A gold-medal-winning Olympic show jumper from Canada has been accused of faking brain cancer to avoid a court showdown over accusations he got rich by selling unfit horses.
Eric Lamaze, 55, was facing numerous lawsuits when he first announced in 2019 that he was battling glioblastoma, an aggressive, rare cancer, according to HorseSport.
In July, his then-attorney filed legal papers claiming that Lamaze’s cancer had “spread to his throat” — and that he would need a “high-risk” craniotomy, temporarily removing part of his skull and leaving him unable to speak “quite possibly on a permanent basis,” the report said.
However, documents submitted as proof were soon proven to be forgeries — in part because they were written in Dutch, a language the named specialist doesn’t speak.
Even Lamaze’s attorney, Tim Danson — who has known him for 30 years — then jumped ship, leaving with a damning statement in his final appearance with him in Ontario Superior Court earlier this month, the report said.
“Eric is very sick, but maybe not with cancer,” Danson was quoted as saying.
Justice Marvin Kurz ruled earlier this month that Lamaze — who won gold in Beijing in 2008 after earlier disqualifications for cocaine use — “feigned end-stage cancer” to avoid a “day of reckoning” in the lawsuit.
The show jumper was ordered to pay costs for earlier missed hearings and has until Oct. 9 to find a new attorney or risk losing the lawsuit by default.
Lamaze has now blamed the forged documents on a member of his staff doing “funny things.”
“The Dutch doctor never existed … I never had a Dutch doctor,” he admitted in interviews with The Daily Beast that also addressed his history of using cocaine and having a “really bad drinking problem.”
However, he maintained that he had not lied about his cancer — even claiming that he walked out of a hospital in 2020 when he was given just two hours to live, and somehow recovered on his own.
He also shared an undated photo of him looking frail in a hospital bed, and another showing a zig-zag-shaped scar on his head, which he claimed was from the surgery to address his tumor.
A neuro-oncologist told the outlet that such operations were more likely to leave “linear” scars, while accepting that the shape of the wound was “theoretically possible” from the stated surgery.
One plastic surgeon, Jay Calvert, told the outlet that a separate cavity near the horse rider’s nose was “consistent with cocaine use.”
Despite his assurances, attorneys for at least one of the horse owners suing Lamaze have had doubts for years — with private investigators spotting him competing days after he announced his apparent cancer battle in 2019.
“You know, January 19, 20, he’s on his deathbed for brain cancer. And on January 31, he’s jumping in” an event, an attorney in the case, Jerome Morse, told the Beast.
“We put an investigator on him … And sure enough, throughout March he competed, and competed rather well.”
Morse represents equestrian Karina Aziz, one of many accusing Lamaze of selling horses that were unfit for show jumping – including, in Aziz’s case, one surgically deprived of feeling in a foot that later went lame.
“They were sold these faulty horses. And then Eric would say, ‘Oh, you’re a terrible rider, it’s not the horse, like, I’m Olympic champion,’” Aziz told The Daily Beast of Lamaze, who amassed a fortune over the years in buying and selling high profile show jumpers.
Lamaze, however, remained defiant.
“I’m not guilty. I mean, bring it on,” he told The Daily Beast. “It’s your job to check what you’re buying, not mine,” he told the outlet.
“In our business, [it’s] rich daddy, princess girl. They want what they can’t ride.”
While being open about his heavy drinking and coke abuse, Lamaze insisted that drugs are not part of his current problems — because the court battles have left him too penniless to by any.
“Ask me to go buy a hamburger today, I can’t,” he lamented.