LeMond presentation

anything she can’t do? :)

my impression of LeMond is that he’s a reasonable, smart, thoughtful guy who cares a lot about the sport. He also comes off as excitable and impulsive when he speaks. So shoot him??

All I can say is that if I were LeMond, I’d be pretty pissed with CN right now. Hell, I’m not LeMond and I’m annoyed. I just don’t see how they botched the story this badly.

Keep in mind that I like LeMond, and hey, my comments are just an impression too, so maybe I’m biased. Still, I’m of the opinion that, well, CN basically owes Lemond an apology. Not even so much for what they said about him – though they grossly misrepresent him, in my view – but for the fact that most people are going to take this story as an accurate representation of the presentation (why wouldn’t they? I think CN’s generally pretty good), and hence will be more likely to be completely dismissive of everything LeMond says in the future, because they read that CN story in June 09 about what a crackpot he is. In my view, the only ethical thing for CN to do would be to run a counter-story, in the same place (these “notes” that everyone reads, not buried in the errata section of the web page somewhere), that admitted the inaccuracies of the previous story, and more accurately portrayed his presentation.

What are you, a hater? ;) seriously though, thank you for the link.

I get what you’re saying, but I would say that his take is much more nuanced in the presentation. He’s not saying that doping hasn’t always been around – he makes several pointed comments about how prevalent it was in his time, and I don’t think he’s under any illusions that cycling and doping haven’t always been linked. (I mean, yesterday I learned that the term “convicts of the road” comes from the 1920s.) His point, rather, is this: when he was riding, you could conceivably not dope and still race; with the introduction of EPO, well, for a few years there, riding without doping and remaining competitive, he claims, would have been impossible. In fact, at one point toward the end of his presentation, he talks about how he’s glad he got into cycling when he did, because if he’d come around a few years later, even he, with his ridiculous amount of talent, wouldn’t have been able to compete.

Obviously one can be critical about LeMond’s claims, for example not everyone is the genetic freak that is Greg LeMond – I think he still has the 2nd highest VO2 max ever recorded (not bad for a cyclist…though as always, we x-c skiers are superior ;), so for him to say that he could race in the 80s and still be competitive even without doping…well, all you have to do is read Joe Parkin on this – he talks about how, at the exact same time, he succumbed to the temptation to take drugs (amphetamines, if I remember his book right) just to have a chance of winning Kermesse races in Belgium! And Parkin himself, in an interview I recently read (in CN, of all places), says that LeMond is the most talented cyclist he’s ever seen – talks about how LeMond could show up, overweight and with hardly any miles in his legs, and then a few weeks later be kicking everyone’s ass. So – not everyone’s as gifted as LeMond.

But LeMond’s argument here generally concerns the efficacy of doping from the 90s onwards – he’s not saying that previous eras were cleaner, but that the 90s stuff was better – to the extent that, had he come along a few years later, even he, with all his tremendous gifts, couldn’t have competed. This echoes an interview that he did a few years ago in Le Monde, which I can’t find right now, but in which he basically says this: in 1990 I won the Tour, and my team (Z) won the team competition. In 1991, my team and I, despite being in what we felt was even better shape than the year before, literally couldn’t keep up to the peloton. So LeMond asks the obvious question: what had changed from one year to the next? Again, not more doping, but better doping.