GREG LEMOND

Cyclist

Crashed in a race, then shot with a shotgun, the miracle was not that Greg LeMond won the 1989 Tour de France, it’s that he was on a bike at all. Two years earlier, fresh off his 1986 Tour win—the first by an American— the then-25-year-old broke his hand while racing in Italy. He returned home to California to recover for a couple of months but, just before returning to Europe to defend his Tour title, everything changed. While hunting with his uncle and friends, a confused hunter mistook the cyclist for game and shot LeMond with a 12-gauge shotgun. It was an hour before a helicopter arrived, another half hour or so until he was in surgery. There were more than 100 shotgun pellets in his body; two of LeMond’s ribs had been broken, his left ring finger was shattered; he’d lost nearly three pints of blood, and much more had pooled in and around his lungs, causing them to collapse. The membrane around his heart was leaking blood as it, too, had been perforated by pellets. Holes in LeMond’s diaphragm and small intestine were repaired in surgery, holes in his liver were left alone. And while a number of pellets were removed, five remained in his heart, five in his liver, and two dozen more in his back, arms and legs. In the end, LeMond lost nearly half the blood in his body, his small intestine leached waste and his one good kidney was damaged (his other had failed in childhood). Doctors credited his strong heart and lungs with getting him through, but his body was devastated and wracked with pain. Over the next few months, barely able to shuffle across a room, LeMond lost 30 of his 150 pounds, his leg muscles withered and his body fat jumped from 5% to 19%. Further health complications followed over the next year, some severe, but eventually LeMond climbed back on his bike and, just two years after being shot, won the Tour de France for the second time. A third victory followed in 1990 and then he retired. As Tour victories by Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis were disqualified due to doping, LeMond remains the only American to have won cycling’s greatest race.

A confused hunter mistook the cyclist for game and shot LeMond with a 12-gauge shotgun

Greg LeMond cycles to victory in the 1989 Tour de France [above]. Josh Hamilton hits home run number two of four in one night, for the Texas Rangers in May 2012 [right]