The more you learn about the bike industry the uglier it looks. For example Trek married itself to Lance Armstrong, in the era before he was proven to be a massive dope cheat.
Trek at the time and their legal department caused millions of dollars of damages to Greg LeMond and his bike business he had licensed to trek. It turns out LeMond was speaking the honest factual truth all along about what an absolutely terrible human being Armstrong was. All later admitted by Armstrong, and by members of the former US Postal team in sworn depositions.
Yes exactly. They rode that Armstrong/livestrong/US postal/discovery team pony for as long as they could, as hard as they could, as long as it kept selling bikes and provided a huge benefit to the bottom line.
Trek also managed to take the brand name licensed to them by one of the people who can reasonably lay claim to the title of "inventor of the mountain bike", Gary Fisher, and run it into the ground.
Other major brands are almost as bad. Giant was the sponsor for the T-Mobile team of the late 1990s and early to mid 2000s in the Jan Ullrich era, which was just as rife with organized doping. They knew full well about the doping allegations (also all later proven and admitted by the team members once retired) and did nothing as long as the financial figures looked good.
Every single sponsor of the uci protour teams from 1990 to about 2015 knew how absolutely ingrained systemic doping and cheating was, and continued to funnel money into the western European Continental cycling races and team corporations.
Trek at the time and their legal department caused millions of dollars of damages to Greg LeMond and his bike business he had licensed to trek. It turns out LeMond was speaking the honest factual truth all along about what an absolutely terrible human being Armstrong was. All later admitted by Armstrong, and by members of the former US Postal team in sworn depositions.