LEMOND CONSIDERS DRUG ISSUE A WAKE-UP CALL

AIX-LES-BAINS, France---High on the first climb in the Tour de France
on Wednesday, Greg LeMond was waiting to watch the race go by and
trying to understand why it was more than an hour behind schedule
until he was told about the two stoppages by the riders.

"I believe they're.protesting that it's gotten to be kind of a witch
hunt," said the American, who won the Tour in 1986, 1989 and 1990. Now
37 years old and retired from the sport, LeMond was accompanying a
16-person tourist group that has been cycling over some of the Tour's
roads before and after daily stages.

"The riders are-trying to race the Tour de France," he continued in an
interview. "You can't interrupt people's lives. The Tour de France is
hard enough without interrupting people's lives.

"It's hard to say," he admitted. "I don't know the whole story. I'm an
outsider now."

LeMond was critical of the French police, calling their raid on the
TVM team's hotel in Albertville on Tuesday "an illegal search and
seizure by American definitions."

"The riders feel they're being treated like dogs," he
said.

But, he continued as he looked down the mountain and checked his
watch, "This is probably good for cycling. It's a wake-up call. I
think riders will think twice now about team-influenced programs.

"Drugs are the sick side of sports, not just cycling but in many
sports."

Doping problems, he said, were rare in his day. He first raced the
Tour in 1984, finishing third, and last participated a decade later,
when he had to drop out because of a weakness that was later diagnosed
as a rare disease of his body cells.

"In the 1980s, you could race totally clean, as I did," he said. "In
the early 90s, you started hearing things. But in the 80s, there was
nothing like this, no. You heard about people taking steroids and most
of the time they were caught.

"Now everybody believes everybody else is doing it. When some riders
are flying, it creates intense pressures on riders and sponsors and
teams.

"This is a terrible scandal," he said. "The reality is that to get
everything out, they've got to figure ways to detect everything. It's
sad for some of the riders but they're the victims of a system that
needs to be changed."

"You can say that a rider should resist the pressure to dope himself,"
LeMond said, "but when it's some guy who faces the loss of his job, or
maybe his salary is going to drop from $10,000 a month to $3,000
because he has no results, then it's fair to call him a victim."

Checked-by: "Rich O'Grady"