Please mind your toes, reader; there’s quite a big name about to be dropped in a second or two.
Over a coffee in a Limerick city hotel a few years ago, cycling legend Greg Lemond (clang!) told me that the public, traumatic ordeal Floyd Landis put him through was beyond anything the Alps ever threatened.
The eyes that lasered into the back of double-crossing, pantomime villain Bernard Hinault all those years ago, were the same west-coast blue. In his 40s now, he’d fill a pair a yellow jersey more violently. He was greyer too and the Eurosport logo was not, as I remembered, constantly visible over his left shoulder, like a setting sun. But, yes, it was him.
Mid-chat, he quickly rang home to ask one of his children for his email password. As his kid scurried off, loudly tutting his father’s forgetfulness, Lemond placed his hand over the hand-set, twirled his finger around in the air by his forehead and explained to me: “I get these brain farts, y’know’’. I nodded.
Though F Scott Fitzgerald wrote that American lives have no second acts, LeMond long ago folded away the racing bike and forgot the aching glory of Tours de France. And this week too the curtain fell at last on the Californian’s ugly episode with Landis.
First let’s recall 2001; Lemond is about to see his position as America’s pre-eminent rider taken by Armstrong. When Lemond learns that the young superstar is working with Michele Ferrari, an Italian doctor who is about to stand trial for doping charges (he’s cleared) he criticises his compatriot for associating with him. It sparks an angry and ugly spat between the two which rumbles on still.
The pressure on Lemond is unbearable; former fans spit abuse onto the internet, business interests coldly warn him to not derail a gravy train. Lemond, through tears, issues an apology, identifying Armstrong as “a great champion”.
He refuses however to ignore the ubiquitous doping problem which courses through the sport he loves. Landis, a former team-mate of Armstrong’s on the US Postal team, wins the Tour in 2006, only to be caught using banned substances. In a private telephone conversation, Lemond pleads with Landis to come clean for the sake of cycling, before admitting he’d been abused by a family friend as a child. It was secret that had haunted him throughout his life.
Lemond later received a call – the night before he was to testify against Landis – from someone claiming to be his abuser and threatening to disclose Lemond’s secret if he turned up the next day. Shaking with rage, he traced the call on his Blackberry to Landis’ manager Will Geoghan.
The following morning, in a dramatic courtroom moment that could have been drafted in the Law and Order writers’ room, an attorney placed LeMond’s phone beneath an overhead projector and displayed the mystery caller’s number. Humiliated, Landis and his lawyers fired Geoghegan on the spot.
Lemond had stood up to the bullies. But in the war on drugs, one of the sport’s greatest champions was collateral damage. He had never told a soul before Landis of the abuse he suffered as a child. His personal wound now picked apart in public, and with a wonderful career behind him, a real darkness crossed his brow for the first time in years. His marriage disintegrated quickly and he left the family home.
Seven days ago, Landis at last dropped his long-time and flimsy protestations of innocence and confessed to doping throughout his career. He is the only man to ever be stripped of a Tour and, clearly, if his story existed in a vacuum it would be huge.
However, the headlines were set in Livestrong Yellow because Landis became the fifth US Postal team member to implicate his former friend: Lance Armstrong.
Inevitably, this blew a shutter-shaking media storm at Armstrong’s door all this week. The seven-time hero of the Champs Elysee whistled self-consciously and continues to brazen it out/ignore those annoying revelations form those around him.
That’s the big show, ladies and gentlemen. More ink will be spilled on Armstrong’s maillot jaune than oil in the Gulf of Mexico. But that is not our story, today.
No, please instead picture the kitchen of a large, comfortable house in suburban Iowa last Saturday. Lemond’s telephone rings. A familiar voice offers an apology. And Lemond – typically – accepts it immediately, though what’s gone before might warrant more.
Lemond went on to scale his demons, much like every other challenge in his life. When he was shot by his brother-in-law in the off-season after claiming his first Tour, he hung on for life and went on to win two more while dragging 30 pellets in his chest, around France.
When he lost his family, he won them back. When his childhood trauma was exposed cruelly, he set up a foundation for men like him.
“I accepted his apology, but that isn’t really what’s important,” Lemond said after his phone conversation with Landis, “Sincere apologies are for those that make them, not for those to whom they are made. I hope that as a result Floyd can begin rebuilding his life. More people should apologize, and more people should accept apologies when sincerely made.”
He might be liable to brain farts; but that sounds right to me.
adrianrussell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
This column first appeared in today’s Irish Examiner newspaper
