Greg LeMond recalls late Dutch teammate Johannes Draaijer and takes aim at “doping team” PDM

LeMond won the Tour de France in 1986, 1989 and 1990, but ultimately stepped away from the sport in 1994 after several seasons in which he could no longer compete at the level he previously reached. According to the Californian, that decline is directly linked to the arrival of EPO in the professional peloton, with riders suddenly going markedly faster than those he had been able to control earlier in his career.

The American points to Italian rider Claudio Chiappucci as an example. “I raced with Chiappucci from 1986. He was a domestique. I’m sorry, but he wasn’t that good a rider. But I remember him riding away in 1992 on the Sestriere stage. I’d won the Tour three times, but I was basically the last rider in that stage. I finished an hour behind him.”

LeMond says the impact was immediate, including financially. “My team told me: we’ll have to reduce your salary. But I said: this is really happening in teams — they’re taking EPO, they’re taking testosterone. Either you stay out of it and let us race and nothing changes with the salary, or you bring in the same doctor. Not that I wanted to use doping, but we couldn’t be punished for not using doping.”

When LeMond raced for Dutch team PDM in 1988 — after returning from a hunting accident that sidelined him for a long time — he says he encountered doping in an organised form for the first time. “When I rode for PDM, I realised that was the first truly organised doping team. And I left for that reason.”

LeMond also mentioned the Dutch rider Johannes Draaijer, his former PDM teammate who died in 1990 at the age of 26, as an example of what was wrong in that era. “His wife (like LeMond’s, an American) called my wife in the middle of the night because her husband had died. So sad,” LeMond recalled.

At the time, links were drawn between early experimentation with doping and Draaijer’s death, but this was never proven. Dutch riders Bert Oosterbosch and Connie Meijer also died from cardiac arrest in that period. LeMond — who was one of the first prominent figures to openly accuse Lance Armstrong — placed much of the blame on Italian doctors Francesco Conconi and Michele Ferrari. “I genuinely believe some riders had no idea what they were being given, because Conconi worked for the Olympic Committee at the time, doing tests on how to detect EPO. But he used pro riders as guinea pigs,” LeMond said.