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Cycling Legends Media, Everton (2026)

15/06/2026

Greg LeMond came to Paris-Roubaix 1986, as he did when this photo was taken in 1985, with mud on the road, ambition in his legs and the future waiting. He was impatient to win that day, but it wasn’t to be.

Sean Kelly was the master of that race, as he was in so many others. But what our photo shows is more revealing than a results sheet, it’s a Tour de France champion in the making, buried in filth and testing himself against the craziest race in the sport.

Paris-Roubaix has never cared for reputations. It strips riders back to essentials; strength, balance, stubbornness and the willingness to keep driving over stones seemingly designed to break bikes and take souls.

LeMond, the outstanding prospect of his generation, said in a pre-race interview he was going for victory, not the least “So my team can see I’m worth backing,” hinting perhaps at upcoming battles with Bernard Hinault. LeMond believed he could win, and that’s good. Roubaix rewards belief when it’s backed with application and ability.

Kelly’s win fitted the 1986 race perfectly; the rock-hard master of classics had won Roubaix before. LeMond’s ride, though less celebrated, fitted him too. He was never a specialist over the stones, but he had the class, courage and curiosity to measure himself against the specialists on their home ground.

A few months later LeMond won the Tour de France, the first American to do so, the only American as it transpired long after LeMond’s eventual third win. That achievement changed the geography of cycling. It took the sport’s greatest race across the Atlantic and into the imaginations of American sport. It also confirmed LeMond as a rider of rare breadth: tactically intelligent, physically gifted, and mentally resilient.

Here, at this moment, though, in this picture, there is no yellow jersey, no podium, no clean triumphal image. Just a man and his bike, face masked in mud, eyes fixed ahead, body crouched in application of power. This is Greg LeMond before July 1986 made him historic; ambitious, suffering, unbowed, and already proving that greatness is forged on days when victory goes to somebody else.

If you're enjoying these stories then check out Chris Sidwells' books on our website
- https://cyclinglegends.co.uk/collections/all-books

📸 John Pierce Photosport International

14/06/2026

Father's Day is soon!

Get your Father's Day gift now as the day is just 1 week away.

Choose from books, retro mugs, keyrings, coasters and posters - all available on our website - https://cyclinglegends.co.uk/collections/all

We have just restocked with a new range of memorabilia so check it out!

14/06/2026

Italy loves great cyclists and great feuds, in the late 1970s and early 80s they got both.

On one side was Francesco Moser (right), the granite man from Trentino; muscles, power and relentless pressure; world champion on road and track, 3-time Paris-Roubaix winner, twice best in Il Lombardia, a Milan-San Remo winner, Giro d’Italia champion in 1984, and the man who that same year broke the ‘Impossible Hour’, the Eddy Merckx World Hour Record.

On the other was Giuseppe Saronni from Novara, near Milan; sharp, explosive, ruthless in a sprint and adored by Italy’s factory-floor, like Moser was by the countryside. Saronni won the Giro twice, was world champion in 1982 and took Il Lombardia and Milan-San Remo with electric speed in the final metres.

Two great champions, 2 fiery temperaments both with huge ambition and matching egos; they were bound to clash. The first time was in 1978, shortly after our smiley photo was taken. Moser would attack and Saronni follow. Moser would drive the break, while Saronni sat in. Moser emptied himself, Saronni waited, watched, then came past at the finish.

Moser hated it. In his memoir he complains; “Saronni always sheltered behind me, then had the nerve to win in the sprint.” To Moser, that was theft; he did the work, the other collected the prize. To Saronni it was racing intelligence. Why help the stronger man when he’s doing enough to keep you both ahead. Why not let him, when you can beat him with speed?

The feud was made hotter by business. Moser rode for Famcucine, Saronni for Del Tongo, rival fitted-kitchen companies vying for the same customers. The battle between Italy’s best bike racers became showroom wars.

At the height of it, the pair barely spoke. Moser called Saronni “him over there.” Saronni replied by calling Moser “it,” after one race.

Strength versus speed. Country versus city. Attack versus ambush. Their rivalry was petty, personal, brilliant, and it gave cycling, Italian cycling in particular, one of the most delicious rivalries. Francesco Moser and Giuseppe Saronni were the Coppi and Bartali of the marble worktop and built-in hob.

📸 Cycling Legends Collection

12/06/2026

Freddy Maertens: The Rocket and the Earth

He rode like a rocket, earned like a star, then lost almost everything but found a way to live without bitterness.

Some champions are remembered for what they won, some for what they lost. Freddy Maertens belongs to both, but neither explains him. He was devastating; fast, brave, extravagant in effort and indecently prolific. By the end of 1977 Freddy had won a world road race title, 8 stages in one Tour de France, 13 stages and overall victory in one Vuelta a España, and more than 100 professional races in 2 seasons. He was only 25.

Cycling loves numbers, and Freddy’s numbers shine like beacons down the years. Fifty-two wins in 1976, 53 in 1977, 3 Tour de France green jerseys, 2 world road titles; classics, grand tour stages and week-long and single day races. Freddy was one of the fastest sprinters ever, but not just a sprinter. He was a great rouleur as well as being punchy and durable in the West Flanders tradition. He was all those things at once.

But this is not a story about victory, it’s a story about what happens when the applause stops, the money goes, the people around you disappear, and the man left behind has to decide what really matters.

Freddy Maertens’ rise was brilliant, so brilliant it seems it was impossible to sustain. He rode in a way that cobbles melted under his wheels, hills were flattened and riders got out of his way. If a race needed breaking open, Freddy could break it. If it came to a sprint, Freddy could win it. And he did this day after day, emptying rivals of hope.

There was always something excessive about Freddy Maertens. At first, it was excessive speed, ambition, talent and work. He trained with Michel Pollentier in sessions so hard that Maertens remembers they were worse than racing. Seven hours side by side, sometimes not speaking for hours on end. Another day was 4 hours in the morning, broken by food handed up at mid-day by their wives, then 2 hours behind a Derny.

Read more on our website - https://cyclinglegends.co.uk/blogs/long-reads/freddy-maertens-the-fortune-he-lost-and-the-life-he-kept

Find out more about Freddy Maertens in Cycling Legends 04: Flandriens - https://cyclinglegends.co.uk/products/cycling-legends-04-flandriens-by-chris-sidwells

📸 John Pierce Photosport International

11/06/2026

Today we are sharing an extract from Cycling Legends 02: TI-Raleigh about Allan Peiper and the kind side of Peter Post. You can get your copy on our website - https://cyclinglegends.co.uk/products/cycling-legends-02-ti-raleigh

Here Peiper is talking about the 1987 Tour de France.

Just getting a place in the Panasonic Tour team had been tough; Peiper rode flat out all season then had to go really deep in the Tour of Switzerland, the last race before the Tour de France, just to prove his worth. Once the Tour began he spent two and half weeks in the chair, flogging his guts out for Phil Anderson and others going for stage wins, and for Robert Millar going for the overall. Eventually Peiper hit a brick wall and had nothing left.

“I ended up wasted, and it was all I could do to get to the finish of a really hard mountain stage,” Peiper says. “I got to my room, found the bread roll the soigneurs always left for us so we could start refuelling, ate it, crawled into bed and pulled the blankets over my head. There were five mountains the next day, big ones, and I’d ridden pedal over pedal all of the stage just to scrape inside the time limit. I didn’t know how I could do that again.

“I couldn’t face it anymore, I began to cry and couldn’t stop. My room-mate came in and tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t even answer him, so he went to fetch Post. It was quiet for a while, then I heard Post enter the room. I thought he’d go ballistic but he didn’t. He sat on the bed next to me and started rubbing my back while I sobbed, and he kept repeating; “It’ll be all right, it’ll be all right,” like he was comforting a child who’d woken from a nightmare. Post stayed with me doing that until I came out from under the blankets.”

Next day Peiper bowed to the inevitable and quit after being dropped at the beginning of the first climb. He didn’t see Post before leaving the Tour, the assistant team manager Fred de Bruyne drove Peiper to Geneva airport. On the way there they stopped for lunch at a good restaurant, ate well and shared a bottle of expensive wine. “Peter told me to treat you,” De Bruyne told Peiper.

Read the full story in Cycling Legends 02: TI-Raleigh - https://cyclinglegends.co.uk/products/cycling-legends-02-ti-raleigh

10/06/2026

Theo de Rooij will be joining us at Simpson Retro 2026 as a guest speaker for the Talks on Saturday, as well as riding the route on a TI-Raleigh bike on Sunday.

Simpson Retro is taking place in Harworth, Nottinghamshire from 11th - 13th September.

There are not many tickets left for Saturday so get them quick. The full information about the weekend can be found on our website - https://cyclinglegends.co.uk/pages/simpson-retro

10/06/2026

The new wave of English-speaking pros entering the European peloton in the early 1980s caused ripples. They were winning, but they were different. To the eyes of the Peugeot team manager, Maurice de Muer, the young Stephen Roche didn’t even look like a pro bike racer.

They met at the 1981 Peugeot training camp in the South of France. Roche travelled with Robert Millar, who’d been with Peugeot the previous year. When they arrived De Muer asked Millar if his driver was staying for dinner. The ‘driver’ was Stephen Roche.

Millar explained the mix-up and De Muer looked Roche up and down, and told him; “You might have been able to win amateur races carrying that much weight, but you won’t as a pro.”

Roche’s baby face had misled De Muer, which he quickly proved by winning the Tour of Corsica and Paris-Nice. That was incredible. Peugeot was stuffed with established talent, but its newest recruit took the first two big wins of the year. And with that Roche went on holiday.

He knew himself, and winning those 2 races as a 21-year-old new pro was big. Roche needed time to recover and process what he’d done. De Muer was not impressed. When they next met, the evening before Paris-Roubaix, he told Roche he was a tourist. Roche did badly, and afterwards De Muer said; “That’s what you get by going on holiday halfway through the season.”

Their relationship changed at Roche’s next race. The night before La Flèche Wallonne, De Muer held a team meeting and asked Roche; “What will you be doing tomorrow.” Roche replied; “I’m a tourist, so I’ll be taking my camera.” The room fell silent.

Nobody spoke to De Muer like that, and he told Roche, but Roche would not back down. “I understand what you are saying, but next time you want to talk to me like that do it in your room, not in front of everybody,” De Muer told him. The others were shocked.

Later that evening De Muer knocked on Roche’s door, entered and said; “Everyone in that room has wanted to talk to me like that at one time or another, but you are the only one who has ever had the balls to do it.”

“It cleared the air,” Roche says. “We knew where we stood after that.”

Photo: Cycling Legends Collection

09/06/2026

Introducing our New Podcast Series - Cycling Family Trees

Every cycling team has a story. In this series, we’ll dig into the teams that made cycling what it is: the dynasties, the cult squads, the superteams, the survivors, and the vanished names that still echo through the peloton today. We’ll look at where they came from, who built them, what they won, what they changed - and what grew from them after the final finish line.

In this first episode, Gary Fairley explores the extraordinary history of the Peugeot cycling team - one of the most influential and successful teams the sport has ever known. From the earliest Tours de France to the modern peloton, Peugeot helped shape professional cycling through legendary riders including Eddy Merckx, Tom Simpson and Bernard Thévenet. Gary follows the team’s evolution through the Roger Legeay years, from Z and GAN to Crédit Agricole, tracing a remarkable lineage that lasted more than a century.

Listen on Spotify here - https://open.spotify.com/episode/5uS8ndRLPDQ07r9xC2IJS7?si=30249529e4ee4d09

Also available on all good podcasting sites

08/06/2026

We’ve had lots of feedback lately about our Barry Hoban (right with Raymond Poulidor) book, the one he wrote with Chris Sidwells and we publish. It was Barry’s second go at writing about his life in cycling, and he always said our book was the one he wanted to write.

Barry thought that his first, Watching the Wheels go Round, although good, was too soon after his racing career to process it all. Barry had done that processing by the time he wrote our book, Vas-y Barry with Chris.

The feedback we get is that reading Vas-y Barry is like being on the bike with him. So, we thought we’d kick off the week with a little extract from Vas-y Barry. It’s about the collusion between 2 old pros that deprived Barry of what would have been a fabulous stage win in his first Tour de France.

“It was 1964, a velodrome finish in Bordeaux, and I was really psyched up for it. I led into the Velodrome with a lap and a half to do, and because I’d been bit of a trackie as an amateur I knew how to use the bankings. I pointed my bike at the top and swung right up there.

“Nobody followed me, so I had the element of surprise and I used it. I flew off the top of the banking down into the home straight. I left the bunch for dead and was going like a rocket with 1 lap to go. I was flying round the track lengths clear thinking I’m gonna win this, I’m gonna win this.

“Then coming up to the finish line I could see the stage win lying there in front of me, then, woosh! Five metres from the line André Darrigarde passed me like he’d been shot out of a gun, and my world disintegrated. I burst into tears. It was frustration, everything, the whole damn lot.

“Then I thought; hang on, how come everyone else was still 25 metres behind me but Darrigade flew past. He was fast, but what happened was Jean Grazcyk had given Darrigade a dirty great big hand-sling. I’d been flicked. That’s how Darrigade flew past me.”

If you want to read more of Barry’s adventures, and he had plenty, then use this link to buy the book - https://cyclinglegends.co.uk/products/vas-y-barry

Photo: Roger Hobby.

07/06/2026

Father's Day is just 2 weeks away!

Get your dad a gift to remember, choose from illustrated cycling history books, retro mugs, keyrings, coasters and vintage posters.

With memorabilia from a host of teams - Bianchi, T-Raleigh, Peugeot, Brooklyn, Salvarini and more. Plus books by cycling legend Barry Hoban and cycling author Chris Sidwells.

Browse everything we have to offer on our website - https://cyclinglegends.co.uk/collections/all

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