The 2025 edition of the Tour de France is an entirely French affair, with the race staying within the confines of the hexagonal borders for the whole three weeks of racing. This means a Grand Départ on home soil for the first time since 2021, as the peloton begins their Odyssey around France in the northern city of Lille.

Prior to this year, the only time that Lille had played host to the start of La Grande Boucle was in 1994, as the 81st edition of the race began with a 7.2km-long prologue around the city. Before the days of Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard, this was an era ruled by Miguel Indurain, who was known for being dominant in the time trials, but he would not come out on top in this race against the clock.

On that day, Chris Boardman would emerge victorious on debut to claim his first of three prologue wins at the Tour de France and become the first British rider to wear the maillot jaune since Tom Simpson in 1962. On his infamous Lotus 110 bike, the Englishman clocked an average speed 55.2km/h and set a record for the fastest stage ever ridden at the Tour de France, which would not be broken until 2015.

Meanwhile, Boardman’s GAN teammate and three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond was beginning the final race of his career. In a changing of the guard, the American legend was a figurehead in an outgoing generation of clean riders, as professional cycling was gradually entering into its darkest era. No longer able to compete at the highest level for seemingly inexplicable reasons at the time, LeMond had become disillusioned with the sport and opted to bow out a few days later with his integrity still intact.

This excerpt from issue 123 of Rouleur focuses on a photograph by James Startt, taken in the last minutes before LeMond rolled off the ramp to begin his final Tour de France.

‘The future is not always a good place. Greg LeMond circles the holding pen for the starters of the 1994 Tour de France, just ahead of the opening Prologue in Lille. In his immediate future: a solid but unspectacular ride to 22nd place, 41 seconds behind the day’s winner Chris Boardman, and 26 seconds behind the eventual yellow jersey winner Miguel Indurain. LeMond’s medium-term future was grimmer: he would lose more than five minutes on stage four to Brighton, UK, a further 2:46 a day later in Portsmouth, and, demoralised and suffering from fatigue, he recorded a DNF on stage six to Rennes, his last day on the Tour de France, and his last ever as a racing cyclist.

For a three-time winner of the race, it was a quiet, underwhelming and sad way to leave the sport – long-term health issues caused by the presence of lead shot in his body following a hunting accident had eroded his once world-beating powers of endurance, and he professed to be unable to compete with rivals who were taking EPO. And a further poignant twist was added by the fact that Boardman was his team-mate at Gan. LeMond had once been the future of the team; now he’d been replaced, just as he’d replaced the established stars as an up-and-coming rider.

LeMond was a groundbreaking, revolutionary cyclist. More than any other individual in his era, and perhaps in the history of the sport, he dragged the sport from being a hidebound, traditional, inward-looking concern, to a modern, technologically-savvy, better paid place. He instigated better conditions for riders, was the highest-profile proponent of the new technology of tri-bars for time-trials, raised salaries across the board and inspired generations of Americans and anglophones to get into the sport.

The short and medium-term future for LeMond in Lille might not have been happy, and he experienced tribulations through the Lance Armstrong era, but maybe the perennially cheerful Californian might have raised a smile to know that in the long term he would become one of the sport’s most venerated, popular and loved figures.’

Timepiece features in each issue of Rouleur and places readers at the centre of a moment in cycling history. Read the magazine to discover more untold stories and be taken on a journey into the past.