Zannier’s company needed to make people aware of its existence Peugeot desperately needed a sponsor. He was drawn in part by the fact that a Peugeot rider, the quiffed and sideburned Teddy Boy lookalike Ronan Pensec, had just finished fifth in the Tour de France.Ī stage win for Jérôme Simon had probably done no harm either. Z’s founder Roger Zannier saw one of the many media reports about Peugeot pulling out, and got in touch. Legeay’s career as a team manager could have been short-lived, but the sponsor found Legeay. “Peugeot decided they were going to stop sponsoring during the 1986 Tour, which gave me about a month to find a new sponsor,” recalled Roger Legeay, who had moved on from riding for Peugeot to working as its directeur sportif that same year. ![]() The sport? No, not the sport, but the event that rapidly came to be the sport: the Tour de France. This was a different market: not blokes who go to bike races, but their wives who might watch the sport on daytime television. They were pedalling sandwich board men for a chain of children’s clothing stores. The riders who had been publicising Peugeot were no longer advertising basic consumer goods – radios, cars, cigarettes, booze, chewing gum, sausages – like most of their peers. To start with, Z didn’t make the kind of product that fitted the profile of traditional cycling fans. Between 19, on the back of Greg LeMond’s success and a massive expansion in television coverage of the Tour de France, cycling went global, and Z was part of that process. The arrival of Z coincided with the point where cycling entered a new world. The change, however, was very much of its time. And as the sole surviving big-time squad where the lead sponsor was a bike manufacturer, Peugeot had been the last factory team in cycling.Įddy Merckx leads the pack at the 1966 Tour of Lombardy Peugeot had always made a point of using French componentry: Mafac centre-pull brakes, Simplex gears, bits and pieces from TA, Wolber tyres. The damiers had graced greats including Eddy Merckx, Charly Gaul, Walter Godefroot, Tom Simpson, Bernard Thévenet and Roger Pingeon. As a team, in various guises, it had been around since the turn of the century and won four of the first six Tours de France. Peugeot had begun sponsoring cyclists not long after its inception in 1882. This is our logo, said the jersey you haven’t heard of us, but this is what we do. Out went the damiers, the black-and-white chessboard of the old institution, and in came a ker-pow splodge-splat punch of a logo that would not have looked out of place in a Superman comic strip, along with a scrawl (“ vêtements enfants”) that could have been written by a child. To make the point, there was a kit change, a seismic one. ![]() That solid, dependable national institution of a name was not suddenly coupled with another, as was the case with other major bike companies (Panasonic- Raleigh, La Redoute-Motobécane, Renault-Gitane), but a letter.Īnd not just any letter: Z, if you will, the most unlikely of all. The Peugeot team, including Bernard Thevenet and Jacques Esclassan, parade along the Champs ElyseesĪll this is to underline that when the Peugeot cycling team stopped being known as Peugeot in 1987, it was quite an event. People had been getting on Peugeot bikes and vélomoteurs to go to work for more than 100 years, and the chances are that a good few of the nation’s children had either been conceived in the back of a Peugeot, or with the Peugeot used as transport to the place of conception. It was not a national joke in the way mass-market British car companies were by then. Peugeot had a place in the national warp and weft akin to an English football club such as Arsenal, but at the same time Peugeot itself in its various guises was as good as universal. There is no British or American equivalent for Peugeot, because the status the bike company and its sponsored cycling teams enjoyed in France in the 1970s and 1980s was unique. The team is sponsored by a company that is a national institution, one that has probably provided every family in the country with locomotion of some kind, either car or bike or moped. The design is instantly recognisable because the colours are also worn by amateur competitors across the nation. It wears colours that go back more than 20 years and have been worn by the greatest athletes in this sport to win the greatest events. ![]() Picture, if you will, the most rock-solidly traditional bastion of the sporting establishment, with a history spanning more than a century, a team embedded in the very roots of this sport.
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