RETRO: 1983 WORLDS
Greg LeMond’s 1983 Worlds win established the American as one of the bright young stars of the peloton. But as Procycling recalls, LeMond first had to overcome in-fighting in the US team and a crisis of confidence before claiming the rainbow jersey
This month’s retro relives Greg LeMond’s breakthrough World Championships victory
Greg LeMond won the World Championships road race three times in 11 years: the junior title in 1979, and the professional title in 1983 and 1989. Each marked a turning point in his career: the junior rainbow jersey in Argentina was his first major international title, pointing at what was to come; the rainsoaked rainbow jersey in Chambéry in 1989 was the apogee of cycling’s greatest ever comeback. But the 1983 win in Altenrhein, Switzerland, was the moment LeMond confirmed his status as the coming star of cycling, when he went from talented hopeful to champion.
This was a pioneering era, the period when professional cycling ceased to be parochially European and became international at breakneck pace, propelled by the English speakers: LeMond, Phil Anderson, Sean Kelly, Stephen Roche, Robert Millar... There were breakthrough races all through the 80s: LeMond’s 1983 Worlds win followed Millar and Roche’s successful first Tour de France; Anderson’s victory at the Amstel Gold Race; Kelly’s first victory in a Classic at the Tour of Lombardy came after; the arrival in Europe of the American 7-Eleven team, and so on.
LeMond was a pioneer in another way. Until his arrival, cycling was dominated by champions who raced constantly and won prolifically: Hinault, Merckx, De Vlaeminck. Prefiguring what came in the 21st century, however, LeMond didn’t actually win many races during his career, but when he did
cross the line first, he won big. In 1989, for example, he won just five races. They happened to be the World Championships road race, the Tour de France, plus three Tour stages. Roche would be the same, not prolific, but special nonetheless. The 1983 championships were based in the Swiss village of Altenrhein, on Lake Constance, right up against Switzerland’s border with Austria. As a location, it is at the heart of central Europe: Germany lies on the other side of the lake, and the Rhine flows in at one end and out at the other. Inevitably for Switzerland, the course was hilly, although while it was tougher by far than the previous year’s flattish course around Goodwood and the 1981 circuit in Prague, Altenrhein bore no resemblance to the brutal 1980 route at Sallanches, where only 15 riders had finished.
It was a classic attritional Worlds course, a 15km circuit with two ascents. The first began after 2km, and was short and steep, lasting 800m to the village of Schuler. The second, longer and draggier, took the riders to the Wartensee Hotel, and was the main battleground of the day. “It wasn’t a climb for climbers,” recalls Philippa York.
“It was the usual horrible six-to-seven per cent climb that you can get up in a big gear; you go up it in the big ring on power, so that as always in the Worlds, you just get worn down by the distance.” There were other aspects to the climb: it twisted across the hillside, meaning that the field could see just how much was left. That wasn’t easy on the mind, and nor was the contrast in the road surface, which was far rougher than the celebrated, silky smooth tarmac found elsewhere on the Swiss circuit.
LeMond had missed the Tour de France because his directeur sportif at Renault, Cyrille Guimard, believed he was too young for the three-week race. Guimard had acutely noticed LeMond’s nascent talent, but he made a classic error among successful directeur sportifs in believing that his American could slot into precisely the same template he had used for Bernard Hinault. The Badger had been raced hard but was brought gradually to the Tour on a pathway that encompassed one-day Classics, minor stage races and the Vuelta a España.
LeMond didn’t respond to a heavy workload as happily as Hinault, particularly if the weather was questionable – he kept on getting ill or injured – and as a rider who responded best to the biggest events, he could have been introduced to the Tour in 1983. Unlike Hinault, he was constantly doubting his form and health, to the point of hypochondria, but he also had the ability to take time off, then return to compete in the biggest events and win – the hallmark of an extremely talented athlete.
By 1982 LeMond had progressed rapidly, with silver in the World Championship, and a dominant win in the Tour de l’Avenir, by the largest margin in the event’s history. In spring 1983 he took the classic next step at Guimard’s Renault, riding the Vuelta a España, which always endured foul weather due to its late April date. He caught a cold, which became a virus, and had four weeks off. Having ridden two kermesses, and convinced he was in dire shape, he rocked up at the Dauphiné Libéré and won three stages, finishing second overall to Pascal Simon, who would later be disqualified for doping.
Kept out of a Tour he could well have won, LeMond took a holiday, then returned to Europe and raced criteriums, putting in 100km of training in the morning and racing
LeMond rode that World Championships without the bene it of a national team to back him. There wasn’t any strength in depth in US cycling in the early 80s
100km in the afternoon or evening. “I’ve never felt stronger,” he said of the spell just before the Worlds. “I was just floating. When you’re training that well, nothing is hard,” added LeMond. Guimard had him riding a seven-and-a-half-hour day and a sevenhour day back to back on the Wednesday and Thursday before the Worlds, all in the company of Anderson, a good friend who lived near to LeMond in Belgium.
Guimard was, in LeMond’s view, the best coach he encountered during his career. “You get a manager like him every 50 years. He made an effort to get to know everyone so as to work out how to get the maximum out of them. He understood exactly who I was, and he knew exactly what to say to me.”
Famously, Guimard had permitted LeMond to go completely against the grain of European cycling culture by allowing him to bring his wife Kathy to races; he had also learned English specifically to communicate with his young American. LeMond has told – and retold – the story of Guimard’s magic words before the Worlds several times. He explained to the Herald Tribune writer Samuel Abt, “The night before the Worlds I was so nervous that I could barely sleep. I couldn’t get anything out of my mind. At breakfast, at the hotel, I ordered a pot of muesli, two hard-boiled eggs, bread and orange juice from room service. I ended up eating nothing but five bites of muesli and an apple. My stomach was in a knot. I went over to Cyrille Guimard and said, ‘I’m so nervous that I only slept four or five hours last night, and I’m so exhausted this morning that I don’t know how I’m going to do.’”
The 80s variant has him only sleeping four or five hours and being barely able to keep any food down during the race; the millennial version has him sleeping “maybe two” hours, and vomiting up all his muesli. But what matters is Guimard’s response, a classic piece of confidence building. LeMond recalled: “Guimard answered, ‘Greg, you’re going to do really well today. Before their best days, all great champions have a sleepless night because they know they can win.’
“That’s the kind of thing Guimard was so good at,” added LeMond. “He said, ‘Don’t worry about being nervous, you’re going to win.’ Maybe he didn’t actually say I was going to win, maybe he actually said, ‘You’re going to have a big day when you’re nervous because you know you are going to do well.’ Whatever, it made me feel good. That was Guimard’s strength.” It seems unthinkable now but LeMond rode that World Championships without the benefit of a national team to back him. There wasn’t any strength in depth in US cycling in the early 80s – that would begin to develop in a couple of years once the 7-Eleven team had made the move to Europe – and his relationship with the only other American to race full time in Europe, Jonathan Boyer, was more than strained.
As, indeed, was his relationship with the national team set-up. The story is worth telling in full, for what it says about American cycling in that antediluvian era; the issues stemmed initially from the fact that there was no US national pro championship in those days. After the 1980 World Championships, in which Boyer finished a more than respectable fifth, Boyer declared himself the American national champion and raced the following 12 months in a stars and stripes jersey.
In 1981 in Prague, however, there was a second world-class American at the Worlds: LeMond, who didn’t want to race the World Championships as a national title. His view was that no other nation did this, and the way to progress US cycling was to move towards emulating other nations by having a proper National Championships, and fielding a complete team in the Worlds who would work together. Before Prague, the USCF asked the team to vote on whether the Worlds should include the national title; the team was split, LeMond refused even to vote, and said he would not race, and the USCF abandoned the idea.