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.
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