The French team’s offer of $5.5 million over three years was lower than Toshiba’s, but the clincher was that the team would ride LeMond branded bikes. The deal was a bidding war between 7-Eleven, Toshiba and Z. Robert Millar in Cycle Sport Magazine, 1997. Since I knew Roger Legeay, who was relatively new to the job, it meant that he was able to talk to us on a person-to-person basis and not like he owned you, which had been the case up until then. I was glad to return to the spiritual successor to the old Peugeot squad. The astute, personable Legeay had tapped up LeMond at two key moments: in 1988 when he was at his lowest ebb after his shooting accident, and in 1989, the evening before LeMond took the yellow jersey for the first time in the Tour. Millar was an astute signing for 1989, winning a Tour stage and finishing in the top 10, but for 1990, Legeay and Zannier pulled off the ultimate coup de pub and dragged cycling into the 90s with a multi-million dollar deal for Greg LeMond, who had just won what most regard as the greatest Tour ever by 8sec from Laurent Fignon. Vêtements Z-Peugeot Cycling Team postcard from 1989 Plus, Zannier was a hands-on sponsor, who would let a mechanic or soigneur drive his Ferrari when the team was racing near his Saint Etienne base and he would jump into a team car for the day. Philippa York, who as Robert Millar was the team’s leader in 1989, recalled a family atmosphere, thanks in part to the fact that most of the team riders and staff were from Peugeot, and the management - Leugeay, Serge Beucherie, Michel Laurent - had ridden for the old team. In that respect, it was of its time, as cycling moved rapidly into the modern incarnation we know today. Like the equally radical La Vie Claire jersey, the design was possible only because of new printing techniques: Legeay recalled that it shocked some, but the consensus was that it was a “young” design. The only addition was an explanatory vêtements enfants in a typescript deliberately resembling a child’s handwriting, which appeared on the jersey from 1988. The two Rogers were on the sub-group that designed the jersey: “the logo was already there, and the deep blue was the company’s color,” Legeay told me. Vêtements Z-Peugeot Cycling Team postcard from 1988 At the point where Zannier and Legeay joined forces, the company was just expanding into the high street. The brand had been launched 30 years later: clothing from A to Z was the marketing blurb. He and his sister Josette had founded their clothing makers in 1962, armed with only a pair of sewing machines. It was a quick decision because Zannier was the company’s only decision-maker. The deal was sealed in the four-week window which was all the time that another Roger, Peugeot manager (and former rider) Legeay had to play with between Peugeot telling him they were pulling out, and the team being disbanded. Z made a timely entry after their founder Roger Zannier spotted during the 1986 Tour that Peugeot needed a new sponsor. Or rather, who would watch the Tour de France. This was headed at a different market: women who would watch cycling on daytime television. Traditionally these had been basic consumer products for men: sausages, cigarettes, booze, radios, cars. The Z children’s clothing company was one of a new wave of cycling extra-sportif sponsors. Peugeot had been cycling’s last factory team, solely sponsored by a bike maker. It was a radical look for a radical moment. Vêtements Z-Peugeot Cycling Team postcard from 1987 The Z team kit launched on the public in 1987 was all that and more: a deep blue with that comic-book biff-kapow-burst Z in a rip-look “window”.įor the time it was utterly radical, the more so because it replaced France’s most traditional jersey design: Peugeot’s black and white checkerboard with its heritage going back to the dawns of cycling in the 19th century. The great cycling kit designs always divide opinion, but they have another thing in common: they are always utterly memorable. Greg Lemond, Robert Millar and Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle all rode in the famous comic-book-inspired team jersey. Join cycling author & journalist William Fotheringham who looks back at the Z Vêtements Peugeot cycling team.
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