![]() Zannier had built the company from nothing, beginning in 1962 when he and his sister Josette bought two sewing machines and began making clothes. Zannier’s company needed to make people aware of its existence Peugeot desperately needed a sponsor. A stage win for Jerome Simon had probably done no harm either. ![]() He was drawn in part by the fact that a Peugeot rider, the bequiffed and sideburned teddy boy lookalike Ronan Pensec, had just finished 5 th in the Tour de France. ![]() 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 might 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 was very much of its time, however. And as sole surviving last big-time squad where the lead sponsor was a bike manufacturer, Peugeot was the last factory team in cycling. Peugeot had always made a point of using French componentry: Mafac centrepull 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 it had 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 might not have looked out of place in a Superman comic strip, along with a scrawl that might have been written by a child, vetements enfants. And to make the point, there was a kit change, a seismic one. Z, if you will, the most unlikely of all. That solid, dependable national institution of a name was suddenly coupled with, not another name, as in the case of other major bike companies (think Panasonic-Raleigh, think La Redoute-Motobecane or Renault-Gitane), but a letter. People had been getting on Peugeot bikes and velomoteurs to go to work for over 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.Īll this is to underline that when the Peugeot cycling team stopped being known as Peugeot in 1987 it was quite an event. It was not a national joke in the way that 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 that the bike company and its sponsored cycling teams enjoyed in France in the 1970s and 1980s was unique. Our 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 are worn by amateurs the nation over as they compete. Our team 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 going back over a century embedded in the very roots of this sport.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |