photographs

by

JESSE CHEHAK

THESE DAYS, THE FIRST AMERICAN CHAMPION SEEMS TO HAVE MORE VENDETTAS THAN VICTORIES. AS TREK BICYCLES, HIS LONGTIME SPONSOR, SUES LEMOND TO SHUT UP ABOUT 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. When he came $5.5 million over three years – but also bred acrimony. “He was back from cancer to win the ’99 a businessman on the bike – the very first,” says his former Tour he was deemed the second trainer, the renowned Dutch physiologist Adrie van Diemen. coming of LeMond, and he too was named SI’s Sportsman of the Year. In the spring of 1987, LeMond’s life took another dramatic turn At the start of the 2001 Tour, however, the London Sunday Times when he returned from Europe to recover from a hand injury. While published an article by detailing Armstrong’s history with hunting on opening day of turkey season, he accidentally stood in the none other than Dr. Michele Ferrari, who by that time was under path of a blast from his sister’s husband’s 12-gauge. He lost three criminal investigation in Italy. It questioned Armstrong’s return from quarters of his blood and endured a collapsed lung. That he went on to testicular cancer, a malignancy that spread to his brain and lungs and win the 1989 Tour de France, two years later, with 35 pellets still nearly took his life in 1996, to win the Tour two times (going on three embedded in his body – three of them to his heart – might qualify that summer). In a follow-up story, LeMond dropped this bomb: as a Vatican-worthy act of God. Yet there he was, hurtling down the “If Lance is clean, then is the greatest comeback in the history of sports. Champs-Elysées on the final day, winning the race by a razor-thin If he isn’t, it would be the greatest fraud.” margin of eight seconds. The uproar began immediately, Armstrong called LeMond a few The next morning Americans who barely knew what a derailleur was days after the 2001 Tour ended. “You’re telling me you’ve never done awoke to read about Greg LeMond’s amazing comeback. Sports EPO?” LeMond alleges Armstrong said, referring to the blood-boosting Illustrated named him Sportsman of the Year, a first for a cyclist, and drug . “Your comeback in ’89 was so spectacular. Mine the next six months disappeared in a blur of awards banquets and was a miracle, yours was a miracle. You couldn’t have been as strong as celebrations. “I was overwhelmed,” he recalls. In 1990 he won a third you were in ’89 without EPO.” Tour, staking his place among the greatest athletes ever. “Listen, Lance, before EPO was ever in cycling I won the Tour de He didn’t know yet that this was the peak, as good as it was ever France...because I had a VO2 max of 95. Yours was 82. Tell me one going to get. The following year he struggled to finish seventh, and each person who said I did EPO.” year after that the pace of the pack got faster, especially on the climbs. In “Everyone knows it.” one mountain stage of the 1992 Tour, LeMond finished nearly 50 “Are you threatening me?” LeMond says he asked. minutes behind the winner. He used to win in the mountains. He quit the “If you want to throw stones, I will throw stones,” Armstrong race the next day. “It was a very confusing period,” LeMond says, “But allegedly replied. Later in the conversation, LeMond says, Armstrong it makes sense today.” promised to “find at least 10 people who will say you did EPO.” At the time, he blamed himself; the winner that day in 1992 was the “It’s my word versus his,” said Armstrong, reached by phone in St. scrupulously drug-free Andy Hampsten. LeMond trained harder than he Bart’s earlier this year. “But I’m telling you, his description of that call ever had in his life and changed his diet, but nothing worked. “My dad is 100 percent inaccurate. He was accosting me, screaming and yelling. tortured himself,” says Geoffrey. Finally he went to see a Belgian doctor He was not acting normal that day,” (In a deposition, Armstrong named Yvan Van Mol. “‘There’s nothing wrong with you, Greg,’” described LeMond as “like a drunk.”) LeMond says the doctor told him. “‘If you’re going to compete today, However that phone call went down, LeMond’s troubles were only you’ve got to go see Ferrari.’” beginning. Speaking out against Armstrong carried serious consequen- Dr. Michele Ferrari Italian sports doctor who had become notorious ces in the close-knit cycling world. “There was this Lance mania going for his glib comments about performance drugs, comparing EPO to on, and people were angry about what LeMond said,” says LeMond’s orange juice, and declaring that it didn’t bother him if his athletes went former teammate Andy Hampsten. “He had nothing to gain and quite a to Switzerland to buy blood-boosters. Many top riders bad already lot to lose by sticking his neck out.” started seeing Ferrari, and their performances had improved markedly. LeMond spent the first two weeks of August 2001 fielding calls from But LeMond refused: Greg LeMond didn’t need anything the Italian cycling bigwigs, including Thorn Weisel, chairman of USA Cycling and doctor could provide. He had the highest VO2 max, and he could still the owner of Armstrong’s team. He also heard from Trek CEO John beat everyone. Burke, who pleaded with LeMond to stand down and, according to Except he couldn’t. In 1994 he struggled to keep up on the flat LeMond’s 2008 lawsuit against Trek, “implied in graphic terms that Mr. stages. “We were always in the red – dans la rouge ,” he says. When the Armstrong would financially harm Mr. LeMond.” Spooked, LeMond pack dropped him yet again during the sixth stage, he got off his bike began taping the calls. But he was, trapped; Burke demanded he issue a and climbed into the “broom wagon;’ which cruises along behind the retraction, drafted by Armstrong’s attorney. race to sweep up exhausted riders, the most humiliating way possible to 10 weeks later a “clarification” from LeMond appeared in USA exit a race. Today. “I do not believe, in any way, that [Armstrong] bas ever used In December 1994, LeMond announced his retirement, citing any performance-enhancing substances,” LeMond was quoted as mitochondrial myopathy, a rare condition in which the body’s cellular saying. “I believe his performances are the result of the same hard

MEN’S JOURNAL 114 JULY 2008 work, dedication, and focus that were mine When Greg got a little older, Ron 10 years before.” started showing him pornographic maga- He says differently now. “I only regret zines and talking about sexual things. The that a retraction was forced out of me. young boy got aroused, and Ron took I wouldn’t change anything, not a word.” advantage of him. “He waited until I was In fact, he ups the ante. “Lance is the just at the right stage of development,” epitome of the opposite of what a LeMond says now. He can’t remember champion is. He gets away with it because whether the abuse continued for three he’s a cancer survivor.” months or a year and three months; he just tried to shut it out. AFTER AN HOUR OF RIDING IN ALMOST For decades the secret ate at him. Even unbearable heat, LeMond and I stop for a as he stood on the Tour de France podium in mercy Coffee Cooler at Caribou Coffee. 1986, shaking hands with Paris mayor When I emerge with my drink he is deep in Jacques Chirac, he says, he wondered if Ron conversation with two new-agey male was out there somewhere, ready to tell the acquaintances about Christianity and world and embarrass him. shame. Before long LeMond casually brings up the sexual abuse he’d suffered as A YEAR AGO, EVERYONE WITH A TELE- a child. vision found out that Greg LeMond had It was so painful that I couldn’t tell been sexually abused as a child, thanks to a anybody, and I was quite self-destructive,” bizarre incident at the Floyd Landis arbitration hearing. Landis, the winner, had tested positive for testosterone “LANCE IS THE OPPOSITE during the Tour and stood to he stripped of his victory if found guilty. LeMond had been called to testify for USADA, the U.S. Anti Doping OF WHAT A CHAMPION IS,” Agency, about a call Landis had made to him a few days after the offending urine sample. LeMond says. “He gets away with it Earlier, LeMond had told a French newspaper, “If he is confirmed positive, I hope he has the because he’s a cancer survivor.” courage to tell the truth. I hope that he won’t do LeMond told the two. “I would have preferred to kill myself before I what another American did: deny, deny, deny.” told my wife.” Landis was either perturbed about LeMond’s comments (says Starting about six years ago, at the same time that his public Landis) or seeking the older rider’s advise (says LeMond). According to comments about Armstrong were keeping him in the headlines, LeMond, he urged Landis – if he had used drugs – to own up to it. Better LeMond’s personal life was beginning to unravel, triggered by his son to confront the truth than have it eat at you from inside. “It’s the defense Geoffrey’s deepening depression. The oldest of LeMond’s three mechanism of the lie that poisons you, he told Landis. To illustrate the children, Geoffrey had been traumatized as a toddler when his father point, LeMond told him about the secret he’d kept for many years. was shot, and it didn’t help that LeMond traveled constantly. “His dad “What good would it do?” Landis replied, according to LeMond. was gone 200 days a year,” Kathy tells me. “He would just sob.” “Everybody would hate me. I would destroy all my friends.” “I’m so glad I’m not a professional cyclist anymore, because it’s What good would it do? That struck LeMond as a tacit admission, incredibly selfish,” LeMond says when we’re back at the house. And the conversation didn’t stay private for very long. When a Canadian “You’ve got everyone around you supporting you and propping your reporter called Landis, wondering if he’d “admitted” drug use to ego up.” LeMond, Landis hit the roof. On a cycling website he posted a message The only thing worse is when all that ends and the bottom drops out. saying, in part, “Unfortunately, the facts that he divulged to me in the As he watched his son going in and out of treatment facilities. LeMond hour which he spoke...would damage his character severely and I would could feel his own secret rising to the surface. It culminated on his son’s rather not do what has been done to me. However, if he ever opens his 18th birthday, in 2002, when Geoffrey showed up late to a celebratory mouth again and the word Floyd comes out, I will tell you all some dinner and a family confrontation ensued. “That was only the things that you will wish you didn’t know....” beginning,’ Geoffrey says now. “I hated them for a long time.” In fact, LeMond hadn’t told the reporter about the call; a friend of his “I wished I could tell him I didn’t have this magical childhood,” wife’s had. But when USADA asked him to testify at Landis’s hearing, LeMond tells me, “If he knew the suffering I had done internally, he LeMond agreed, he says, only after Landis rejected an alleged offer from would think differently. But I couldn’t tell him.” USADA to fink on his former teammate, Armstrong, in exchange for a One night, with the help of a bottle of scotch, LeMond tried to tell lesser sanction. (It was a rough month; LeMond’s mother was in a coma, Kathy about his abuse, but it was no use. “I’ll tell you on my deathbed,” dying of liver disease, and he hadn’t spoken to his parents in four years, he mumbled as he passed out. Six weeks later he took off to Arizona since he’d revealed his abuse to them. “I had a lot of questions I wanted with another woman. “Our whole family was on [the antidepressant] answered, and it went to a shame-based reaction,” he says. “I never got Celexa, LeMond tells me, breaking into sobs, “I couldn’t console my to talk to my mom again.”) son. Instead of giving him the care he needed, I tried to run.” He came The night before the Landis hearing, LeMond’s phone rang. back and finally told Kathy what had been done to him, three decades A strange voice was on the other line, claiming to be his “uncle” – his before; the thing that haunted him, that kept him running. abuser. “I’m gonna be there tomorrow,” the man said, “and we can talk It happened to LeMond, as it so often does, at the hands of someone about how we used to hide your weenie.” he knew well. In his case it was a man named Ron, a trusted family During his testimony the next day, LeMond held up his phone, friend. When LeMond was about eight years old, Ron started taking him revealing the incoming call log. Several present immediately recognized skiing and camping in the mountains. “He was kind of like a Boy Scout that the call had come from a phone belonging to Will Geoghegan, counselor,” LeMond says of Ron, who was considerably older than him. Landis’s friend and business manager. Landis’s lawyer Maurice Suh “If you think about pedophiles, they’re all that type.” wheeled around and faced Geoghegan. “You’re fired!” he spat.

MEN’S JOURNAL 116 JULY 2008 Landis was convicted and stripped of his Tour title, and although the Armstrong. But in the end, SCA ended up settling, in February 2006, for arbitration panel stated that LeMond’s testimony had nothing to do with $5 million, plus another $2.5 million in interest and fees. Despite the its decision, the incident sealed Landis’s fate in the court of public parade of witnesses, the arbitrators never ruled on whether or not opinion. Sports columnists and commentators who once summoned Armstrong had doped. sympathy for Landis now wrote him off an unworthy cheat, one who had violated the ultimate taboo. As even Armstrong says, “Man, you don’t “I’M NOT SITTING IN MY HOUSE UPSET THAT HE SURPASSED ME wish that on your worst enemy.” by four Tours de France,” LeMond insists, but one could argue that Armstrong’s ascendancy was not necessarily a good thing for LeMond. ONLY ABOUT EIGHT PEOPLE KNOW FOR SURE WHAT HAPPENED Sponsors such as Oakley had dropped him unceremoniously; a deal to in a certain Indiana cancer ward on October 27, 1996, the supposed market a LeMond-branded line of low-end bikes and cycling accessories date of Armstrong’s alleged hospital room confession. Armstrong in Target stores also fell through, in 2002, in part because the company, watchers, cycling obsessives, and conspiracy theorists have argued PTI Holdings, felt LeMond was “no longer the preeminent American about it, analyzed it, and blogged it to death, and no one would be cyclist.” (LeMond sued for breach of contract and eventually won surprised if it were to reemerge in LeMond’s suit against Trek, almost $3.5 million from PTI.) triggering a new flood of gossip. Yet on balance Armstrong’s rise helped LeMond, by spurring The issue first came to light in the 2004 French book L.A. interest in cycling to unprecedented levels. Sales of his road bikes Confidentiel , written by David Walsh, based on his London Times piece. jumped from less than $8 million in ’98 to more than $15 million, Drawing on interviews with former teammates and support staff and the where it’s stayed until recently. It also benefited LeMond Fitness, LeMonds – who are thanked in the credits – Walsh alleges that which makes stationary bicycles and accessories. “I had everything to Armstrong had used performance-enhancing substances both before and gain from him winning the Tour,” LeMond says. “But I couldn’t after he was diagnosed with cancer in 1996. “I don’t know how long support him.” [Lance] can continue to convince everybody of his innocence, LeMond The reason, he says, dates back to the 2000 Tour, when his former told a French daily in July 2004, on the publication of L.A. Confidentiel mechanic Julian DeVriese, who’d gone to work for Armstrong, told him (Walsh updated the book and published it in English as From Lance to that Armstrong’s U.S. Postal Service team was experimenting with some Landis in 2007). sort of superior blood-doping product, more powerful than EPO, that Though she’s not named as the source, it later emerged that Betsy cleared out of an athlete’s body within 48 hours and was thus Andreu, wife of former Armstrong friend and teammate Frankie Andreu undetectable. “‘This isn’t cycling any more,’” LeMond testified that told Walsh that in October 1996, she and her husband were present in DeVriese had told him. It was competitive pharmacology. (“Absolutely, Armstrong’s hospital room when he told doctors he had used EPO, 100 percent not true,” Armstrong says; DeVriese later signed an human growth hormone, and testosterone. Others there that day denied affidavit denying he’d said any such thing.) Armstrong had said any such thing, including Armstrong’s doctor, his LeMond says he was devastated. All of a sudden it made sense why coach, and a rep for Oakley sunglasses named Stephanie McIlvain, who he couldn’t seem to finish the Tour after 1991, and why his old worked with Armstrong and had also worked with LeMond. But the teammate Philippe Casado had left for an Italian team that reputedly had allegations led to a legal dispute between Armstrong and a company an EPO program – and then died at age 30.

“IT’S THE DEFENSE MECHANISM OF

THE LIE THAT POISONS YOU,”

he told Landis. To illustrate the point, he told him

about the secret he’d kept for many years. called SCA Promotions, which had promised a $5 million bonus if LeMond had had a squeaky-clean reputation as a racer, and in 1988, Armstrong won a sixth Tour. When Armstrong won a sixth time, SCA he quit his team when a teammate tested positive for testosterone. Even withheld the payment until an investigation could be completed. so, a whisper campaign alleging that he, too, used drugs during his LeMond was not in the room that day, but he ended up advising SCA career started around the time he first came to blows with Armstrong and looking into the incident on his own. In 2002 he surreptitiously and continues online to this day. The case against LeMond goes recorded a phone call with McIlvain, with whom he hadn’t spoken in something like this: he always used the most advanced cycling years. “You’re not taping this, are you, Greg?” she asks jokingly on the equipment. He was also a serious student of training and nutrition. recording (which is available online). “No, no.’ he says, before leading Wouldn’t such all “early adopter” be drawn to a new miracle substance her circuitously to the subject of the hospital room. “I was in that room,” such as EPO? Especially if it hadn’t yet been banned from cycling? she says. “I heard it. I definitely won’t lie.” (EPO was officially forbidden in 1990 but couldn’t be reliably tested for But McIlvain later testified that she hadn’t heard Armstrong admit to until 2001.) using any performance drugs. The LeMond tape was inadmissible as “What pissed me off about Lance’s accusations was his idea that evidence in part because recordings obtained without the subject’s my comeback was a ‘miracle,’” LeMond says. “Was I on a doping consent are illegal in California, where McIlvain lives. Reached by program at 15? When I was 16, I was the best bike rider in the United phone, McIlvain declined to comment. States.” “Why would an icon of world sports do that?” Armstrong wonders Others point to his final time trial in 1989, when he made up a about LeMond’s stealth recordings. “If Kareem Abdul-Jabbar did that to 50-second deficit to leader Laurent Fignon in just 15 miles, ripping Michael Jordan, we would think he was the craziest guy alive!” through the course at 34 mph and setting a Tour de France time-trial “The police suggested I start taping conversations,” LeMond record that stood for 16 years – well into the EPO era. It’s still the third counters. “I felt really afraid, and not just financially. That period was fastest long time trial ever, surpassing all of Armstrong’s blazing fast not a fun period.” rides. Then there was the incident from the d’Italia in that same SCA president Bob Hamman says LeMond’s comments and year, when LeMond was struggling. In front of a VeloNews reporter, testimony “pretty much convinced us we should pursue the case” against LeMond received three injections – of iron, (continued on page 139)

MEN’S JOURNAL 118 JULY 2008 LEMOND continued from page 118 As the case grew heated, LeMond There’s already tension in the house because my wondered if Blixseth’s lawyers were working questions have rekindled LeMond’s anger toward he insists, nothing illegal. Nevertheless, his with Armstrong. “I’m dealing with two Armstrong and Landis. “I’m gonna hold Floyd performance improved dramatically. sociopaths here, Blixseth and Lance,” he tells accountable for what he did to me,” LeMond vows. LeMond is launching into a long, compli- me. “There’s something creepy about having Yester the dog senses the unease in the air. cated analysis of VO2max, genetics, and somebody this obsessed with trying to destroy “He’s overkill for us,” Kathy says, “but if someone aerodynamic handlebars when Kathy inter- your credibility.” (Blixseth declined to com- tries to carjack me, he will jump through the open rupts. “I think the one thing that’s indicative ment because the case has been reopened.) window at them.” that you weren’t on the forefront of EPO is This spring LeMond amped up his feud There are still a few kinks to work out. Yester that you fell off the map!” she says. “You with Armstrong when he brought suit against recently trapped the electrician in his truck; now he were beating your head against the wall!” Trek. (In a case of bad timing, he served notice slips away from Kathy, jumps up, and snaps at To that her husband has nothing to add. of the lawsuit three days after the funeral of Taylor, nipping her in the side. He doesn’t break Trek founder Richard Burke, John’s father.) the skin, but the girl is terrified; weeping, she flees THE NIGHT BEFORE OUR BIKE RIDE I HAD The case will get ugly. LeMond claims to have out the front door. dinner with the LeMonds at an upscale Italian tapes of conversations with John Burke that are “Mom!” Simone screams. “I can’t have this! restaurant in a mall. Afterward we walked potentially damaging. Trek shot back with a We’ve got to get rid of him!” MJ over to a Borders, where LeMond beelined claim that LeMond offered to take a vow of straight to the self-help section. “Have you silence on the doping issue for $10 million. All read The Drama of the Gifted Child?” he indicators point to a knock-down, drag-out asked. fight. “It’s been a crazy, sad part to a cycling LeMond discovered Alice Miller’s 1979 career I truly felt blessed with, LeMond said. psychoanalytic classic early in therapy, as he About LeMond and his tumultuous history, began to face his past. Miller argues that the Armstrong says: “I’ve seen it all, from when I only cure for mental illness is to come to was a 17-year-old watching ABC Sports and terms with the “unique history of our watching him win the Tour by eight seconds. If childhood.” Instead of dealing with his abuse you asked me to sum it up, I’d say it’s a once it stopped, LeMond transferred all of his tragedy, bro. It’s an American tragedy.” energy into the bike. “Cycling saved my life. I know it did,” he told me at one point, BACK AT THE LEMOND HOME AFTER breaking down. “It allowed me to reinvent dinner, LeMond goes to return a call from a New myself.” York Times reporter in the living room, furnished When I later read The Drama of the with exquisite antiques and Native American Gifted Child , one passage leaps off the page. artifacts. “It’s hard to feel bad for him,” a major “The repression of brutal abuse experienced figure in U.S. cycling once told me, “living in a during childhood drives many people to mansion with millions in the bank. destroy their lives and the lives of others,” On the other hand, his last few years have Miller writes. “In an unconscious thirst for been anything but pretty. The Landis case was a revenge, they may engage in acts of violence, personal and public nightmare for him, and he’s burning homes and businesses and physically made it clear that Armstrong infuriates him. But attacking other people, using this destruction what he rarely talks about is the fact that the to hide the truth from themselves and avoid amount of lead in his blood has increased feeling the despair of the tormented child fourfold from just a few years ago. “They did a they once were.” study: anybody over two micrograms [of lead] is In those two sentences Miller describes at 60 percent more risk of heart attack or stroke,” LeMond’s sense of outrage to a T. No longer he tells me. “Mine’s 20.” ashamed of his abuse, LeMond actually While Armstrong has essentially fled from seems to feed on it, as it propels him on his professional cycling, LeMond is slowly endless quest for justice – consequences be returning to it. He is invited to anti-doping damned. summits and greeted like a hero at cycling After the trauma of the Landis case last events. After years of being treated like a crazy year, LeMond decided to take care of some uncle in the attic, he’s now being listened to, unfinished business. He hired a private and if there’s one thing Greg LeMond likes to investigator, who located Ron in Nevada. The do, it’s talk. It’s getting on toward 11 PM, and LeMonds called the man at his job, only to be I’ve been here since 8:30 in the morning. informed that he had abruptly moved “He’s a great guy, on the inside, Kathy overseas. “I don’t know what I was going to says when he’s out of the room. “He went do,” LeMond says; the statute of limitations through a difficult period, and worked hard on sexual abuse had long since expired. on himself. But he never really has changed.” The next person to be held accountable by Just then the LeMonds’ 17-year-old the new LeMond was Tim B1ixseth, founder daughter Simone comes home with a of the Yellowstone Club, an exclusive resort classmate named Taylor. She’s the youngest, near Bozeman, Montana. LeMond was with her father’s brash outspokenness. “Are among the first investors in the club, in 1999, you writing about how my dad is five years but later believed Blixseth was misusing the old?” she asks. money. LeMond sued in 2006, and this past Tonight she’s peeved because her dad won’t fall the club settled with him and his co- let her get a driver’s license. “He says my eyes investors for $38 million. ‘glass over’ when I’m driving,” she pouts.

MEN’S JOURNAL 139 JULY 2008 Dear Editor,

Concerning Bill Gifford’s article “Greg LeMond vs. the World,” in the July issue of Men’s Journal :

Greg LeMond is neither a crazy uncle in the attic, nor a brutalized child bent on revenge, rather, he’s an honest gentleman doing what he can for the sport he loves, which has gone rotten with corruption and is often lacking any scruple. He’s cycling’s equivalent of the canary in the coal mine, and trying to shut him up won’t make the air any less poisonous.

I agree with Mr. Armstrong that there is an aspect of tragedy associated with LeMond, but I see it in a very different light: it is truly sad that the standard of sporting integrity that LeMond and others of his generation (such as Andy Hampsten, Davis Phinney, and Connie Carpenter) worked so hard to establish has been so quickly and thoroughly trashed by a bunch of lying, cheating punks like Armstrong, , and of course, Floyd Landis – cycling’s poster boy for sleaziness.

What sort of person wouldn’t be outraged by that?

Thank you,

Charles Howe Olmsted Falls, OH