I'm not knocking Trek or Lance, the question asked was, "if lance didn't ride a trek?"
Trek sales in '99 were $55 million and jumped to over $550 million last year. They make nice products, I'm not arguing that. We are all cyclists but I'm talking about the average consumer, in which the last time they ever even thought about riding a bike was when they were ten on their 20" bmx.
When Trek signed Lance, it was a huge gamble, they even said so themselves, look it up. They knew that his story of beating cancer, being an American, and hopefully winning Tours would do great for their business.
And of course everyone in this forum will say that "Ive been riding bikes since 1923, so how can you say it wasn't popular?" So I guess that means if you like it, everyone else must like it. But before Lance won his first tour, does anyone even remember Le Tour being mentioned during the evening news, no. No one cared about the sport of cycling, until Lance won, it was a sport for the rest of the world.
As far as the quality of their bikes go... well my view is a bit scewed since I part-time at a shop in DC that is one of the top ten trek dealers in the country. We've worked on Lance's bikes for the Tour of Hope, we've put together Trek bikes for the entire Bush family... we've received so many broken OCLV frames from crashes, poor shipping, crappy hangers, etc... and all this also happens with every company out there. Basically what I'm saying is, their quality is no better than the next.