Despite a career that saw him become world champion, Luc Leblanc faced serious financial problems which led him to end up with “a cannon under his throat, his finger ready to press”.
Luc Leblanc had his day of glory in September 1994, during the world championships in Sicily, a few months after having tasted EPO before the Tour de France. But his career was also punctuated by disappointments like the craving that hit him during the 1991 Tour de France when he could hope to win. But his greatest tragedy struck him in 1978 when a speeder killed his eight-year-old brother and left him seriously injured in one leg.
“Why him and not me”, does he still wonder? Interviewed in the columns of Le Parisien on the occasion of the release of his book “Me, Lucho – The important thing is to stay alive”, the former Festina rider spoke about the consequences of this injury. “A lot of people didn’t know about the drama of my childhood and didn’t care about my gait when I had a leg injured for life. Every morning I left, I didn’t know if my leg was going to leave me alone or not. Each morning “, he explained.
These mockeries deeply affected him, as well as the unfounded accusations. “It was also said that I had betrayed my teammates to be champion of France (1992) or of the world (1994), which is archival. That I was the rotten board and the ugly duckling of the bike. I was misunderstood and unloved,” he added. At the end of his career, Luc Leblanc experienced other torments, this time financial.
I was at my wit’s end, in full depression
“Five years after my career ended (he stopped in 1998), I was at the end of my rope, in full depression. I had put on 20 kilos and I was subject to a tax audit when I had been the victim of a bad financial adviser. For the taxman, I was a cheat when I thought I was in good standing,” he said, explaining that he then wanted to end it: “That day, I took my gun and went up into a wood. I walked for a long time. At one point I sat down by a tree and held the gun barrel to my throat. It lasted a long time. The back against the bark and the finger ready to press… I remade the film of my life. Then I thought of my two children and my family. Finally, I put the rifle down and went back down to my village. »
Luc Leblanc, however, had to face other betrayals, one of which caused him to lose the rest of his savings. “The little I had left, I had invested, with my sister, in a project of seamless denim pants. It was pretty revolutionary stuff. We were supposed to produce 5,000 a month in a factory in South Korea. But the guy who created the project left after four years overnight,” he confided, now in search of a “fixed job”.
