TWO

LAZARUS RISING

‘There was a ten-second pause as we reflected on the American’s chances.
The whole table erupted with laughter’ – Paul Kimmage

GREG AND KATHY LeMond live in Tennessee these days. For 30 years, they endured Minnesota’s bone-shaking winters, those months when the landscape slides into a deep, deep hibernation. It’s a time when there’s little to do other than strap on a pair of cross-country skis and head out onto frozen Lake Minnetonka, just across the street from the LeMonds’ home in the Minneapolis suburb of Wayzata. It can be bleak round those parts. Indeed, the film-making siblings Joel and Ethan Coen, who grew up in the neighbouring suburb of St Louis Park, once referred to midwinter Minnesota as ‘resembling Siberia, except for its Ford dealerships and Hardee’s restaurants’.

The LeMonds will freeze no more; the first tenet of that legendary Southern hospitality is its clement weather. Today is the opening day of March and while Minnesota’s temperatures remain below zero, the mercury in mid-morning Knoxville has already reached a very agreeable 26° Celsius. The couple recently moved south to be closer to the base of their carbon fibre company, LeMond Composites.

In short, life is good for the LeMonds. Such buoyancy is in deep contrast to the state of affairs the couple found themselves in the spring of 1987. Yes, the arrival of baby Scott undoubtedly brought joy, but father Greg, post-accident, faced a difficult and uncertain future, a journey that would be undertaken while his physical and psychological scars slowly healed. ‘We were so lucky,’ Kathy says of the helicopter rescue, three decades later. ‘That was the silver lining of Sacramento being the murder capital. Those ER docs had a lot of experience with shootings. And they had an amazing female trauma surgeon. She saved him. She was extraordinary.’

Not that there wasn’t more distress on the immediate horizon. Toshiba, the team with whom LeMond had won the Tour de France with the previous summer when they were known as La Vie Claire, had shown themselves to be both impatient and callous. With their flamboyant owner Bernard Tapie now having eyes for the young French rider Jean-François Bernard, LeMond was deemed surplus to requirements. Barely a month after the shooting accident, he received a letter giving him his marching orders.

‘Oh yeah, we got that right away,’ confirms Kathy. ‘We were really pissed off. Greg had just won the Tour for them. But, honestly, we always felt that we were just grateful that he was alive, so we didn’t dwell on it that much. Compared to not being alive, it really wasn’t that big a deal.’

Tapie and Toshiba had obviously thought that the severity of the accident meant LeMond would never again be the rider he had been before the events of Easter Monday, 1987. But, due to his extraordinary physiology, and his resolve, his recovery was the speediest it could have been. ‘That’s because he’s Greg,’ says Kathy. ‘If he were a normal person, it would have been months and months. He was better on his bike than he was walking. The bike was a good support. But he was skin and bones. Absolute skin and bones. He was 120 pounds. When he won the Tour in 1986, he was 145 or something. But he was back on the bike.’

As well as building those muscles back up, LeMond needed to restore his levels of blood. He hadn’t been given any transfusions out of his doctors’ fear that donated blood might be contaminated with the AIDS virus, and it took a full two months for his levels to be back to normal. But then, three months after the shooting, LeMond had to undergo an emergency appendectomy, one made difficult because of the scar from his shooting operation. ‘It was a picnic in comparison to the accident…’

Not only did LeMond appear to be physiologically different from other riders, his outlook on life was decidedly more relaxed than that of more intense types in the professional ranks. This often brought criticism from conservative quarters within the sport; the writer Edward Pickering neatly compared LeMond to the outsider chess player Bobby Fischer, ‘coming in from America to beat the established countries at their own game’. Simply substitute Russian grandmasters with the cycling traditionalists of northern Europe.

LeMond’s motivation and commitment seemed to come under constant scrutiny, as he later told Procycling magazine. ‘I’ll never forget reading a Belgian newspaper story that said I got what I’d deserved in ’87, because I was eating ice cream and hunting when I ought to have been racing and training. And yet they knew that I was back in the States because I’d fallen in Tirreno-Adriatico and wouldn’t be able to race for six months. After the accident, there were some mean-ass letters and negative articles. Even today, you still hear the myth that I didn’t train properly and that I was only interested in the Tour. The reality was that, physically, I wasn’t the same after the accident. Before that, I raced balls-to-walls from February to September.’

Hope – elation, probably – came in the shape of PDM, the Dutch team who were arguably the strongest outfit in world cycling. They signed LeMond for the 1988 season, although the contract stipulated that he had to appear in PDM colours during 1987, presumably to measure the progress of his recovery. That September, five months after all that emergency surgery, he entered a criterium race in Belgium, just to honour this legal requirement. ‘One lap, and I pretended to have a flat tyre.’

While his injuries denied him the chance of wearing the prestigious number 1 on his back at the ’87 Tour as defending champion, LeMond didn’t make the start the following year, either. A crash in a minor springtime race in Belgium prompted an enforced lay-off, the premature return from which brought about a case of tendinitis in his shin. ‘Because I started riding on it too soon,’ he later explained to the American writer Samuel Abt, ‘it got irritated and then inflamed … After two weeks off my bike, I was really ambitious and did four races in the first week. I didn’t finish any of them.’ While the Tour was well under way, across the Atlantic, LeMond was under the surgeon’s knife in his new home state of Minnesota. Another frustrating summer. The title he’d been so desperate to reclaim was instead pocketed by the first-time-winning Spaniard, Pedro Delgado.

One incident during that Tour, though, angered LeMond from afar: the positive drugs test of his PDM team-mate Gert-Jan Theunisse. ‘My reaction was to tell the management that whoever had given him the drugs should be fired,’ he told Daniel Friebe, ‘and the same applied to Theunisse. I liked Gert, but I didn’t want to be associated with any kind of doping. Of course, this was never made public, which gave them the licence to start rumours about me bad-mouthing the other riders and asking for a pay raise. They were all saying “How dare he ask for a pay raise when he’s had no results and he never trains?”.’

The relationship had soured and both parties welcomed his departure. ‘They had lost total confidence in me,’ he said at the time. ‘They were trying to claim that maybe my liver was bad, my lung was shot up, maybe I had lead poisoning. They said, “Maybe you’re not going to ever come back”.’

‘We felt that his training was not concentrated,’ offered Harrie Jansen, the PDM team manager. ‘His whole career, he has eaten hamburgers, not worrying about what he drank or how he rested. He has so much talent that he can live like ordinary people. He was too fat, and he was still eating his hamburgers, his pizzas, his beers, his everything.’

The Bobby Fischer figure certainly wrote his own rules, and much was often made of his less-than-saintly refuelling. L’Equipe was particularly dismissive of his diet. ‘He could unearth a Mexican restaurant in the depths of the Auvergne,’ the paper grumbled. Andy Hampsten, his team-mate during the La Vie Claire years, admires his compatriot’s rebellious streak. ‘He really loved to go to Italy and fret about his weight over two or three big plates of pasta,’ he laughs, ‘as we all would.’ Another American rider, Joe Parkin, once noted how this kind of preparation didn’t really affect LeMond’s performances. ‘He could climb off the couch and win races. He could come back from the off-season soft and doughy, and within a week he’d be ripped.’

With an exit from PDM looking imminent, LeMond put the feelers out for an alternative team for the 1989 season. He tested for the Fagor squad, before putting in a call to Johan Lammerts, a former team-mate at Toshiba. Lammerts, a Dutch rider with whom LeMond had struck up a firm friendship, was now riding for the small Belgian ADR team. The American had been offered a slot on their roster the previous year before he hooked up with PDM; at the time he had been dismissive of them, denouncing them as ‘one of the weakest teams around’ who could never help deliver a Grand Tour victory.

But now, having fallen from number two in the world rankings right down to number 345 in the space of two years, this beggar couldn’t be a chooser. ADR owner François Lambert and directeur sportif José De Cauwer were enthusiastic about a former Tour winner joining their roster, and a salary, significantly lower than that which LeMond was on at PDM, was agreed. It was based on a comparatively meagre basic pay, with a $500,000 bonus should he confound the critics and win the Tour in ADR colours. The deal went down to the wire, with LeMond’s father Bob finalising it a couple of hours short of midnight on New Year’s Eve. Had the contract remained unsigned as the clock struck 12, another season at PDM awaited – and one on a much-reduced wage, to boot.

‘ADR was a really crummy team,’ Kathy LeMond remembers. ‘They weren’t paying him that much – and in the end they didn’t pay at all. Going into the Tour, we hadn’t been paid yet. But he had some freedom there. You really don’t have to listen to the team owner if he’s seven months late paying you.’ ADR – the vehicle-hire firm All Drive Renting – had a Flemish nickname. It was suggested that its initials stood for Al De Restjes, or the Good-For-Nothings.

In order to cover LeMond’s salary, ADR had entered into an agreement with the American Coors Light team, whereby he would race for them at events in the US. The arrangement gave Coors team boss Len Pettyjohn front-row insight into how the unscrupulous François Lambert operated. ‘Very quickly, Lambert was running into money problems,’ he explains. ‘He wasn’t paying the riders. He wasn’t following through on his contract obligations. He had a huge fight with Greg, because Greg’s contract required that he got a Mercedes as a personal car. He ended up getting some piece-of-shit Fiat or something like that. A Punto, or whatever. Greg was just furious and Bob LeMond was out-of-control mad about it.’

As Kathy LeMond clarifies, the couple didn’t even get some piece-of-shit Fiat. ‘We never got anything! He made us go up to Antwerp where we picked out a nice Mercedes and he took us to dinner. He kept saying “Yeah, yeah. Your car will be in next week, next week”. He was a total, total conman.’ LeMond even had to sign up, through a criterium organiser, a new co-sponsor, the lubrication gel manufacturer Agrigel. In return for cash to cover administrative fees, Agrigel received advertising space on the team jerseys. ‘ADR didn’t even have the $50,000 to enter the Tour de France. We came up with the money from Agrigel. And we didn’t have the money either. We hadn’t been paid.’

Having encountered salary issues while his son was with La Vie Claire, Bob LeMond had negotiated a front-loaded contract, whereby the first chunk of the annual wage would be paid on 1 January 1989, the day after the contract was signed, sealed, delivered. It never came. Not in January. Not in February. Not in March, April, May…

In fact, not a cent had been paid by the time LeMond lined up for the start of the ’89 Tour. ‘François was significantly in arrears,’ explains Len Pettyjohn, ‘so we sent a letter to him saying that he was in breach of the contract. The UCI had looked at the contract and the payments, and said Greg was free to leave the team. That was a shock to François. He thought he had it nailed down.’

Pettyjohn has the utmost sympathy for José De Cauwer. ‘I felt sorry for him that he was tied to Lambert. He was the direct link to the riders. “OK, you’re not getting your salary. You’re not getting the things that have been promised to you.” As a team director, that’s a horrible thing to happen to you. I’d be sitting in his office and I thought there were times when he was just going to throw his phone through the wall. François was a crazy man. He had this ego that thought, just by his presence, he could will things to happen. And he was constantly lying to people. He didn’t have any money. He was playing a shell game – always trying to shift the sponsorship around so he could pay for next week.’

Nothing ever seemed to be easy for LeMond. Not only was the team teetering on the shakiest of financial foundations, but the quality within its ranks wasn’t the greatest, certainly not for a Grand Tour. For starters, there was only one ADR rider who could remotely be thought of as a climber. LeMond soon realised that he’d be getting minimal assistance when the race hit the mountains. ‘We weren’t a team that was aimed at the Tour de France,’ says Johan Lammerts, by this time LeMond’s room-mate. ‘It was mainly for the Classics races at the start of the season. That changed when Greg joined. He was a little more progressive than others in the team. Belgians are sometimes very conservative and we had conservative riders in our team. But everybody had respect for Greg. He was a Tour de France winner.

‘There were expectations, but not necessarily high expectations. Everybody was curious to see if he had recovered well and could perform at the highest level again. The hunting accident wasn’t just a little thing; he still had pellets in his body. But he was still an incredible, super-good rider.’

Certainly LeMond’s form in the early months of 1989 was lacking. Lacking to the point of provoking an existential crisis. Riding in the colours of co-sponsor Coors Light at the Tour de Trump – the inaugural stage race bankrolled by Atlantic City huckster/future US president Donald Trump – it wasn’t a happy homecoming. Struggling on the climbs, LeMond trailed in 27th overall. ‘He realised that he was attracting little attention as reporters flocked to interview the riders with impressive results,’ reported the New York Times correspondent Samuel Abt. ‘The message was unmistakable: he was yesterday’s story.’ Getting dropped at the Tour de Trump was, says Andy Hampsten, ‘an absolutely unique experience for LeMond.’

It was an experience that would be repeated, back on European soil and back in ADR colours, at the Giro d’Italia little more than a week later. On the second day, on a moderate climb up the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily, LeMond trailed the winner by eight minutes. Three weeks later, going into the final day time trial, he was in 47th place, nearly an hour behind the about-to-be-crowned champion Laurent Fignon.

‘I remember talking to Greg and feeling sorry for him at the Giro,’ says Hampsten. ‘He was genuinely humbled about how terrible he was and was writing off his chances. He was an unknown quantity after his accident, but I wouldn’t write him off. It was Greg LeMond, after all.’ Kathy saw from the closest of quarters how the accident had changed him. ‘He never really had bad days before, but after he got shot, he had a lot of bad days. He was a completely different rider.’

His team boss, José De Cauwer, was careful not to exert pressure on those vulnerable shoulders, though. ‘We weren’t expecting miracles,’ he later explained to Cycling Weekly. ‘The only question was, “Can we bring him back?”. The Giro was bad. There were a couple of days when he was behind and the race radio would announce Groupe LeMond, six minutes down, seven, eight… I remember he had an insurance policy he could have cashed in if he’d stopped. Collect the money, retire, go do something else. I know he considered it.’

The low point of his Giro experience was in the wake of Stage 13, where he lost 17 minutes. He put a tearful call in to Kathy who, because of a health scare, had yet to fly to Europe for the racing season and was still in Minnesota. He was on the verge of not just quitting the race, but turning his back on the sport. ‘I just asked him if he thought he’d given it everything. If he’d given it everything and he was really, really done, then OK. But if he hadn’t really given it everything, then it was a momentary depression.’

A number of factors were coalescing. It wasn’t simply his form on the bike. There was the lack of wages going into the bank account, and there was Kathy’s health scare, which involved the couple’s yet-to-be-born third child. ‘It was a really down period,’ she recalls. ‘We had had a scare with the next pregnancy, my cousin had died in a helicopter crash that week, and Greg wasn’t riding well. He was half a world away. He was depressed. But he was still a person.

‘Fans forget that these are still just young men who have marriages and families. When you’re a cyclist, it’s not like being a baseball player or a basketball player. They live in really rough and lonely conditions. A trainer once told me that it takes almost all their human energy just to do their sport. They don’t have a whole lot of extra room for stress. So if you’ve got pressures or your parents are ill, there’s just not a lot of extra room. And your cycling will suffer. You can’t do it all. And they’re humans.’

Help was soon at hand, though, as dispensed by LeMond’s long-time soigneur, a gentle giant from Mexico by the name of Otto Jacome. He spotted one of the causes of LeMond’s woes; his grey skin suggested an iron deficiency. ‘I told him he needed an iron injection,’ Jacome explained to the author Guy Andrews, ‘but he got mad with me because he never used injections and he was upset because I was suggesting it. The following day, a doctor from the Giro came over to see him and they told him the same thing, that he needed iron. He got a jab – iron with vitamins – and the next day he says “Hey, Otto. I feel so much better now”.’

A corner had been turned, as Kathy notes. ‘I flew over the night of the iron injection. The kids and I were there, the baby was OK. Everything got better that day. We hit a good patch.’

The final week of the Giro saw an improvement in LeMond’s riding, culminating in an extremely promising result in the final-day time trial. José De Cauwer had formulated a plan for that particular stage. ‘That day we put the heart rate monitor away and I said, “Give it everything. Let’s see when the engine cuts out.” After six kilometres, he caught one rider. Then another. He ended up taking seven riders that day.’

LeMond’s second place on the stage naturally delighted him. ‘I’d pretended that I was in contention for the Giro,’ he told Daniel Friebe, ‘just to see where I was compared to everyone else. I’d got myself psyched up and ended up ahead of Fignon. That result blew me away.’

Most saw that performance as an anomaly, a one-off, a result from which little significance could be extracted. Fignon was one, even if his analysis was at odds with that of his team boss Cyrille Guimard. ‘On the evening after I had won the race in Florence,’ his autobiography reveals, ‘Guimard came to have a word with me. He looked even more worried than usual. He wanted to talk one-to-one and it was important, even though all I was thinking about was celebrating my triumph. He was already concerned about July and looked me straight in the eyes. “LeMond will be up there at the Tour.” I didn’t hide my amazement.’

Others would have been amazed had they been privy to Guimard’s assessment. A rider damaged by a life-threatening trauma, and riding for a wildcard team, did not a Tour de France favourite make, no matter what his past achievements. That was certainly the opinion of British rider Sean Yates, by then enjoying his first season with the American 7-Eleven team. ‘It wasn’t the last-chance saloon at that point for him, but ADR certainly weren’t a major team with a major contract. You’re only as good as your last race and his last two years had not been great. In the Tour de Trump, he was just going nowhere, but he did show a little bit at the end of the Giro. After that, I rode a kermesse and he didn’t look great in that, although he might have been building it back up after the Giro and taking it steady. He certainly wasn’t considered a contender for the Tour.’

Yates’s former team-mate, the Irish rider Paul Kimmage, recalled how, on the first morning of the Tour, the Fagor team organised a sweepstake at the breakfast table of their hotel. The object was to predict the winner of the Tour three weeks hence. All the obvious names were mentioned – Delgado, Fignon, Mottet, Breukink, their own leader Stephen Roche. Then the team masseur, a Spaniard called Txomin Erdoiza, was asked his opinion and he plumped for LeMond. ‘There was a ten-second pause as we reflected on the American’s chances. The whole table erupted with laughter.’

The rider-turned-TV-commentator Paul Sherwen admits he shared the majority verdict on LeMond’s chances on the Tour. ‘I rode my last professional races in ’87 and remember seeing Greg at the Nissan Tour of Ireland. His back was pockmarked. It looked like he had measles. Unless you saw Greg’s back at that time, you can’t imagine how bad it was. There was a pockmark every inch of his back. He was like a dartboard. It was pretty scary to look at. Other guys will have seen that. “This guy’s been shot in the back. He ain’t going to win the Tour de France any more.”’

As François Thomazeau confirms, the press pack was also giving LeMond’s chances short shrift. ‘Nobody fancied LeMond at all. For all of us, he was finished and it was a miracle he managed to make it back on a bike. His team was simply dreadful. We were just glad to see him back and felt more pity than anything else at the start.’

There were a few dissenting voices, though. LeMond’s room-mate Lammerts notes that, following the Giro, the ADR team took part in a small stage race in Spain, in which LeMond rode well. ‘He could follow the best Spanish riders and that gave him a lot of confidence.’

And that confidence had also been spotted by the photographer Graham Watson. ‘I knew that LeMond knew this Tour was a do-or-die race for him and that he had every intention of re-finding his winning ways. Only a photographer would have spotted it, but LeMond had a certain glint in his eyes, a sparkle we’d not seen since 1986 – this too went unnoticed by most observers. The French media in particular ignored LeMond because of Fignon’s superior form, a small oversight that would come back to bite them. But, importantly, it let LeMond come into the Tour as an underdog and race more or less unnoticed for a few days.’

LeMond had never been such an underdog in the Tour before. And, drawing from his wide smile and twinkling eyes, it was fair to say he appeared to be relishing his new-found position.

It was time to let the games begin.