At the tender age of 14, Greg LeMond started cycling in Nevada just to “get in shape for skiing”. After only a fortnight he won his first race, but his choice of outfit attracted some dirty looks. “I showed up to my first race [in 1976] riding a yellow Cinelli bike and in a yellow jersey,” the American tells me by phone. “In my second race, my friend looked at me with such disgust, and I was wondering why. Ten days later I beat him, it broke the ice, and he said: ‘I gotta tell you: you don’t wear the yellow jersey’. When he explained why, I responded, ‘What’s the Tour de France?’”

A decade later, LeMond not only knew the Tour de France intimately but justified that early yellow jersey. As the first American and non-European to win the yellow jersey, LeMond would win two more maillots jaunes, including one in 1989 by a margin of eight seconds.

He is deserving of Cycling Weekly’s 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award for a multitude of reasons. He has set many records through his career – and not only in cycling; in 1991 he found himself in the world record books for catching a four-pound smallmouth bass during a fly fishing trip. He is also famed for astonishing comebacks, radical modifications and innovations that have shaped bike design, and regular outspoken tirades against what he believes was a doping culture that denied him even more Tours.

This article was published in Cycling Weekly in December 2024. You can read the full article here.