Trek and Lemond - a question from the diaspora

[benb]

The whole company store one is an interesting one.

One of the big LBSes in my riding history was Goodale's in Nashua, NH and they apparently sold out and it turned into a company store. Not sure but maybe it was the owners wanting to retire?

I do wonder how that happens. If a dealer is really good maybe they don't try to butt into the market but if the area is weak they open a company store?

There are a still a whole bunch of independent Trek dealers around here and I have never actually seen a Trek company store.

(Just went and looked, I live within 25 miles of 16 independent trek dealers and one company store.)

[Mark McM]

Originally Posted by unterhausen

I know Lemond thinks that Trek somehow screwed him with their buyout, but all the other buyouts seem like the previous owners did okay. And Lemond can use his name again wrt bikes, correct?

As above, Trek did not simply buy the Lemond bicycle company, but they also had a contractual agreement that put Lemond on the Trek payroll (as they also did for Fisher, Klein and Bontrager). Lemond claims Armstrong used his connections at Trek to purposely tank the Lemond brand and break the Lemond-Trek contract early. Given Armstrong's history of ruining the careers of people who spoke out against him (the list is long), it is entirely possible that Armstrong did the same with Lemond.

[Gummee]

Originally Posted by EB

Trek is a large corporation and what they did at the time makes sense if you consider the threat LeMond’s public statements represented to the revenue streams that Lance’s personal brand supported. Remember at the time that no allegations were proven, so they made a bloodless risk management decision to protect their business.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

This. LA was the golden boy, driving sales throughout the US. GL's disparaging LA was a threat.

If the guy had kept his mouth shut at the time, he'd probably still have a line of bikes

M

[benb]

Originally Posted by Mark McM

As above, Trek did not simply buy the Lemond bicycle company, but they also had a contractual agreement that put Lemond on the Trek payroll (as they also did for Fisher, Klein and Bontrager). Lemond claims Armstrong used his connections at Trek to purposely tank the Lemond brand and break the Lemond-Trek contract early. Given Armstrong's history of ruining the careers of people who spoke out against him (the list is long), it is entirely possible that Armstrong did the same with Lemond.

Reading the Wikipedia entry on the controversy it seems there is something to this.

Lemond Criticized Armstrong
Lemond and Armstrong both were on the payroll
Lemond likely had some kind of clause or company rulebook he had signed off on that said he wouldn't publicly criticize the company or it's employees/sponsored athletes
Lemond did it anyway
Trek punished Lemond

I do wonder if it was just a convenient excuse to move him along. The concept of the bikes was aging badly at that time and I think it was unclear how to move the Lemond bikes forward while keeping them relevant both to the current times and to Lemond himself.

I didn't know Lemond did his late stages of his career on Carbon fiber (not Trek). Every Lemond bike I ever saw in the wild was steel, and they were apparently anachronistic even by the time he was out of the Peloton.

Who knows what was going on with those bikes at the time but since then he hasn't seemed like he has what it takes to build/run a bike business and succeed.

[Gummee]

Originally Posted by benb

I don't remember Matrix. My first Trek had "Icon" branded parts. I am curious what year they first started marketing Bontrager.

Icon was good stuff before they sold out. Lightweight. Strong.

Ditto with Syncros before they sold. I still have a few Sycros seatposts and stems in the garage

Bontrager sold out a while ago. Kept designing part for Trek for a while afterwards. I hear that he wanted to be an engineer again, not a business owner, but that's just what I heard. He sold in what? the late 90s?

M

[reuben]

Originally Posted by Elefantino

I interviewed for a part-time job at a Trek store. The (young, new) manager's questions were all dancing around my apparently overly advanced age. Surprise! I didn't get the job.

That store, at one, point, had 22 employees. Now there are five. And they closed down one day a week.

That'd be perfect for an old guy. Maybe I should apply.

[Gummee]

Originally Posted by zap

Companies (and/or leadership) in other industries have done far far worse yet their products are very popular.

Lemond's win inspired me to get into cycling in '86. Riding Trek products since '88. Trek sorted out Klein's road geometry in '92/'93. The Lemond affair is unfortunate but I'm pretty certain Lemond is not innocent.

So......though I am a fan of Lemond, I started tuning him out.

The tale of the 'iron injection' makes me suspicious. GL may not have been quite as juiced as later riders, but I'll bet there's been some kind of doping in his past.

Eddy Merckx was doing it
You can't convince me Indurain wasn't as big as he was
yadda yadda yadda

M

[mhespenheide]

Originally Posted by benb

I didn't know Lemond did his late stages of his career on Carbon fiber (not Trek). Every Lemond bike I ever saw in the wild was steel, and they were apparently anachronistic even by the time he was out of the Peloton.

LeMond was one of the early adopters in the peloton of carbon fiber, first from Look and later from TVT. (Or I might have that backwards...) Even after he left La Vie Claire and their affiliation with Look, he rode TVT frames for climbing races and stages, repainted to match the sponsor's bikes. Here's an example where you can see the give-away of the aluminum lugs at the top and the bottom of the headtube:



He also used American carbon fiber from Calfee (nee "Carbonframes") for his 1991 bid with Team Z:



By the time LeMond partnered with Trek, there were some carbon LeMond bikes available, and also the carbon/steel mixed-material frames. But yeah, most of the LeMond bikes you'll ever see will be steel.

[bikinchris]

I find the idea that people don't understand corporations funny.
Corporations are completely amoral. They simply have zero morals. They have even less loyalty to anyone or anything. The bigger the corporation, the more that statement is true. Corporations will bulldoze anything into the ground, and they will gladly kill your grandmother if they think there's a chance they can get away with it and it will help the ONLY THING corporations care about. "Profit" You cannot give a corporation the death penalty for doing bad things. They will pay their fines and maybe get broken up, but next week, they will reorganize under a new name. As alive as ever. Thoe fines came out of money they had left over after paying their dividends. You didn't get that money from the people who ran the company. The fall guy took the brunt of the punishment.
Greg Lemond is funny because his biggest argument against Lance was that everyone he beat was a doper. I got news for you. Everyone Greg Lemond EVER beat was a convicted doper except Indurain. Who is twice the size of the climbers who couldn't separate themselves from him enough to matter on the biggest climbs. Go figure. Lemond is obviously not a very smart businessman.
Lance thinks like a corporation. If you are an enemy, you MUST somehow be beat.
I don't take any of these corporations seriously. I would ride a Trek if I like it. But I prefer the smaller custom builders when I buy a bike. I keep them for decades, so the cost for each use is tiny.

[Gummee]

Originally Posted by mhespenheide

LeMond was one of the early adopters in the peloton of carbon fiber, first from Look and later from TVT. (Or I might have that backwards...) Even after he left La Vie Claire and their affiliation with Look, he rode TVT frames for climbing races and stages, repainted to match the sponsor's bikes. Here's an example where you can see the give-away of the aluminum lugs at the top and the bottom of the headtube:



He also used American carbon fiber from Calfee (nee "Carbonframes") for his 1991 bid with Team Z:



By the time LeMond partnered with Trek, there were some carbon LeMond bikes available, and also the carbon/steel mixed-material frames. But yeah, most of the LeMond bikes you'll ever see will be steel.

There was a Mitsubishi Rayon LeMond at Adams Ave bikes 'back when' that I really wanted but couldn't afford. Webbed lugs like the Calfees.

Course, it's been a while and I could be misremembering who actually built that bike...

M

[Mark McM]

Originally Posted by mhespenheide

By the time LeMond partnered with Trek, there were some carbon LeMond bikes available, and also the carbon/steel mixed-material frames. But yeah, most of the LeMond bikes you'll ever see will be steel.

Those mixed carbon/steel and carbon/titanium bikes were "interesting" to say the least. They didn't last long, maybe only a few years. While other companies were trying to decide if they should add a carbon front triangle to a metal rear triangle or a metal front triangle to a carbon rear triangle, the Lemond bikes decided to mate a carbon upper section to a metal lower section (i.e a metal "spine"):



Of course, simply gluing a carbon tube or two into a metal frame was mostly about design-by-marketing than any kind of engineering.

There were also some all carbon OCLV Lemonds as well. As we know, carbon frame molds are expensive, so the OCLV Lemonds were actually the same as OCLV Treks, which means they had to use some sleight of hand to claim they were actually different. At the time, Lemond was known for using frames with long top tubes. So to make it appear that the Lemond OCLV frames were different from the Trek OCLV frames, they simply marked their measured sizes differently. Trek frames were usually sized by the length of the seat tubes from center to top. A Trek OCLV frame that measured 54cm from center to top might have center-to-center measurement of 52cm, and a frame that measured 56cm from center to top might be 54cm center-to-center, and so on. So, a Lemond bike that was labeled 52cm (c-c) would actually use the same frame as a Trek bike that was labeled 54cm (c-t), and the 54cm Lemond would use the same frame as a 56cm Trek, etc., which made it appear that a Lemond bike of some particular size had a longer top tube than a Trek of the same size.

[tdh]

I am fully aware that corporations are about profits first and foremost, which seems to be the majority opinion here. As in "nothing to see here, move along". But I thought trek's stance and actions were not only cynical but completely outlandish. Outside/Velo published part of the transcripts of the court proceedings Trek vs Lemond when the judge questioned the trek lawyer about the possibility of Armstrong being indeed a doper (which they didn't know at the time but which, as we know now, turned out to be true):

Kyle (the judge on the case): You know, some test comes back. They have some way of doing it, and sure enough he’s been doping.
Weber (attorney for trek): It doesn’t undo the $9 million and more in lost profits from the bike sales Trek did not realize.
Kyle: Even if what (LeMond) said was absolutely true?
Weber: Right. Trek was damaged. The contract with LeMond is over. Trek was damaged to the tune of between $9 and $12 million as the result of lost bike sales. That doesn’t go away.
Kyle: Okay.

So trek's stance basically was: When our guy cheats and somebody says our guy cheats and we sell less bike as a result of that guy opening his trap, that guy is liable for our loss, doesn't matter if he's right...after all these years I am still in awe of the chutzpah of some lawyers

But this wasn't really the point of my original question. I gather that the majority of the forum members don't really care about cycling history and lore when choosing a bike but rather technical aspects or the "right" feeling of the bike and the proximity to a place where they can have their bike serviced...

[tomato coupe]

Originally Posted by tdh

I gather that the majority of the forum members don't really care about cycling history and lore when choosing a bike but rather technical aspects or the "right" feeling of the bike and the proximity to a place where they can have their bike serviced...

I think most forum members do care about cycling history, but they care a lot less about business history, which is what your post is about.

[Sarhog]

Originally Posted by tdh

I gather that the majority of the forum members don't really care about cycling history and lore when choosing a bike but rather technical aspects or the "right" feeling of the bike and the proximity to a place where they can have their bike serviced...

IMHO, if you’re buying a bike for the purpose of riding it (and enjoying said ride), choosing a bike based on company history or “lore” would be foolish.

[Mark McM]

Originally Posted by tdh

I am fully aware that corporations are about profits first and foremost, which seems to be the majority opinion here.

This is not just what large corporations want to do, in our economic system this is what publicly traded companies are actually required to do. Corporate executives are accountable to the stockholders to generate profits and value. If they put their own personal moral compasses above the generation of profits, then they aren't doing their jobs (assuming they aren't actually breaking any laws).

Originally Posted by tdh

So trek's stance basically was: When our guy cheats and somebody says our guy cheats and we sell less bike as a result of that guy opening his trap, that guy is liable for our loss, doesn't matter if he's right...after all these years I am still in awe of the chutzpah of some lawyers

That's not quite right what Trek's stance was. If a person not associated with Trek speaks the truth and says that Trek's guy cheats, and Trek losses money because of what that person said, that person is not liable to Trek. But in this case, the person speaking up was in the employ to Trek, and contractually obligated not to say anything bad about Trek or any of their people. In that regard, Lemond breached his contract, and could be on the hook for damages caused by his breach. In the case of whistle blowers, they can generally not be held to confidentiality contracts in the case that they speak out about actions that harm the public good. But that doesn't really apply here, because: 1) Lemond spoke out without actual knowledge of Armstrong's doping; and 2) even if Lemond did have direct knowledge of Armstrong's doping, it could be difficult to establish that cyclist doping causes harm to the public good.