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These Days, the First American Tour De France Champion Seems to Have More Vendettas Than Victories

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These Days, the First American Tour De France Champion Seems to Have More Vendettas Than Victories photographs by JESSE CHEHAK THESE DAYS, THE FIRST AMERICAN TOUR DE FRANCE CHAMPION SEEMS TO HAVE MORE VENDETTAS THAN VICTORIES. AS TREK BICYCLES, HIS LONGTIME SPONSOR, SUES LEMOND TO SHUT UP ABOUT LANCE ARMSTRONG AND DOPING, Bill Gifford TRIES TO DETERMINE WHETHER THE FORMER SUPERSTAR IS A CRUSADER OUT TO SAVE CYCLING OR ONE MASSIVELY BITTER MANIAC. MEN’S JOURNAL 111 JULY 2008 REG LEMOND’S ATTACK DOG IS STARING that Armstrong’s team paid a $500,000 bribe to persuade cycling me down. I’ve made it as far as the living officials to accept a backdated prescription after Armstrong tested room of the family’s brick manor outside positive for corticosteroids during the 1999 Tour. “I don’t care if he is Minneapolis, but now this purebred German a hero,” LeMond says. “I am going to bring that to the forefront.” shepherd has stopped me in my tracks. Armstrong dismisses LeMond, saying, “I feel really sorry for the “His name’s Yester, as in ‘yesterday,’” guy,” but taking the high road seems unlikely to keep LeMond at bay. the three-time Tour de France winner tells In his home, LeMond tells me ominously, “I was always too nice. I’m me, rubbing the neck of the dog he’s owned holding people accountable from now on.” for all of six months. “Aww, he’s okay.” It seems wise for me to make friends with Yester, so let him give G“He likes you,” LeMond’s wife Kathy chimes in. my hand a good sniff before I reach out to rub his neck. He assents, I’m not so sure. Yester hasn’t released me from his gaze, and his relaxing slightly, but I still feel a vibration rising from deep within his snout is aimed at the meaty part of my thigh. I try to remember what chest, the low beginning of a growl. the Dog Whisperer said in such situations. Should I stare back into those expressionless eyes or avoid eye contact altogether? HIS TIRES SIZZLING ON THE HOT PAVEMENT, GREG LEMOND But even the Dog Whisperer rarely deals with creatures such as sprints past in a blur, blond hair blowing back in the wind, still Yester, who is no house pet but a Level III Schutzhund, a highly looking like the powerful athlete who stunned the world by winning trained German-bred police dog, used for security purposes only and Europe’s greatest bicycle race more than two decades ago. costing upward of $20,000. “All I have to do is say ‘throat! LeMond Only it isn’t Greg LeMond; it’s his son Geoffrey, who at 23 is a whispers, “and he’d kill you.” Lucky it is then that Yester only dead ringer for his old man in his glory days. “That’s how he trains,” understands commands in German. the real Greg LeMond says proudly, riding It might seem odd to keep a lethal beside me. “Balls to the wall.” guard dog in the tranquil exurb of Medina, The famous mane is now silver, and where the locals rarely get up to anything there are 50 more pounds of him than back worse than fox hunting. But if you had the in the day, but at 46 the elder LeMond still kind of enemies that LeMond has acquired resembles his younger self: his eyes are the over the last few years, you might consider same dazzling blue, though now they seem getting some protection too. He has sued sadder and heavier, more like those of an everyone from Tim Blixseth, the old hound dog than the eager puppy he was billionaire who developed the Yellowstone when he won the Tour the first time. Club, to various sponsors and business We’d spent the morning watching partners. He has tape-recorded phone calls coverage of the 2007 Tour de France. with business associates and friends, and, LeMond’s mind seems troubled by the race most famously, he’s tangled with Lance he won in 1986, 1989, and 1990. He’s Armstrong and Floyd Landis, the only horrified by the extent to which performance- other Americans to have won the Tour de enhancing drugs have distorted the contest. France. LeMond was among the first to Just the day before, a key contender had been suggest that media darling Armstrong tossed out of the race for an illegal blood might have used performance-enhancing transfusion – basically, for having someone drugs, and he testified at Landis’s doping else’s blood in his body. hearing last May, after a Landis associate “I can’t come to grips with how corrupt threatened to publicly reveal that LeMond it has become.” LeMond told me earlier. “I had been sexually abused as a child. want to be a fan, but I know too much.” By refusing to keep quiet, LeMond has For years he barely even road his bike, created a massive rift in the sport he left TROPHY CASE LeMond’s 1989 until he started riding with Geoffrey two nearly 15 years ago. The Lance/Landis camp Tour jersey, with other mementos years ago. LeMond thought it might help derides him as a “whiner” who’s jealous of his son beat back the depression and sub- all other American Tour winners and who may have even used blood stance abuse problems that had haunted him since his teens. Geoffrey boosters himself, while the pro-LeMond camp worships him as the has considered trying to turn pro, but LeMond opposes it because he greatest champion of all. “I’ve received death threats,” he says. “I’ve doesn’t want his son to be tempted to use performance drugs. had people say I should have my teeth kicked out. I’m a lightning rod It’s not clear he’d need to, if he has inherited the tiniest strand of his for everybody.” father’s DNA. From the moment Greg began showing up at bike races This spring LeMond launched a new offensive in his long-running around his native Reno, Nevada, as a teenager, he won just about war with Armstrong by serving a breach-of-contract lawsuit against everything. In a tough race up Mount Tamalpais, outside San Francisco, Trek, which has licensed the LeMond Racing Cycles brand since 1995 15-year-old Greg placed second only to the great George Mount, who’d and which also sponsored Armstrong beginning in 1998. The partner- finished sixth a few months earlier in the 1976 Olympics. ship generated more than $100 million for Trek and $5 million for LeMond was gifted with an ungodly VO 2 max of 93; sometimes he LeMond over the years. Ostensibly a business dispute, the complaint puts it at 94 or even 95, but at any rate his would have been among the is filled with explosive allegations against Trek and Armstrong – highest VO 2 maxes ever recorded. (The VO 2 max measures an athlete’s among other things, that Trek stopped promoting LeMond’s products aerobic activity; a typical fit man’s score is 60.) By age 19, LeMond had after he spoke out against doping and Armstrong. It goes so jar as to a pro contract to race in Europe, so he and his new wife Kathy moved to say that Armstrong was trying to sabotage LeMond’s business. “Lance France, and later Belgium. He won the world championships in 1983, basically destroyed my bike company,” LeMond says. and in 1984 he finished third in the Tour de France. “When you’re “I’m a busy man,” Armstrong told me, when I later asked him good,” he tells me, “you’re good from the beginning.” about this. “Greg LeMond is never on my to-do list. He rode under the wing of his superstar teammate Bernard Hinault, Trek fired back with a massive, very public countersuit against who had basically adopted the LeMonds, kicking them some extra LeMond, claiming that LeMond’s “inconsistent behavior” damaged prize money to supplement Greg’s $12,000-a-year salary. Once he even the Trek brand and harmed his own company as well. The case may changed a tire on LeMond’s Renault. The great Hinault, changing a tire open up a Pandora’s box of cycling’s darkest secrets. Sample allegation: for 1’Americain ! In 1985 he finished second to Hinault in the Tour, MEN’S JOURNAL 112 JULY 2008 and finally, in ’86, this blond kid with the LIFE OF LEMOND Speaking dur - gleaming Colgate smile led the entire Tour ing Floyd Landis’s arbitration hear- de France peloton onto the Champs- Elysées, a conquering hero who was nev- ing (left); with children Geoffrey, ertheless adored by everybody in France. Scott, Simone, and wife Kathy at ho me in Minnesota in 2000 IT SHOULD’VE BEEN SO PERFECT AFTER that; his life an athlete’s fairy tale. Yet even then there were hints of trouble to come, energy system basically breaks rumblings of conflicts and conspiracies. It down. By then America was started with Hinault, who had attacked getting to know its newest LeMond relentlessly during the race, despite young cycling superstar: a promising to help him win. “He was a fatherlike figure who let cocky 23-year-old Texan me down, LeMond says. “It just crushed me.” named Lance Armstrong. Then the legal wrangles started, a torrent of lawsuits that has continued pretty much unabated since. LeMond sued anyone AFTER WINNING THE WORLD who tried to use his image for profit. A series of tough championships in 1993, Arm- negotiations between LeMond and several team sponsors strong skyrocketed from new- yielded the highest salary ever paid to a professional cyclist – comer to hero.
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