Why Lance Armstrong will Prevail

Lance Armstrong refuses to give the USADA the satisfaction of his attention.  He has moved on and so should we.  Here are the facts -

• Along with baseball at the same time, nearly everyone on the Tour was doping and very few got caught.  
• The UCI was inept and unwilling to adequately test race participants.
• The USADA admits on page 20 of its 202 page report "This case was initiated [..] based on evidence other than a positive drug test."
• The USADA cut deals with nearly all their witnesses. This effort was full of personal vendettas and quid pro quos and was done to take the heat off of the sport and focus it squarely onto a single scapegoat.
• Everyone will remember Armstrong as the winner of 7 titles, regardless of asterisks and medal strippings, because we can never seem to remember who came in second.
• At least five of the runners up to Armstrong's victorious races have faced their own doping demons, just minus the attention.

I'm not saying he didn't do it.  EPO is a commonly prescribed drug for cancer patients because it  boosts red blood cells.  The first time he took it he probably thought "Whoa! This stuff is great.  If I can ride a bike after chemo, What other miracles await?"  In the end Lance Armstrong beat cancer because he surrounded himself with good doctors, good drugs, a "geeked out" attention to medical analytics, and he fights like a son-ova-bitch.  Then he beat the USADA with his inhuman defiance.

So why the polarizing feelings about Lance Armstrong?  Like Franky Sinatra he did it his way and without apologies.  Armstrong lives on his terms and nobody else's.  We love him for his story and we hate him for his stubbornness and alien level of self reliance.  We love him because he worked harder than any other cyclist and we hate him because on top of that, he cheated so well he pissed cleaner than Mother Theresa.  We love him because we want to have a hero and we hate him because we want to tear them down.  And when the dam starts to crumble, he does just enough of a deft sidestep to clear our ignorant backlash and mind numbingly repetitive media mouthpieces.  He steps down from key areas (namely his charity which has arguably done more for cancer progress than the Komen Foundation), gets let go from others, all without holding a press conference, and we rage because in our anger we realize we hate him most of all because if we didn't, we'd have to hate ourselves.