LeMond vs. Trek: It Is About The Bikes

According to news reports, tomorrow (or more likely today by the time most folks read this) a judge in Minnesota will issue a ruling that will either keep Greg LeMond’s lawsuit against Trek Bicycles alive, or bring a quick end to the case. It’s all part of what is one of the most contentious of divorces, if this were a married couple and not a businessman suing another business, that is.

At issue is whether Trek Bicycles was right in terminating it’s relationship with Greg LeMond, the original American Tour de France winner. To hear Trek’s side of the story, LeMond did a number of things that undermined not only the LeMond bicycle brand, but also the parent company’s brand, too. To hear LeMond’s side of the story, a certain other Tour winner strong-armed Trek into pressuring Greg to shut the heck up about all the doping stuff, and Trek caved into that other person’s demands.

Which is where it gets a bit puzzling for me. LeMond had a licensing deal with Trek where the Wisconsin-based manufacturer would distribute bicycles bearing the LeMond brand. For 13 years, from 1995 through 2008, Trek produced and distributed LeMond bikes, paying Greg a royalty on every bike sold. Considering the state of the American bicycle industry in the mid-1990s, Trek pretty much ensured the survival of the LeMond brand during the latter half of that decade and into the early 2000s. Without Trek, the LeMond brand would have already been consigned to the ash-heap of history, like a number of other brands that were once popular 15 or 20 years ago.

On the other hand, Trek has sponsored Lance Armstrong and the teams he’s been a part of since the late 1990s. They have been his sponsor during every one of his Tour de France campaigns, including his seven consecutive wins, and they have reaped quite the sales bonanza as a result. Armstrong, however, does not have his own line of bikes, and last time I checked the local Trek dealership, I didn’t see any Lance Armstrong signature models being sold at a premium price. (Actually, I haven’t seen any LA signature models at all at any Trek dealer I’ve visited, including the company-owned stores in Madison and St. Louis.)

In some ways Trek is stuck in the middle in a war not of its choosing.  For a good, long time LeMond and Trek did business together and did quite well. But Trek also sponsors Armstrong, the 800-pound gorilla of the American cycling scene. Regardless, the real beef here is between the two businesses, but one side (LeMond) wants to drag another party (Armstrong) into the dispute.

Granted, there’s been bad blood between the two cyclists since 2001, when LeMond paid Armstrong what can be charitably described as a left-handed compliment in comments he made to David Walsh of the (London) Sunday Times. “If Lance is clean, it is the greatest comeback in the history of sports. If he isn’t, it would be the greatest fraud.” As Nathaniel Vinton of the New York Daily News also noted:

One thing is certain: Trek CEO John Burke was put in the unenviable position in 2001 of trying to mediate the dispute between two star cyclists, both of whom brought millions of dollars into his company.

Vinton’s story runs with the headline, “It’s not about the bikes,” a play on the title of Lance Armstrong’s book (ghost-written by Sally Jenkins) which was originally released in 2000. Regardless of whether or not Armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs, and regardless of what Greg LeMond thinks of Lance Armstrong (or vice versa), the real dispute is between LeMond and Trek. Armstrong’s part of this whole saga is that of a distraction or a sideshow. If LeMond’s brand had continued to sell well, Trek would have no problem producing and marketing the bikes. After all, what sane company is going to get rid of a cash cow? On the other hand, if Trek didn’t support LeMond’s brand well enough to keep those sales going, then LeMond might have a case against the manufacturer.

Now, Armstrong (whose Mellow Johnny’s bike shop is a large Trek dealer) may not have liked what LeMond said about him in that 2001 interview and comments that LeMond has made since then. And the folks at Trek may well have been stuck in the awkward position of trying to mediate between two strong personalities — one whose name appeared on bikes they produced, and the other whose image appeared in countless ads and other promotional materials for the company’s flagship products.

But I don’t really see where Armstrong would be in a position to strong-arm Trek into dropping the LeMond brand, or even to force LeMond to shut up. Yes, Lance’s image helps Trek sell some bikes. But at the end of the day — given the controversy that surrounds the seven-time Tour winner — it seems to me that this is pretty much of a wash. Many American cycling fans are either passionately for Armstrong or passionately against Armstrong. When they go to the store to buy a bike, those strong feelings probably cancel each other out in terms of overall sales — at least on the high-end, high-profit bikes.

As one Trek attorney told Judge Richard Kyle at a hearing last week:

Trek has always supported Greg in his comments about doping in general – those comments are fine, but the specific attacks on individual athletes were not. ‘No comment’ would have been a preferable statement to attacks on specific athletes. Trek would have been okay with that.

Judge Kyle has recommended that the two warring sides try to come to an out-of-court settlement. Given the personalities involved, I rather doubt that this saga will come to an end before 2010 — at the earliest.

Greg LeMond may want his lawsuit against Trek to be about Lance Armstrong as the New York Daily News article suggested, but in the end LeMond’s lawsuit and Trek’s countersuit really are all about the bikes.