LeMond, don’t forget, did it first – and did it clean

To show how the mind sometimes works, the first thing I thought of when Lance Armstrong was stripped of his bicycle riding titles was Bo Jackson saying, "So where's that Tour de France thing?" in those old Nike commercials.

I also thought of Sheryl Crow, and how she broke off her engagement with Armstrong because she wanted to have a child and he didn't - and then Lance had a child anyway, with his new girlfriend. The one after Kate Hudson.  

But I mostly thought of Bo and that Tour de France thing, and how Spike Lee also used to wear a bicycle cap with the bill turned up, like they do in the Pyrenees and the French Alps. As did Wesley Snipes in "White Men Can't Jump." And how whereas most people would attribute these pop culture and fashion nods to the greatness of Lance Armstrong, they had started happening around 1990 - some nine years before Armstrong would win the first of his seven yellow jerseys.

So it's much more likely they were an homage to the greatness of Greg LeMond.

Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong were to the Tour de France what David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar were to Van Halen, with the primary difference that LeMond once was shot 40 times with a pellet gun and Armstrong beat cancer. And that the cyclists have never admitted to being hot for one of their teachers.

LeMond came first. He won three times. Then Armstrong came along and the hits just kept on comin'.

LeMond won without performance-enhancing drugs. That's also Armstrong's story. He's sticking to it, despite testimony to the contrary from practically the entire peloton.

And Roth? Diamond Dave says that whereas he once had a drug problem, now he makes enough money.

Of the three, LeMond is the only one to which I've spoken.

(I did ride in a golf cart once with one Alex Van Halen and Michael Anthony, the original Van Halen bass player. But the golf cart was moving kind of fast - this was during an IndyCar weekend at California Speedway - and Alex looked a bit overcome by methanol fumes, or the 11 a.m. starting time. So few questions about the band's recreational drug use were asked.)

In 1997, I really wasn't into riding my 10-speed farther than the nearest Taco Bell and it had been a few years since LeMond had won that Tour de France thing. So when his publicist suggested an interview, I sort of declined. He said I should reconsider "because there's only one Greg LeMond" - and that he would be driving a race car at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in about 45 minutes.

Our interview lasted longer than LeMond's auto racing career but he was really personable, not pretentious in the least. And that was about the last I heard from Greg LeMond until 2008, until a bicycle trade show at the Sands Expo and Convention Center where Armstrong was making an appearance.

Lance said it would be best for those assembled to focus on the competitive aspects of the Tour de France, and not the other aspects. Not more than five seconds later, LeMond, who was sitting in the front row, asked about the other aspects, or at least about the percentage of oxygen in Lance's blood.

Their exchange was more uncomfortable than cycling shorts on Jessica Simpson until Armstrong told LeMond it was time to move on.

By then, everybody in the cycling world, with the exception of the guy who finished second in Paris, wanted LeMond to move on.

A year earlier, when LeMond was scheduled to spill the beans on 2006 Tour winner Floyd Landis in front of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (Landis would be stripped, too), an anonymous caller told LeMond he would go public with a terrible secret unless he kept his mouth shut.

The caller turned out to be Landis' manager. The next day, LeMond testified anyway - testified that he had confided in Landis that he had been sexually abused as a child, and now Landis and his people were trying to destroy him.  

"I can't sit here and lie to people and go along with probably the most corrupt, drug-ridden sport in the history of sports," LeMond said. "Will I regret it? I don't think I will."

I wonder if he does. I wonder if he feels vindicated.

I came across a compelling story written by Mike Magnuson - a huge fan of LeMond's who has written for Esquire and GQ, who in 2006 traveled to the cyclist's home in Minnesota to shed light on "Whatever Happened to Greg LeMond?"

Magnuson wrote thousands of words about his hero/friend, about how his life, like his own, had boomeranged from greatness into something less than that. But it was two sentences in the middle that resonated most.

Wrote Magnuson: "Within an hour, I was in downtown Minneapolis having coffee with my mistress. She was smoking a cigarette and was not happy with me for having taken so long talking with Greg LeMond, whose name she didn't recognize."

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.