Try googling “Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport+Eric Lamaze”.
What you will find in a pdf document, in part, is this.
"Personal Background
Eric Lamaze was born in Montreal on April 16, 1968. His life of 28 years already
provides ample material for a compelling biography or full-length movie. The facts which follow are not recited for any voyeuristic purpose but to demonstrate the incredible strength of character and resilience of this remarkable young man.
He has no brothers or sisters and neither he nor his mother knows who his father is. Since his mother had problems with drug abuse and was unable to support him, he lived with his maternal grandmother in a poor area of Montreal for the first twelve years of his life. She was separated from his grandfather. While she appeared to treat him well, she was a heavy drinker and their only source of income was social assistance.
There was a great deal of illicit drug use in the area where Eric’s grandmother lived and drugs were readily available “on the street”. By the time he was eleven or twelve he had used marijuana and experimented with “magic mushrooms” and “LSD”. Such drug use was common amongst his friends and was expected of those who “fit in”. It occurred mostly on week-ends.
His mother would visit him occasionally on week-ends but some time after he turned six, she was incarcerated over a period of approximately four years. He would be taken to visit her on week-ends. After his mother was released, he lived with her for approximately two years (when he was twelve and thirteen years of age). During this time, she trafficked in drugs and, particularly, cocaine. His mother did not discourage his own use of cocaine during this period.
Eric was an energetic and, possibly, “hyperactive” child who took readily and
successfully to sports. His mother had an acquaintance who owned a farm with horses where she ran an informal school. One way or another, he would get to the farm and started to ride horses until he became enamoured with the sport of equestrian riding. His riding began while he was still living with his grandmother. He learned quickly and the owner of the farm eventually provided him with a horse so that he could attend horse shows.
Throughout this period, he was also developing his skills in tennis. From the time he was six, Eric would “hang out” at a park near his grandmother’s. One day, someone gave him a tennis racket and he began hitting balls. Again, he learned quickly and soon was playing doubles with older people. As he became increasingly proficient, he began to receive compliments and occasional tips. He was invited to join a tennis club in another area which competed in the province of Quebec and in the United States. By the time he was twelve, he had a sponsor and was competing seriously.
However, it soon became apparent that he would not be able to continue to compete in tennis if he wanted to pursue riding. At the age of thirteen, he quit tennis. The reaction of many of those closest to him at the time was traumatic for him. The response of his mother, grandmother, tennis coach and sponsors was overwhelmingly negative. They all felt that he was squandering a talent which would allow him to be successful in spite of his poorperformance at school.
Eric reacted to their rejection of him by becoming a “street kid”. He stopped going to school, went to a lot of parties, took the odd job in order to live and, generally, was aimless in life. The only constant factor in his life was his commitment to riding and his visits to the farm for that purpose."
