Greg reveals Landis threat
ByReuters
Published 17/05/2007 at 22:26 GMT
Three-times Tour de France champion Greg LeMond created a stir at the Floyd Landis arbitration hearing on Thursday, saying he had received a phone call the previous day warning him not to give testimony.
CYCLING 2006, Greg Lemond
Image credit: Imago
LeMond, who won the Tour in 1986, 1989 and 1990, claimed he had been phoned on Wednesday night by someone who said: "This is your uncle and I'm going to be there tomorrow.
"I'm going to be there and we can talk about how we used to hide your weenie (slang for penis)."
Earlier in his testimony on the fourth day of the hearing, LeMond said he had shared a private story with the 2006 Tour de France champion in a phone conversation between the two last August.
"I told him I was sexually abused before I got into cycling and that it nearly destroyed me by keeping it secret," the American said.
"If you did take testosterone, for your own health and your own future - you are 30 years old - this will come back to haunt to you. I shared this with him with the idea of him seeing what keeping a secret would do."
LeMond said the 36-minute phone call took place on August 6th, one day after Landis tested positive for elevated testosterone to epitestosterone levels on the 17th stage of that year's Tour.
"I was very careful and said to him: 'I don't know if you did or didn't [take drugs], but if you did you could be the one to salvage the sport," LeMond added.
"I said: 'I hope and encourage you to come clean'. His response was: 'What good would it do'.
"He said he didn't see that anything good would come out of this. 'If I did, it would destroy a lot of friends and a lot of people,' he said."
Landis, battling to maintain his Tour de France title, has consistently denied using performance enhancing drugs.
At his ten-day hearing, three arbitration experts will determine whether the 31-year-old American cyclist injected himself with the male hormone testosterone.
If found guilty of doping, Landis faces a two-year suspension and the possibility of becoming the first Tour winner to be stripped of his title.
Earlier, the French laboratory that analysed Landis's urine samples had come under increased attack from lawyers representing him.
Claire Frelat, an analytical chemist at Chatenay-Malabry laboratory (LNDD) outside Paris, admitted some errors were made in re-testing Landis's back-up 'B' samples last month.
Frelat, whose native French was translated by an interpreter, also said she knew the 'B' sample from the stage 17 on the 2006 Tour belonged to Landis when she analysed it last August.
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