INTERVIEW:Greg LeMond is no stranger to adversity. Since the early 1980s he has spoken out against the drug culture in cycling; he has found himself bitterly pitted against the sport's leading lights, on and off the road; in 1987 he was shot and just two years later he won the Tour de France. But his biggest achievement was learning to deal with the abuse he suffered as a child, he tells KEITH DUGGAN
HE MIGHT AS WELL have been the only American in Paris that year, gate-crashing through French dreams of another native triumph in their beloved summer ritual: Le Tour. This was in 1989, on the very last stage of an enthralling Tour de France duel between the blond, bespectacled French man Laurent Fignon and Greg LeMond, the blunt talker from across the Atlantic.
The last stage was based on time trials and considered to be a formality for Fignon. Instead, the Frenchman rode a slightly slower circuit than he expected, and LeMond pushed himself to the limit of his endurance, and then waited at the finish line with his wife Cathy and his son, then a baby. You should see the man as he was then: tanned skin and bone. In the end, he won the 2,041-mile race by an unfathomably narrow margin: eight seconds. It was one of the great modern sporting duels and LeMond’s victory was another of those stories of depthless personal courage and will: he had almost died in a hunting accident just two years earlier.
LeMond’s glittering career – he won the Tour three times – is often distilled into the hyper drama of that afternoon. When he stood on the podium that day, he could not have known that it would take him almost another 20 years to understand that cycling, for all his brilliance at it, was not just his career, his life and his fame; it was a way of coping with a childhood spectre that had chased him more stubbornly than Bernard Hinault or Pedro Delgado or any of his rivals in that era.
In 1989, he was just five years away from leaving the sport that had consumed him, finally convinced that the old game had lost its way through doping and cheating. He would become locked in bitter arguments with future American cyclists – Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis, in particular – for whom he had pioneered a trail in Europe. On that podium, he couldn’t have guessed that a bizarre phone call would lead to the secret that he kept running away from becoming public knowledge – he was sexually abused by a friend of his parents when he was a child. Nor could he have known that he would find the strength to live with it.
There was so much that Greg LeMond didn’t know that summer; the walls were about to cave in on communism, and he was the best cyclist in Europe while being a virtual unknown in his own country. When he thinks about it all today, LeMond knows one thing for certain: “Cycling saved my life.”
There is always a disconnection between the memory of sporting heroes from yesteryear and their contemporary appearance. We meet at a golf resort in Doonbeg. Foolish as it is, everyone who knows he is staying here, mentally expects the gaunt blond figure of those tours to appear, perhaps in the yellow jersey. Instead, the LeMond of today is silver-haired, chunky and radiantly healthy, dressed in a checked shirt and chinos: another American tourist in west Clare. He is here to cycle in the Get Back Challenge, an organisation that raises funds and awareness of the importance of exercise for socially disadvantaged children. LeMond talks as openly and engagingly about this as he does everything else, leaning forward in his chair and explaining that if children could be coaxed into just an hour’s exercise a day, “then we could close down a lot of pharmaceutical companies”.
This is just before the latest tour, the 98th, begins, and LeMond’s face clouds for a moment when asked if he will attend. “I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m invited. I have been back several times. See, that’s the thing, there are people on the tour I still like. So maybe, to see a few friends. I just don’t know.”
His outspoken views on what he believes has been the demise of cycling through serial doping and blood abuse have made LeMond an uncomfortable thorn in the professional cycling establishment. It is not just his running battles with Lance Armstrong. LeMond is adamant that his was a constant voice for reform and drug monitoring in his early days. As a former tour winner, LeMond was one of the gilded few who had actually triumphed. But he couldn’t just stay silent and pretend everything was fine in the sport that he loved.
AT 18, LEMOND had come across the Atlantic and elbowed his way into an exclusively European club, with enthusiasm and a West Coast sensibility; he had a straight, uncomplicated view of fairness and an antipathy to “being muzzled.” He was, in other words, an American who believed in speaking his mind. He recalls with fondness his formative days on the European circuit and remembers one legend that spread about him that made him aware of the paranoia at the heart of cycling and the notion that athletes would do anything to get ahead.
“I have this scar running along my calf muscle. The rumour was that it was a kangaroo muscle implant,” he laughs now. “This is when the bionic man was a big television show [The Six Million Dollar Man]. People needed to have an explanation as to why I was winning these races. And that is why big riders don’t critique anyone now – because they most likely took something at some time and believed they had to and that nobody could do it without taking something.”
LeMond is adamant that his stance on doping has been firm from the beginning, and that he was quoted in a French newspaper about the issue as early as 1981. After he won the tour in 1989, he was asked why he had controversially left the PDM team the previous season. “They had spread rumours that I was asking for more money. But I left them to go and try and get on any other team. And I remember meeting one of the PDM guys, Johannes Draaijer, and he literally laughed at us. He said, ‘You guys have no chance.’ And he died of a heart attack six months later. I just thought, f**k this. So I won the tour and I am quoted in the papers saying I left PDM because of their doping policy.”
Few banked on LeMond’s win in 1989, just two years after a shooting accident almost killed him. LeMond grew up hunting wildlife and a fall from his bike necessitated a trip home in March of 1987. He was the reigning Tour de France winner then and in peak condition. He was hunting turkey with family when his brother-in-law accidentally shot him in the back. With 70 per cent blood loss, he was close to death. A collapsed lung placed his cycling future in jeopardy. Bernard Tapie, manager of the La Vie Claire team that LeMond was then a member of, cut his losses. “I got this call saying basically, it has been a wonderful two years and we love you and you are fired.”
He had dozens of lead pellets lodged in his back and the trauma of getting shot to cope with, while the tour went on without him. The European cycling fraternity had largely regarded LeMond as something of an oddity and the attitude to his accident was not always sympathetic. “A few Belgian editorials suggested I got what I deserved: that I was a professional and shouldn’t be out hunting. And you can only imagine what the Peta people said about me.” He struggled to find a team and when he did return to cycling, he essentially had to start again. In his first race, he managed to keep up with the peleton for a single mile and then pretended he had a flat tyre.
The next race he made it four kilometres and invented some other technical excuse. It was a combination of hard work and bluffing. “I just couldn’t keep up at first. I had lost 25 per cent of muscle. Then, I came to Ireland: I always remember the date. October 2nd, 1988. And I came 39th. And I was thinking: how did I do that?”
The recovery was slow: through 1988, he languished in the crowd and had to quit the tour that year through injury. Then came the stunning return to form in 1989 and, after his second Tour de France victory, the importance of his achievements suddenly registered in America. He was Sports Illustrated sportsman of the year, a heavyweight accolade in a country where niche sports struggle for recognition and profile alongside the trinity of American ball sports.
OBSCURITY suited LeMond for private reasons. He often told people in the US that he was in sports marketing, which explained his lengthy sojourns in Europe. “Part of me felt during that time that I wasn’t worthy of the fame,” he says. “My childhood, or part of it, set me up for that.” It was only after he retired that he began to understand that his deepest fear was that while he was winning his races, the man who had abused him when he was a kid would materialise and go public about what had happened.
When he was living in Washoe Valley in Nevada, an outdoors idyll, a man he names only as “Ron” infiltrated his life. He was ostensibly a friend of his parents and an avuncular type who took the young LeMond hunting and fishing; it was then that the abuse began. He is hazy about how long the abuse lasted but knows it ended in the mid 1970s. LeMond took up cycling shortly after that and recalls it as a blissful period. It was only when he embarked on his professional career that he was aware of a negative energy balancing any triumph he enjoyed: shame.
“This is the devastation of the sexual abuse of children,” he says. “Somehow you feel as if you caused it. And the shame is just incredible. I just blanked it out for most of my life. But the only time I thought about it was on the tour because I was so fearful that this guy would come out and tell everyone that this thing had happened. There was no rationale in that, I know. But that is how I felt. I went through a really rough period in 2003 and 2004 because of that. And the after-effects of being shot was there as well: it was a hunting accident but the trauma of getting shot is no different than the post-traumatic stress you would suffer in a war. So it was difficult. But I understand my brain a lot more now.”
As it happened, cycling was the conduit that enabled him to escape that secret shame, in the most bizarre way imaginable. To piece together this key event in LeMond’s life, you have to flash forward to July 2007: he is in a car in Malibu with his wife when his phone rings. He is due to appear as a witness for the US Anti-Doping Agency in a World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) arbitration hearing concerning Floyd Landis, the Pennsylvanian who had won the Tour de France the previous July, but subsequently tested positive. LeMond assumes the call concerns this. Instead, it is a hammy Southern accent in a voice saying: “Hello Greg. This is your uncle and I am going to be there tomorrow and we can talk about how we used to play hide the weenie.” Then the line goes dead.
LeMond is furious, shaken and speechless. The crank call is traced to a manager of Landis’s named Will Geoghegan, who is instantly sacked.
Geoghegan learned of what had happened to LeMond because of a private phone conversation between LeMond and Floyd Landis. LeMond had been anxious to persuade the younger man to admit his mistake and come clean about doping, LeMond told Landis about the difficulty of harbouring shame and about his own shame caused by the abuse he had suffered. Then came LeMond’s scheduled appearance at the Wada hearing and the phone call from Geoghegan. Just like that, his secret was out in the world.
It was an odd thing: LeMond still can’t get over just how hateful that phone call was but most of his sporting life seems, in retrospect, to have guided him towards that moment. That is why cycling, beyond the prestige and fame, has played such a crucial role in his life.
“Oh, it saved my life. It did,” he says. “The thing that was shocking about that phone call was that it was so evil. It was surreal. You know, I am a father. And that is something I would just never do to anybody. The irony about Floyd is that he is not inherently a bad guy. In fact, he is quite brilliant in a way but desperate. He has lost everything. That whole incident . . . I forgave him, you know. I can’t live with that anger.”
Afterwards, he felt liberated. His wife was the only person with whom LeMond had spoken about his abuse, and only after a personal breakdown. But after the confrontation with the Landis camp, he realised that his worst fear had already happened. That gave him the strength to go in search of the person who had been chasing him for almost three decades.
“So we had investigators go look for him,” he says of the perpetrator. “He still lived in the same place. My wife called up there and he had all of a sudden moved. It’s funny: my dad told me that when I was doing well, he came down to the house once or twice and said how great it was. He is not in prison. But he is a paedophile. He was a family friend for five years and nothing happened. That is what happens – it is usually a kid that hits sexual development. It is like taking a kid with zero control and exposing them to it. It is very damaging.”
Not long after LeMond’s abuse became public knowledge, he was approached to become a spokesperson for the 1 in 6 organisation, which helps men to deal with the spectre of childhood abuse. “That is a conservative number,” he says. “Men won’t talk because they are ashamed. But kids are kids: it doesn’t matter if you are a boy or girl. If you are raped, you are raped. And you feel like you are nothing. So I don’t know how I pulled myself through that.
“And so cycling saved my life in that regard. I have an addictive personality and I know that if I didn’t have cycling to calm the brain and had all those emotions coming in, it would have been volatile.”
Listening to LeMond talk now, it seems as though his life has never been less turbulent. In the foyer of the hotel, a wedding party is preparing to leave for the church: the sun is shining and LeMond is planning to cycle the coastal route from Galway to Clare. He is in high mood. Even his decade-long feud with Lance Armstrong seems to be nearing a natural conclusion.
LeMond’s criticisms of Armstrong were interpreted in some quarters as old-fashioned jealousy, particularly as Armstrong’s personal story as a cancer survivor was a source of inspiration to tens of thousands.
“He is under investigation,” LeMond says simply. “I think there will be an indictment and I think it will be serious. I would never want a relationship with him. He is not a good guy. I became his enemy and the one he wanted to destroy. And this is what he has done with everyone.”
In 2008 and 2009, LeMond spent a few days at the Tour de France and caught up with Fignon. They spoke about their epic race and the small details along each stage that made that crucial eight-second difference. The reunion was timely: last year, Fignon died from cancer, aged 50. The year before that, Fignon published his cycling memoir: Nous Etions Jeunes et Insouciants (We Were Young and Carefree). And there is something about LeMond in that title because for all his sparkiness he continually harks back to that time in cycling when he felt just like that: young, carefree, a believer.
There is footage of the American interviewed after the 1994 Tour de France posted on YouTube. He is announcing his retirement and says, “I had a dream of racing well this year.” He gives the camera a look that is jaded and, it seems, full of dismay. It’s as if he no longer quite believes in the game. Cycling has had its trials since then and Greg LeMond has had his. These days, he can look back without regret to the days when his world was reduced to the bike and the endless road ahead.
“Cycling was easy,” he laughs about the most punishing sport of them all. “Racing the tour was easy!” Life; that was the tricky part.
Greg LeMond is an ambassador for the Get Back Challenge, a Focus Consulting Initiative. Further information available at GetBackChallenge.com