A little Lemond Catalog reading for the weekend

Greg LeMond recently re-launched his personal website. To a lot of us, Greg represents everything good about pro cycling. He was an incredible talent, making winning seem easy in his earliest years. Following his unfortunate hunting accident, he used a combination of smarts, incredible bike handing skills, and sheer will to win an additional 2 Tour de France overalls and a Worlds title, to go with his pre-accidents wins.

Greg was an unfortunate victim of the pharmacological revolution in the pro peloton in the early 90's. Where natural talent and intelligence could compete with the cortisone and amphetamine jacked pro's of the '80's, contending in the face of EPO just wasn't going to happen. Greg's been pretty vocal about it, and has gotten a lot of shit from people for speaking his mind. I've seen the guy speak. He's not some ultra-polished PR-trained robot, but a normal guy, who speaks humbly and honestly about what he saw and sees as the undoing of cycling - and does so without an ounce of bitterness. 3 time tour champ. 2 time world champ. He has nothing in the world to be bitter about.

Anyhow, go check out his site, follow him on Twitter, be his friend on Facebook. Encourage and support the guy - he's awesome.

I'm disabling comments on this post - my blog, my soapbox. But in exchange for your forced silence on this topic, here are scans of the 1992 LeMond Bicycles catalog.

The Team Z version of the carbon frames were Calfee built. Where the consumer ones?


Carbon. Calfee or not? It has the webbing we associate with them, but I don't know...


Geometry. Long top tubes was (is?) the Lemond geom

TSX and SL. The rainbow TSX frame, along with the inverted version (black top tube) is the one I always associate with Lemond.

2 days! Who's ready for Paris-Roubaix? This guy right here

Just in case you hadn't noticed, I have a couple of topics I seem to write about. I'm clearly a Mavic junkie, a super-fan of late 80's/early 90's racing, and a pave obsessive. Most roadies cringe when you say Rock Shox, but I get all excited at the thought of suspension on cobbles.

So when an insane opportunity arose to merge all of those in to one project emerged, I couldn't say no.

What we have here is the nexus of all the things that get me excited in a bike. Lemond Team GAN, decked out about as close as possible to the bike Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle rode the latter portion of 1994's edition of Paris-Roubaix.

In 1994, GAN was sponsored by Mavic, and rode the Zap electronic shifters in some events - or at least, tried to. As you can see here, Lemond was riding Zap at least a little during the spring classics.

I'm not going to make any assumptions about why, but they did NOT ride Zap in Paris-Roubaix (and, in fact, in a lot of other races as well...but thats a different topic). Instead they rode a mixed drivetrain - the crank was a Mavic 631/2, the 862 front derailleur, and 571/2 front and rear hubs. For shifters, they used Campagnolo's Record Ergopower shifters, along with a Record rear derailleur. The 571/2 would likely have had a Campagnolo Exa Drive body on it, though it could also have been a custom spaced Mavic proprietary cassette.

Up front, they were riding Rock Shox Paris-Roubaix SL forks. Mavic 451 brakes. Cinelli bars and stems - Duclos-Lassalle rode Criterium bars (yes, with Ergopower). They used a variety of stems on the bikes, including the Oyster and the 101.

Selle San Marco saddles - some Rolls, some Regals, and some Titanios. Selcof posts.

Obviously, a few liberties were taken in building the bike. I'm in no way scared of tubulars, but I AM scared of the price tag associated with Mavic Paris-Roubaix rims. Tracking down the 1994 version of the Record Ergopowers proved something of a pain, so I acquiesced and went with a set of 1995 Chorus levers - identical to the Records of the prior year, save some cutouts in the lever. There are a few other things I know are wrong, but I'll leave it to the astute - and annoying - reader to nitpick on my project.

I'll be riding this bike Sunday, April 11 in the Brooklyn Pavé ride. It's a ride around Brooklyn, hitting some of the handful of cobbled streets that still remain. It starts at the Old Stone House in Park Slope (4th St. + 5th Ave) at 1pm - we roll out at 2. Please note - this is a friendly little ride not affiliated with any responsible entity. If the rider has a flat or breaks a fork or gets socked by Bernard Hinault, we'll help out but we're not culpable. Moderate pace over some pretty bumpy roads - you'll feel 'em way more than I will, what with my suspension fork - so nerves, or at least an ass of steel recommended. Email me (upper right corner of this page!) for additional info.

Still 4 days until Paris-Roubaix

I'm only scratching the surface! More cobbled mayhem all week!

VeloNews, April 26, 1993

4 days to Roubaix: The correct answer is "elastomer"

A few months ago, I wrote about the full suspension bikes that some Team Gan members were riding in 1994 at Paris-Roubaix. At the time, I wasn't sure what the deal with the rear suspension was - was it air/oil, or elastomer. The article below solves that mystery. (it was elastomer)

That's a whole lotta technology on Greg's bike in the above scan. Early SRM power meter, Mavic Zap shifters. Most riders don't care what they ride, but Lemond definitely was the bike geek's racer - he was more willing to try out some of the new technologies that were beginning to emerge, even if some of those technologies, like electronic shifting, are only just becoming viable today.

MERCKX TEAM COLOR SCHEME ALERT: The Lotto rider between Lemond and Cipo is riding a Caloi - which is really an relabeled Merckx. Different color scheme that I'd previously documented - guess I was right when I said there was a Lotto scheme I was missing.

Road Bike Action August 1993 - Paris-Roubaix

58 days until Paris-Roubaix. You ready? I'm ALMOST ready...still have a little work to do...

Here's a little weekend reading, to get you in the mood - Road Bike Action's coverage of Paris-Roubaix 1993. Won by the previous year's winner, Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle from the Gan team. With the success he had riding a Rock Shox fork the previous year, the peloton went a little suspension crazy, riding Rock Shox Paris-Roubaix's, suspension stems, and all sorts of other mad scientist style creations.

Full suspension at Paris-Roubaix

The last couple of years have seen some vendors slowly introducing shock-absorbing materials in to road bikes available to the public. It seems like quite often, these bikes are first seen in public during Paris-Roubaix. A big deal was made of Hincapie's 2005 soft tail Trek, even though that bike design never was made available to the public. Far more successful are some of the dampening technologies, like Specialized's Zertz inserts, which are available in all sorts of bikes in their lineup. Every article that mentions these bikes, without fail, mentions the widespread adoption of Rock Shox forks by riders in Paris-Roubaix in the early 90's, and how Museeuw used a full suspension Bianchi in 1994.

There were actually a few others that were tried as well. An interview for France 2, with Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle and Greg Lemond gave us some interesting glimpses at a full suspension rig they both used for at least part of PR in 1994.

Full suspension Lemond front-end. Note the Grip Shift adjustment knob for the rear shock...

According to the information in the bottome part of the article here, these bikes were built by Clark-Kent, in Denver CO out of Titanium. The recollections in the article are, unfortunately, a little flawed - Duclos-Lassalle finished first in 1992 and 1993, and came in 7th in 1994.

Duclos-Lassalle was off this bike, and on to a Excell tubed Lemond within the first 1/3 of the race that day. Why, we don't know. I think its fair to assume something as simple as a flat that early in the race wouldn't necessitate a bike change - and given that watching 1994 footage closely suggests he changed bikes again in the latter half of the race, to another Excell tubed frame, makes it unlikely whatever went wrong was easily fixed.

Check out that crazy rear suspension system - reminds me of the Moots YBB soft tail.

This scanned clipping over at the Mombat site gives a closeup of a Lemond that looks very similar to the one shown in the interview - it doesn't appear to be the same frame, but its probably fairly similar. Air/Oil shock? Or maybe the white thing in the picture above is some sort of elastomer?

Requisite Rock Shox Paris-Roubaix. Mavic 451 brake.

Potential technical issues aside, looks like a very cool ride, and I'd certainly like to know where any of these ended up after the race.