Success Quote by Greg LeMond

LeMond’s line lands like a clean punch in a sport built on whispered bargains. “I know” isn’t motivational fluff; it’s a veteran staking authority in a culture where plausible deniability is practically part of the kit. By saying “it is possible,” he acknowledges the cynic’s baseline assumption - that winning cycling’s biggest prize requires chemical assistance - then refuses it without sounding naive. The sentence is engineered to do two things at once: defend the legitimacy of exceptional performance and indict the system that makes that defense necessary.

The key move is the word “anything.” He doesn’t name EPO, testosterone, blood bags, or doctors with offshore phone numbers. He keeps it broad because the problem isn’t one substance; it’s an ecosystem of escalation and silence. “Taking” also matters: it frames doping as an active choice, not an inevitability forced by “the peloton” or “the era.” That moral grammar puts agency back on the rider, and pressure back on the sport.

Context sharpens the edge. LeMond’s Tour victories sit in cycling’s pre-Lance mythology, but his public skepticism of Armstrong and the sport’s omerta made him a kind of internal dissident. So this isn’t just self-justification; it’s a challenge to the convenient story that everyone had to cheat to compete. He’s selling a harder narrative: that clean excellence can exist, and that the real scandal is how quickly we treat it as impossible.