hand the role that attitude and emotion can play in fighting cancer, I will still think that being Anti-cancer is much more important than being Pro-cycling. And if any cancer patient wants to keep a "he doped, but" attitude about Lance, she/he should be ENCOURAGED to do so.
Don't let your love for cycling, clean cycling, overwhelm the vastly more important role of attitude in surviving cancer. Vilify Lance forever as a cyclist when the proof's in, but please don't attempt to strip what you view as an illusion from the attitude of anyone suffering from cancer.