"The UCI is just there to stamp licenses and make the regulations. The solution for cycling is very simple: organizers and riders should create their own federation and take over the sport"
Hi everyone & thank you Claire for your kind words.
This is my "new" bike. In fact it is a Trek-US Postal 2003 bike that was given to me by my brother. I've never been an Armstrong fan so I wasn't too excited about the painting & stickers so...
I tried to make this bike as close to Greg's 1983 Gitane bike, the one he had when he won his first rainbow jersey. I was 9 at the time and this is when it all started for me as a Greg LeMond fan. You see, we had this habit with my father & older brother to race on our bikes, pretending we were champions. 1 week before the actual race in Switzerland, we made our own world championship. My father was Fignon, my brother was Hinault and I was Greg. Needless to say...I won. Then the real Greg won too ! That was a sign.
This is my tribute to Greg and the great many years I spent since then enjoying his victories and inspiration over & over again.
This bike has been painted in the same electric blue, I added yellow tape on the handlebars and switched from shimano to campagnolo group to get as close as the 1983 modolo brakes as possible. I finally found good reproductions of Gitane decals on e-bay Australia.
What's really funny is that I took the bike to get this done only 2 weeks prior to Trek dropping LeMond bikes.
I appreciate the kind of irony this bike gives to that story.
"He is American cycling"
"THE best of all time was Greg LeMond"
He told me "I'm gonna win the Tour de France", and I told him "You're crazy Greg!"
"It's not me by speaking out against drugs that's causing this bad publicity for cycling, it's those who choose to cheat and take drugs."
But before you damn Greg, before you write him off as an embittered ex-pro and accept the meme that he says what he says only because he wanted to be the only American ever to win the Tour de France, look at the man's life, in full. Look at what he really said. Look what's happened since. Look at the state of the sport today and ask yourself if he said what he did because he hates the sport, or because he loves it. If you were in his position, that's what you'd want, too.
IF YOU WANT LEMOND TO WIN, TRY TO KILL HIM
Author: Bill Lyon Knight-Ridder News Service Edition: FINAL
With apologies to that incomparable aerialist Michael Jordan, to that geriatric bringer of heat Nolan Ryan, to that ubiquitous merchandiser of jockdom Bo Jackson, to that lord of the rinks Wayne Gretzky, but the best athlete in the world right now is . . . A skinny, scrawny shrimp with a cherubic face and a crooked smile who doesn't look as if he could be a threat at even, say, a brisk game of checkers.Ah, but hunched over the handlebars in that aerodynamic tuck position, legs as tireless and relentless as a metronome, he becomes something of a human bullet and brings a whole new dimension to, and appreciation of, the notion of human locomotion through pedal power.
In short, Gregory James LeMond is hell on wheels.
He won the Tour de France yesterday. It is the longest, biggest, richest, most important bicycle race in the world, and before LeMond came along, hardly anyone in the American sporting public was aware of it. But now he has won it three times, twice in a row, last year by all of eight seconds, thereby giving a whole new meaning to winning by a nose, this year with a glorious and gutsy and irresistible rush on the next-to-last day, on the very day that he called it, called his shot, and now it has reached the point that if he doesn't win it every year you are going to hear people who don't know spokes from sprockets bleating: "So what's wrong with LeMond and that Tour thing, anyhow?"
LeMond has done, imagine a youth from, say, Brazil, going to Canada and learning how to play hockey and then winning the Stanley Cup. Frequently. Only one other American had ever even entered a Tour de France before LeMond, who was a stranger in a strange land involved in a strange sport.
Now the French embrace him. He has won them over with his grit. They adore his boldness, how he metamorphoses from this inoffensive wisp into this single- minded fang-bared killer in the sport that so enflames their passion. And they love that he has taught himself their language, and it probably does not hurt that his name sounds French, although his ancestry is mostly Scotch- Irish, and that basically what he is, is a kid from Nevada who was nuts for skiing until one winter there came a drought and he was stuck biking and got hooked on that. He won the Tour this year breezing, laughing, on cruise control. Yet, as recently as 10 days before, he had floundered along in 35th place, an alarming 10 minutes in arrears of the leaders, there were ominous headlines. But then he has been grievously underestimated before.
It is not necessary to know anything about cycling to understand that Greg LeMond is long on gumption and perseverance. His whole life is a miracle of will. Soon after he became the first Yank to win the Tour, in 1986, he lay bleeding to death, gutted by a shotgun blast in a hunting accident. He lived, but then you knew that. Before winning his second Tour, he had to overcome an emergency appendectomy, tendinitis, a broken wrist and a serious leg infection. Before this year's Tour, he spent five weeks fighting a virus, and then had food poisoning for dessert.
It has become abundantly clear that the surest way to make Greg LeMond win is to try to kill him. He still carries an estimated 30 small lead pellets, No. 2 buckshot, inside his barbed-wire body. "The doctors said there's really no danger leaving them in," he once explained to a horrified interviewer. "Your body forms scar tissue." By now, his body has had a lot of practice. The race itself is a manufacturer of scar tissue, on both the psyche and the physique.
The Tour de France is a crusher of will, a destroyer of spirit and an agony of the body. This year's route covered 2,112 miles and yet the
average speed was more than 24 miles per hour. That's with a couple of fairly serious mountain ranges, the Alps and the Pyrenees. There were attacks and counterattacks, breakaways and switchbacks, impossibly steep climbs when a biker stands straight up and barely can keep up with a pedestrian, followed by terrifying descents at 70 miles per hour where the merest brushing of one wheel against another can trigger a crash that swallows 30 riders. As a matter of fact, LeMond Which, of course, meant he was a mortal lock.
Again. Of course you have to be a bit mad to climb onto the saddle to begin with, submitting yourself to more than 2,000 miles and three weeks of soul-searing excruciation. But to appreciate what Greg Winning on cruise control crashed this year. Got up bleeding, with the middle finger of his braking hand swollen and useless. That's the end of him, they said.
Which, of course, meant he was a mortal lock.
On November 27, 2007 (...) an attorney for Mr. Armstrong contacted Mr. LeMond's attorney. Mr. Armstrong's attorney indicated that he would like to broker a "truce" between Mr. Armstrong and Mr. LeMond because Trek would no longer be in a position to temper things between Mr. Armstrong and Mr. LeMond (...). The suggestion of a truce was interesting since Mr. Armstrong had only recently inserted himself and sought to damage Mr. LeMond's position in a property dispute that Mr.LeMond had in Montana.
"Greg's public comments hurt the LeMond brand and the Trek brand," Burke said.
I'm not sure yet what to think about it... Maybe it has to do with Richard Burke's recent death. Greg had nice words about him:
Greg LeMond, who sold his bike brand to Trek in the early 1990s, called Burke a visionary.
"My heart goes out to the Burke family and the entire extended Trek family," LeMond told VeloNews.
"He was a visionary in the world of cycling and together with his son, John, built an incredible family business. I will always remember him as a man of integrity and he will be dearly missed."
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