DON'T RUSH TO JUDGE, RIDER BEGS

'Ashamed' Lamaze Says Drug Ban Isn't The Whole Story

Eric Lamaze knows this week's lifetime ban from competitive equestrian sports and his dumping from the Sydney Olympic squad for cocaine use looks bad. Real bad. Particularly when it is his second offence in four years.

Lamaze has heard all the talk: about how he's just a junkie and why should anyone care about a rich, spoiled kid who has blown it one time too many. That he doesn't deserve any more opportunities, never mind a third chance.

But in an often emotional interview yesterday, Lamaze pleaded with his legions of fans, supporters - and most importantly, the people of Canada - to please not rush to judgment this time.

He acknowledges having used cocaine. But stay tuned, he urged. This time, there is much more to the sad tale of the rise and fall and the rise and fall again of a talented but flawed star.

The real story of what happened last month when he fell off the wagon for the first time in four years will have to wait for an emergency hearing before a sports arbitrator, likely to be held this week, says the show-jumping phenom.

He doesn't want to taint the process by speaking publicly about the case before that hearing.

Until then, please don't be too hasty to judge, he asks.

"Hopefully when I can tell my story - which I am dying to, because there are so many other circumstances besides one guy making a terrible mistake - people may change their minds about what happened," Lamaze said in an interview.

Lamaze was bumped from Canada's Olympic show-jumping team Wednesday after an A sample - each urine sample is split in two - tested positive for cocaine metabolites.

The B sample was tested Thursday and the positive results released late Friday.

The offence, his second, carries an automatic lifetime ban.

Lamaze was also jettisoned from Canada's 1996 Olympic squad after testing positive for cocaine use just weeks before the team left for Atlanta.

The lifetime ban means Lamaze cannot ride or coach at any Canadian Equestrian Federation-sanctioned event.

Lamaze's lawyer, friend and vigilant gatekeeper Tim Danson hovered nearby as the 32-year-old riding sensation recounted what it has been like to live in the eye of a destructive hurricane for the past week.

"This is terrible; I wouldn't wish it on anybody else," he said. "All I know at this point is that a bad part of my life has come back to me."

Danson insists something "catastrophic" happened to his client that sparked an uncharacteristic - though under the circumstances, he says, understandable - relapse for the first time in four years.

"I can't argue the case right now, but I want people to know that for four years of my life, I have been the best athlete I can be, I have run the best business I can and I have tried to make the best out of the first bad situation," Lamaze said.

Danson says Lamaze has been tested repeatedly over the last four years, at competitions and in random tests, and every time has come up clean.

That is, every time but Aug. 29, when he was tested at his Schomberg home.

Lamaze says the hardest part, besides losing his career, is the effect on friends and colleagues.

"I'm devastated. I can't even get up in the morning right now. I just feel like I have let too many people down to feel hopeful," he said. "I am ashamed of what this has done to other people - to people close to me, to clients, to friends, to my fiancee.

"This is a terrible tragedy, and I am even more ashamed for what I caused them, than for me. That is my biggest concern."

Danson himself says he has been wrung dry watching Lamaze unravel in the white-hot glare of negative publicity and soul-crushing loss.

He tells of how Lamaze's fiancee, American Megan Johnson, has stayed at his side since the story broke last week.

And how friends and family have been so concerned that he has been placed on a 24-hour suicide watch.

"It's crushing to watch someone lose everything that matters to them like this," Danson said. "It's hard to stand by and see it."

This is not the first time Lamaze has lost it all - loss has almost defined his young life.

In 1996, he was initially given a four-year suspension after testing positive for cocaine. An arbitrator accepted his explanation that he had been clean for eight previous years and reduced that to seven months.

But the cloud still hung over his head. It took him four years of hard, single-minded work to come even close to reinstating himself among his peers.

"He's never been better than he is right now," said friend and client Eddie Creed.

"Here's a guy who went down for the count once, he learned his lesson and he worked his way back to the top of the heap."

And now this.

The funny thing is, for a man who now has so much to lose, Lamaze started out as a poor francophone street kid in Montreal with less than nothing.

The story has been told before - how he was born to a cocaine-addicted mother and a father who has never been identified.

How his alcoholic grandmother raised him while his mother served time in prison for drug dealing. He was a kid with no adult supervision, no role models and like almost everyone else, made good and bad choices.

"His first exposure to cocaine was as a fetus," Danson said. "Eric was a street kid . . . since before he was 13. His life has been tragic beyond comprehension."

In his early teens, Lamaze took refuge in tennis and horseback riding. By all accounts he excelled at both - a gifted natural athlete.

Lamaze supported himself through riding from the age of 14, which accounts for his meagre Grade 8 education.

Creed says Lamaze is one of the world's finest horsemen.

"It's incredible how he treats animals, with so much respect. I have never seen him hit a horse; they would do anything for him," he said. "He has dominated his sport in Canada, like Tiger Woods has dominated."

Now, the adult who was once a homeless child lives in a sprawling, upscale home surrounded by rambling gardens.

He drives a Porsche, earns well into the six figures and operates a thriving stable on Creed's farm near King City.

What has been remarkable in this whole sad story is the way colleagues, equestrian officials and sponsors have rallied around him again - a fact Lamaze can't account for.

"Maybe they are just wonderful people with big hearts," he said.

"I can't express how it feels when someone calls in support of you. In the state I am in right now, at the bottom of the bottom, any calls that I get, anything positive that anyone has to say, well it just makes my day."