Lille, France, July 2, 1994
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.
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.
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