From sexual abuse to ADHD and living with just one kidney, Greg LeMond's story is one of victory over all obstacles, writes EOIN BURKE-KENNEDY
IT’S PARIS, late July 1986 and US rider Greg LeMond has just won the Tour De France, the most coveted prize in cycling. He is standing on the winner’s podium, shaking hands with the city’s mayor, Jacques Chirac.
The 25-year-old Californian is a picture of vitality and athleticism: a young man at the pinnacle of sport.
Missing, or perhaps invisible, in this victory pageant is LeMond’s interior.
It has never been an easy place to reside on account of a secret he closely guards; an unsettling truth which he’s never divulged to anyone but which eats away at him constantly.
When LeMond was 12 years old he was sexually abused by an older family friend. He doesn’t remember if the abuse lasted for three months or for a year and three months.
Even as he climbs onto the podium in Paris, seemingly immersed in victory, thoughts of his abuser course through him.
At the very moment of triumph, he is caught in the crosshairs of shame and revulsion.
“US TV had been following the race. It was getting a lot of traction and, for whatever reason, I thought . . . I hope this guy doesn’t come out and say things about me or try to embarrass me.
“It’s so illogical. I thought if people knew what really happened to me as a child they wouldn’t like me.
“It was like a fear that something would be exposed. When you’re abused, you don’t realise you’re a victim. There’s a shame you feel for having been part of it . . . that you participated. It’s subtle stuff that you don’t think will ever rear its ugly head but it does eventually.
“Some men take until they’ve destroyed their lives before they face up to it. It took me until I was 42 to tell my wife.”
Revelations about LeMond’s abuse emerged in the most bizarre fashion in 2007 at an arbitration hearing for disgraced US cyclist Floyd Landis.
Landis, the 2006 Tour de France winner, had tested positive for a banned substance during the race and stood to be stripped of his victory if found guilty.
LeMond had been called to testify about a phone call he had had with Landis a few days prior to the positive tests.
In the course of the conversation, LeMond said he urged Landis to come clean if he had doped for the sake of his own mental health.
LeMond told Landis about the secret he had kept for many years and how it had eaten him up inside. Landis and LeMond subsequently fell out over a newspaper report about the call.
However, the night before the Landis hearing, LeMond received a sinister phone call from a man, claiming to be his abuser, and threatening to expose the abuse and embarrass him if he testified.
When LeMond showed the incoming call number at the hearing the next day, it was instantly recognised by journalists as belonging to Landis’s friend and business manager, Will Geoghegan. Landis later apologised for Geoghegan’s call.
The incident persuaded LeMond, who has suffered occasionally from depression as result of his childhood trauma, of the need to help others struggling to emerge from the legacy of abuse and he has latterly become a founding board member of the US victims’ group, One in Six.
It is just one aspect of an extraordinary life, on and off the saddle.
Another is the fact that he has been functioning on just one kidney since he was 11.
The three-time Tour De France winner also has 37 shotgun pellets lodged deep in his body, the remnants of a near-fatal hunting accident which knocked him out of the sport for two years, right at his prime.
His rehabilitation and comeback victory in the 1989 Tour De France, beating his old rival Laurent Fignon by just eight seconds after a dramatic final day time trial, affords him legendary status in the sporting world.
The man who introduced cycling to aerodynamic helmets, time-trial handlebars and Oakley shades is in Dublin this week as part of an ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) awareness week. He is one of a number of top athletes known to suffer from the disorder, which still remains something of a stigma and controversial, despite being estimated to affect 2-5 per cent of children.
LeMond described himself as a restless, hyperactive child who found the sedentary rigour of the classroom difficult to endure. “I struggled through school not because I wasn’t smart but because I simply couldn’t sit still.”
While he couldn’t focus in the classroom, he found he could sit in a saddle for hours on end with unwavering concentration.
This seeming contradiction goes right to the heart of ADHD and may explain why many sufferers find relief in endurance sports. Though people with ADHD have extreme difficulty focusing, organising and completing mundane tasks, he says, they are conversely able to “hyperfocus” intently on other activities.
For LeMond, that hyperfocus was cycling. He says the bike became something of a sanctuary, a place to burn off energy. He believes that many top athletes may have some form of undiagnosed ADHD.
Before taking medication for the disorder, he believes people should first try exercising “and not just walking; it has to be intense”.
He is adamant there is no drug more potent than an hour of hard exercise.
“There’s a four or five-hour period after exercise when your brain is supercharged, and that is when you are most calm and most able to focus.”
The tragedy, he says, is that many children with undiagnosed ADHD “end up feeling like failures”.
LeMond also believes high-intensity sports can leave athletes prone to depression as the catabolic effect of extreme exercise depletes serotonin. He recounts often feeling depressed or low after big races. “Sometimes athletes seek a stimulant to get out of that and this can become highly addictive.”
His retirement from professional cycling might have been a less bumpy ride had he chosen to stay quiet about the prevalence of drug use which has so tarnished the sport’s image.
His uncompromising stance on doping and his allegations against Lance Armstrong and the latter’s close ties to Michele Ferrari, the controversial sports doctor, drew a lot of flak; with some characterising LeMond as jealous, bitter and even unstable.
Armstrong’s demise – he is now likely to be stripped of his seven Tour De France titles following an investigation by the US doping agency, USADA – represents vindication for LeMond.
It will also, ironically, reinstall him as the only American ever to win the Tour De France.
Someone recently established a “Say Sorry to Greg LeMond” page on Facebook for people to apologise for having doubted his allegations against Armstrong.
It’s a minuscule gesture to someone who’s given so much to the sport.
* The HADD Family Support Group (hadd.ie) has more information for parents of children with ADHD and adults with ADHD.
