cont.
_____
“So you have to understand why amphetamines got there. In the ’50s and ’60s, they weren’t considered cheating. They were considered taking care of your body. Like a soigneur. Then there was the transition, where it became illegal, and there was drug testing. But there was still the leftover through the ’70s and ’80s.
“Also, talk to any psychiatrist with a brain and he’ll tell you Type A personalities are in cycling. They come into cycling because it calms their brain down. But the thing about cycling is that it creates depression. It’s natural to seek a stimulant to get out of that. And that can become highly addictive. It’s not performance enhancing. It’s just the beginning of the end.”
The end, certain cyclists would admit, came sometime around 1990, when a newly-discovered drug aimed at treating kidney disease flooded the sport: erythropoietin. Better known these days as EPO. It became not just the drug of choice but the drug of necessity. LeMond thinks so anyway. He rode the 1991 Tour and took seventh, but three years later he couldn’t even finish. Something had changed. Riders he would normally drop without breaking sweat were sticking with him. Several more were further on up the road. He reckoned he was just burnt out. He retired.
“We should probably head back,” he says. “I like to push myself, still, but I got to be careful these days. I found that a couple of years ago, when I started back riding a lot more. The more I pushed myself, the worse I felt. I ended up in the Mayo Clinic for a week, last year, doing some tests. The problem, we think, is those lead pellets. When I push myself now, the body goes catabolic, and that leaks some lead into my system. I’m going to have to get them taken out. I don’t know. That’s a big operation.”
We shower and agree to meet in the Doonbeg Lodge, overlooking the first tee. I tell him I’ll bring along my tape recorder, get some stuff on the record. “None of this,” he says, “is off the record.”
I’m just not sure what he can say about Lance Armstrong. Turns out he has plenty to say.
INEVITABLY THEIR careers became entangled. Armstrong won the World Championship in 1993, the first American since LeMond. In 1996, he overcame cancer. A survivor, in his own way, like LeMond. And in 1999, he won the Tour, his first of seven, and the first American since LeMond. Shortly after that LeMond questioned Armstrong’s association with the Italian doctor Michele Ferrari, and his alleged doping practices. Since then any relationship between Armstrong and LeMond has gone from bad to worse.
It could be seen as just personal. Except it’s not. It’s about business. It’s about fighting for what you believe in. LeMond started his own bicycle company in 1990, then two years later signed a deal with Trek. They would manufacture and distribute the bikes and sell them under LeMond’s name. But by 2001, when LeMond raised his concerns about Michele Ferrari, by far the biggest name on Trek’s books was Lance Armstrong. LeMond, under pressure, retracted, but the fall-out was only beginning. Eight years later it’s headed for the courts; LeMond claims Armstrong, as a way of getting back, was responsible for Trek’s neglect of his line of bikes, which ended the deal completely last year.
“Believe me, I want to walk away from this,” he says. “But right now I’m suing Trek. I’m really not the litigation type. I don’t even want to say disparaging things about Lance, because I don’t think he’s worth it, really.
“He’s starting to paint me as disillusioned, unstable. Now that I realise Trek is over and I don’t have a gag order I’ve been a little more outspoken. But I haven’t just been talking about Lance. The guy has an obsession with me, somehow thinks when I talk about drugs, rehabilitations, I must be talking about him. That’s not a good sign.
“Why can’t we have an open, intellectual debate about it? They want to shut everybody down who talks about it. What I don’t get is, I make comments about cycling in general, about doping, and he always relates them to him. I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about the sport in general.
“It’s all just made me aware of how really corrupt the world of cycling has become. I’m just amazed at how many peoples’ morals are for sale. It’s just a matter of price. They’re trying to take everything away. My business, my reputation. But I am a fighter. And I will go down in flames.”
If LeMond has learnt one thing from the doping mess that has crippled cycling, has somehow become a stronger person because of it all, it’s the importance of being honest with yourself as much as everyone else. About coming clean. For most of his life he told nobody about the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of an old family friend sometime around 1974. Until he couldn’t keep it in any longer. In a twisted way, what convinced him to speak out was a phone call from Floyd Landis, the third American to win the Tour, in 2006. Landis was about to be stripped of that title for failing a drugs test, and LeMond pleaded with him to tell the truth. That keeping it secret, like he did his abuse, could destroy him.
What happened next was even more twisted, as Landis’ business manager tried to scare LeMond from testifying in the doping trial by pretending (in a phone call) to be the man that abused him as a kid. As traumatic as this was, it proved to LeMond how sick the sport had become.
“Because of what happened to me as a kid, the abuse, I was trying to please everyone. Trying to do the right thing. Maybe some people thought I was naive. But it’s the same with the riders right now. I know they don’t want to be doing this. They’re like lab rats. That’s why I’ve likened it to somebody who is being abused. They think they’re willing participants, but they’re not able to make that adult, long-term decision. And when they’re 45 or 50 they’ll look back and go, ‘God . . .’
“It’s one thing harming yourself. I’ve done stuff I’m not proud of. Tried recreational drugs. It’s another thing when you’re consciously manipulating, and trying to cheat other people. That to me is a big difference. I see Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton as tragic stories. Marco Pantani as well. I know some people look on them as the problem. They’re not the problem.
“They’re tragedies of the rules not being implemented. Who makes sure the rules are implemented? The governing body. There are some big efforts being made, but it only takes one person to mess it up. There should be no questioning when it comes to implementing the rules. There is enough good science now to get 98 per cent of doping out of the sport.
“It’s just like what happened on Wall Street lately. If you have the fox guarding the hen house. It’s about a trust system. Nobody trusts anybody. Some people are trying to make a living doing it the right way. Some people are trying to get away with murder. So you lose trust. Cycling has mimicked that.”
It’s a sad way to end an extraordinary day with an extraordinary man.
Next Saturday, LeMond will head to Monaco for the start of the 96th Tour de France. “I don’t even know if I want to be there,” he says. “Last year I was a little more hopeful, and then . . . I mean, right now, would I get back involved with professional cycling? No. Would I like my kids to get involved with professional cycling? No way. For me, it’s a lost cause.”
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