Tour de France champion Greg LeMond.
A new documentary tells the story of Tour de France champion Greg LeMond’s comeback after being shot in a hunting accident. Phil Taylor talks to him about what happened next.
With his golden-blond hair and sharp blue eyes, the young Greg LeMond looked every inch the cliche of an all-American boy. LeMond radiated a restless energy that, combined with a physiology tailormade for endurance sport, saw him become a cycling superstar. What wasn’t apparent to the naked eye was a secret he kept until middle age, causing existential damage that propelled him forward but also threatened to unravel him.
Those who raced against LeMond in the days before the world knew him couldn’t help but realise he was something special. In a recent social media post, Jack Swart — one of New Zealand’s best cyclists — recalled encountering LeMond when racing with the national team in the United States: “We were on the line with an 18-year-old who’d just become junior world champ. They said ‘ready, set, go’ and that was it. LeMond blew everyone away.” The year was 1979.
Soon after, LeMond was hired by a French professional team and began racing in Europe, the oldest and toughest arena for cyclists. Instead of getting lost among the foreign talent, he excelled. Third in his first Tour de France, second the following year. Then, in 1986, he wore the Tour winner’s yellow jersey on the podium in Paris on the Champs-Elysees, the first non-European champion in the famed road race, which dates back to 1903.
All that accomplishment. So much glory. And what he felt was dread. “Oh my God, I’m going to be famous,” LeMond would tell an interviewer many years later. “And then I thought, ‘He’s going to call.’”
LeMond was a pubescent teenager when a friend of his parents began to sexually abuse him. For three decades, he lived in fear of anyone finding out. He couldn’t bring himself to tell his wife, Kathy — his lifelong love since they were teenagers — until he was in his 40s.
“It was really crazy,” says LeMond, 62, speaking to Canvas from his home in Oakridge, Tennessee, following the international release of a new documentary, The Last Rider. “I was on the podium! That’s the problem with abuse. It’s not even logical when I think about it today. But that’s how you feel. You feel so ashamed that you just would not want that exposed to the world. It really messes you up in a way that is so subtle.”
LeMond doesn’t remember how long it went on but it was over by his 14th birthday. Not long after, he started riding a bike to get fit for skiing. He was a natural and winning came easily. He talks about finding something “pure” about cycling. Riding made him feel “euphoric”, helping him bury the feelings of shame and guilt.
The Last Rider references the impact of the sexual abuse as it fits within the parameters of the story the documentary tells - LeMond’s struggle to come back from a near-fatal hunting accident to win the Tour for a second time, by the smallest margin in the race’s history. After battling the feisty and taciturn French champion Laurent Fignon over 3200km, LeMond sealed victory in the final minutes to prevail by eight seconds.
C’est la vie. Our stories can change in a moment. Just as a shotgun had blasted apart LeMond’s family, those eight seconds healed it. Guilt had consumed his brother-in-law, who’d become suicidal after firing the wayward shot. But the accident hadn’t destroyed LeMond’s career after all. He had still been able to win the biggest race in the world with 30-odd shotgun pellets in his torso, including some lodged in the lining of his heart that were too risky to remove.
LeMond believes that for Fignon — who died of cancer at the age of 50 and to whom the documentary is dedicated — losing by such a tiny margin was a traumatic event, overshadowing the fact Fignon had won the Tour twice before. “It’s weird, but in France they love an underdog and I became more popular after that 89 Tour than I ever was,” he says.
The 1989 edition of the Tour was unusual in that it ended with a time trial, where riders raced alone against the clock. Normally, the final stage is a showcase for the sprinters and has no bearing on the overall standings, but big chunks of time can be won or lost in a time trial. LeMond, using an aerodynamic rear disc wheel and clip-on triathlon handlebars that helped him better slice through the wind, covered the 22.5km at an average speed of 54.5km/h, then the fastest time in Tour history.
We talk about what happened next, the part of his life that followed after the comeback story, which is where the documentary ends (the title references LeMond as being the last “pure” cyclist before the EPO doping era began). The next year, he won the 1990 Tour by a comfortable margin. And then things began to change.
In 1991, LeMond finished seventh. He couldn’t understand it, because he was training better than ever. Years later it would be revealed that a secret heist was underway. A new drug called erythropoietin (EPO) had been developed for seriously ill patients who could not produce sufficient red cells to oxygenate their bodies. Oxygen is the key to endurance cycling, so the potential for the drug to provide an enormous performance boost was obvious to those in the know, including a number of corrupt sports doctors.
The 1991 Tour was “the pivot point”, says LeMond. Normally after a series of hard days, the peloton would take an easy day to recover. Not that year. “There was never a slow day. The stage from Brittany to Nantes was 240km and I think we averaged 50-plus km/h. That was truly a shocker. But at the time you don’t know about EPO, it’s just, ‘Holy s***, this is a fast day.’”
Each year, racing got harder, faster. LeMond rode the Tour twice more but didn’t finish. In 1994, he took part for the final time, withdrawing exhausted after just a week of the 21-day race. It would be four years before the use of EPO was revealed via a doping scandal centred on the Festina team.
LeMond had thought there was something physically wrong with him, perhaps due to the lead pellets in his body. After a series of tests, he was diagnosed with mitochondrial myopathy, a disease that can cause muscle weakness (mitochondria are the energy factories found in cells that convert sugar enzymes to produce power). “Finally, we did a biopsy, and 20 per cent of my mitochondria weren’t functioning.”
But there was much more to it than that. By the end of the 1990s, LeMond was learning a lot about the abuse of synthetic blood products such as EPO. He had good sources, people on teams that were using the drug. He began speaking out against doping and, later, mechanical doping (the use of hidden motors), and co-operated with investigative journalists, including a 60 Minutes team investigating the possible use of hidden motors as early as the late 90s.
LeMond’s ethical stance made him enemies, notably the other Americans who went on to make their names at the Tour: Floyd Landis and Lance Armstrong. Both would be stripped of their titles for doping. In the curious way things sometimes work out, it was a blackmail attempt by Landis’ manager that prompted LeMond to reveal publicly that he was a survivor of sexual abuse.
In 1996, Landis won and then lost the Tour after failing a drug test. He denied doping, a strategy he pursued despite coming across as an uncomfortable liar. It was during this period that Landis spoke to LeMond and intimated he had indeed doped.
LeMond told Landis that if he told the truth, he’d back him. “I really believe that a rider should be given a chance to plea bargain,” he says, “because I know that a rider who starts cycling, his choice isn’t to go take drugs. They’re seduced [and] it becomes a cultural thing.” Imagine, says LeMond, if there’d been an incentive in the 1990s for cyclists to identify the enablers (the doctors, the soigneurs, the team bosses); the culture would slowly but surely have changed.
The second thing he told Landis was that he knew from experience the damage that secrets can do. “And I said I was sexually abused. And I know how it started eating at me, and I started drinking. And, you know, don’t do that to yourself.”
Landis continued to deny doping (his admission would come later) and LeMond was called by the US Anti-Doping Agency to testify at Landis’ arbitration hearing. Driving to the hearing, LeMond got a call from a man who pretended to be his childhood abuser and threatened that if LeMond gave evidence, he would go public about the sexual abuse. Landis’ manager was later exposed as the caller. “I don’t react well when people threaten me and bully me,” LeMond tells me. “I will go to the end in a battle.”
LeMond, who had told his wife a few years earlier and been to counselling, decided to go public himself — setting up a survivor support organisation called 1in6, its name taken from the estimated ratio of male victims of sexual abuse.
His high-profile feud with Lance Armstrong came early in the Texan’s run of seven Tour wins after life-threatening cancer, when LeMond was quoted saying that if Armstrong was clean it was the greatest comeback; if not, it was the greatest fraud. “Boy, that unleashed 15 years of hell on me,” he says. “Armstrong was involved in the lawsuit trying to get my bike company shut down. He tried to get my fitness company shut down. He never let go of it. Do I think it was worth it? Maybe not. Would I have done anything differently? Probably not.”
LeMond is aware he was lucky with his timing. Doping had long been part of the professional cycling culture when he arrived as a green neophyte, but it was still possible for an outstanding rider to beat someone using cortisone and stimulants. That all changed with EPO. “I never felt like I wasn’t as good as anybody else. Had I come in at age 19 right in the middle of EPO, I can’t say what I would have done.”
Today, LeMond is mostly happy with what he sees, although he’d like all bikes x-rayed for hidden motors. Physiologically, there is more transparency at the elite level. Rider passports record baseline biology. Maximum oxygen uptake capacity (Vo2Max) and power wattage outputs are also more known.
LeMond, who had one of the highest recorded Vo2Max readings, says the power outputs of Danish rider Jonas Vingegaard and Slovenian star Tadej Pogacar, who currently dominate the Tour, are in keeping with their physical profiles. Better technology aside, the key difference today is weight.
“They are not producing more power output … but their speed up the climbs is faster because they’re lighter. Vingegaard [who won the Tour last month] weighs 60kg. I’m about the same height. My racing weight was 67kg.” And while it may indicate doping is not the problem it once was, whether it’s healthy is another debate. “It’s like seeing an anorexic supermodel … but it is not just fat, these riders are cannibalising muscle to reduce weight.”
In 2022, LeMond was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukaemia, which he believes is related to the pellets that remain in his body. He is being treated and the prognosis is good. The disease is just another challenge for LeMond, who’s still busy with a number of cycling-related businesses.
He describes himself as a natural optimist, so it seems appropriate to end on an upbeat note. We should take heart that the recent Tour champions are so young, he says. “That means real talent is able to shine … So, I think it’s a good period right now. But, you know, as soon as I say that, there’ll be somebody who tests positive.”
The Last Rider will be available for streaming on DocPlay from August 7.
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