How young does Greg LeMond look here? It’s early 1981, his first pro year and he was 19. Moving to Europe to race and train was a culture and life shock, but his Renault-Elf team boss Cyrille Guimard understood and tried to help. He allowed Greg trips back to the US through the year, but it was still difficult. Even the standard and expectations of European pro racing were shocks.
Greg started his first pro season overweight, but Guimard had a fix. After most of the early season races in the South of France he made LeMond ride back to the team’s base. He went from 70 kilograms to 61 in six weeks, then he hit the early-season classics.
He rode Paris-Roubaix in support of Bernard Hinault, who won, despite the Frenchman’s hatred of the cobbled classic, with Greg making one of the final attacks to set things up for his team leader.
A short break in the US in April was followed by LeMond’s first pro victory, a stage of the Tour de l’Oise ahead of Australian Phil Anderson. Ten days later he started the traditional warm up for the Tour de France, the Criterium du Dauphine, and finished 4th. This was boosted to 3rd when the original 3rd place rider was thrown out for doping. Another fact of European racing LeMond had to deal with.
On a trip home in the pro-am the Red Zinger and stage race he beat the Russian 1980 Olympic road race champion Sergei Sukhoruchenkov, which flagged up the fact that, but for the US boycott of the Games, he could have achieved his Olympic gold medal ambition in 1980.
And that was pretty much Greg’s first pro season. He rode some after-Tour criteriums with Bernard Hinault and did the world road race championships in Prague. Guimard was happy.
He’d upped LeMond’s salary during the year, having started on the equivalent of 18,000 dollars for the year, the dollar got stronger and it was soon worth only 12,000 a year, so Guimard increased it to 25,000. He also told Greg “You are the biggest talent I’ve ever seen. Bigger than Hinault even.” That’s praise indeed.
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