LeMond went on to reveal that he told Landis that keeping dark secrets can ruin one's life, then relayed his own story of being sexually abused as a child, a story LeMond said he had shared with only a few people and never talked about publicly until Thursday. . . The drama continued when LeMond, under direct questioning from Barnett, said he received a phone call Wednesday night from a mysterious caller, who identified himself only as "Uncle Ron."
LeMond said he was perplexed at first, but that changed to concern when the caller made direct references to the conversation about sexual abuse that he had with Landis last August.
"He said ‘Hi Greg, this is your uncle. This is your uncle Ron and I'm going to be there tomorrow,'" LeMond recalled. "I said, ‘Who is this?' He said, ‘I'm going to be there and we can talk about how we used to hide your weenie.' I got the picture right away that there are very few people who know about that. I figured this was intimidation."
The three-time Tour champ said the caller then hung up, and when LeMond redialed he got a voicemail message identifying the call recipient as "Will."
LeMond said he tried calling back three more times, finally getting an answer from someone who identified himself only as "Bill." The conversation was inconclusive, so LeMond hung up and then called the police. A subsequent check of the number saved on LeMond's mobile phone showed that it belonged to Landis's business manager Will Geoghegan.
We at Project B are certainly not ones to cast the first stone when it comes to obscene late-night phone calls, but it's a sad state of affairs for the professional peloton these days:
Henceforth, the phrase "Uncle Ron" shall now be verbified to describe the act of a phone call or text message that seemed like a good idea at the time. Kind of like a Hungry Painter, but with less awkward dismounts and more hide-the-burrito.
At the end of the day, Vinokourov still remains the man. When your patrones are Kazakhstani energy oligarchs, you tend to fly under the radar of any anti-doping investigations.
Gangsta.
2 comments:
What about those phone calls that you *know* are a bad idea - even though you've been drinking and you know drinking makes you make bad calls, and bad phone calls - and you say to yourself: "I know! It's 3am and I'm going to call my boyfriend and call him a bitch! That will be soooooo funny! [giggle, giggle]"
Does that count under your definition, because I think *my* kind of bad phone call has gotta have another name...
Less than twelve hours after posting that, I was slumped semi-conscious on a couch at the Brickhouse, and decided it would be a good idea to pull out my cellphone and get my Uncle Ron on.
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