Friday, September 20, 2013

Resurrection

LeMond cycles has announced it's relaunching the brand, with Time providing the manufacturing.  I found this picture of the frame at InterBike on LeMond's FaceBook page.

The paint on the '86 recalls the yellow and combined jerseys in a way that, like LeMond himself, is classy.

Each of the three frames is numbered according to the year Greg won the Tour de France.  This one is the '86, commemorating both his GC win as well as his triumph in the now defunct Combined Category.

LeMond's place in cycling history has been up and down over the years, with many in the cycling community thinking he was a bit of a whiner while Lance was winning his tours having been subsequently forced to eat crow as his revelations have come out.  The mid to late eighties happened to coincide with my mid to late teens, a time when I was discovering myself and bike racing.  The epic battles between LeMond, Hinault, and Fignon on the mythic cols and Parisian avenues of France inspired me, a skinny climber kid, to suffer in the humid Florida heat on roads without hills.  

That LeMond is now regarded in most circles as the only American winner of the Tour will hopefully be mirrored by the resurrection of this brand as a going concern.  It was unfortunate that his relationship with Trek was sullied by the Armstrong camp to the point that the LeMond brand was basically run into the ground.

And perhaps we'll even see an updated Poprad.  One of the ways LeMond's Americanness affected bike racing was that he didn't limit himself to traditional ways of doing things, equipment and training wise.