Brimming with confidence after becoming America’s first world pro road champion on September 4, 1983, Greg LeMond took aim at the final weeks of the season with great form and big ambitions. He had a good chance of becoming the first American to win not only a European classic but also the Super Prestige Pernod competition (equivalent of today’s UCI ProTour).

The remaining three Super Prestige races were the Grand Prix des Nations time trial and the one-day classics Paris-Tours and the Tour of Lombardy. His main rival for the truly prestigious Pernod award was Sean Kelly, the Irishman who was enjoying a break-out year, with overall wins at Paris-Nice, the Critérium International and Tour of Switzerland, along with taking the Tour de France green jersey.

The "invasion" of "Anglos" like Kelly and LeMond was causing a revolution in European racing circles. Until that year, no rider from an English-speaking country had ever won the season-long Super Prestige award, which had been the property of cycling legends such as Eddy Merckx (seven titles) and Bernard Hinault and Jacques Anquetil (four titles apiece). But in 1983, only a couple of Europeans were still in the hunt.

Following the world championships, the points score was: 1. Giuseppe Saronni, 175; 2. Kelly, 155; 3. Jan Raas, 145; 4. LeMond, 140. Saronni, the Italian who won the 1982 world title, had an outstanding first half to the season, in which he won Milan-San Remo and the Giro d’Italia, while Dutch classics specialist Raas racked up Pernod points by winning the Tour of Flanders and taking podium spots in Milan-San Remo, Ghent-Wevelgem, Het Volk and the Amstel Gold Race. Saronni had been winning races since February, and his 17th-place finish at the world’s showed that he was getting season-fatigue; he would have probably ended his season there if he hadn’t been leading the Super Prestige rankings.

In contrast, LeMond and Kelly were eager to challenge for the Pernod title. To maintain his good form for the September 25 Nations time trial (then over a 89km distance!), LeMond rode three high-paying Dutch criteriums in three days on the weekend after the world’s, while Kelly had a similar program of races in France, winning the Bellegarde criterium and the 207km Grand Prix d’Isbergues. Both men then rode the 301km Paris-Brussels semi-classic on September 21 — LeMond was 12th, two places ahead of Kelly.

Neither the Irishman nor the American had wanted to make too big an effort in the marathon road race as the Nations was only four days away. By this point in his career, Kelly, then 27, had six Tours de France under his belt and so had ridden plenty of long time trials. LeMond, however, was relatively inexperienced at racing individual time trials.

He never competed in time trials as an amateur because he was told by the Belgian coaches Noël and Richard De Jonckheere not to ride them to avoid burnout. But as a pro LeMond soon showed his expertise in the race against the clock. Even so, the longest TT he had ridden prior to this 1983 Nations was a flat 45km stage of the previous year’s Tour de l’Avenir — he won it by 21 seconds over the veteran French rider, Raymond Martin, who finished eighth at that year’s Tour de France.

To improve his TT technique, LeMond worked closely with Renault-Elf-Gitane team director/coach Cyrille Guimard, who had by this point been advising LeMond for almost three years. "He never told me to train on small gears," LeMond remembers. "He said you want to work out. I’ve always trained hard. Even as a junior, I trained much harder than the others. So when I went with Guimard, it just kind of helped reinforce my belief. I always trained on gears of 53x15, 53x14…."

Guimard had trained Hinault to four victories at the GP des Nations between 1977 and 1982, and was on the cutting edge of coaching. For a long, hilly time trial like the Nations he prepared his riders with plenty of speed work behind a derny (a fast, moped-style moto), along with some interval training and a few long rides in the hills. The French coach was also an advocate of carbo-loading for an intense two-hour effort like the Nations.

With the rainbow stripes on his back, LeMond was one of the favorites for the ’83 Nations, along with former winners Daniel Gisiger of Switzerland and Jean-Luc Vandenbroucke of Belgium, while the outsiders included world’s bronze medalist Stephen Roche, Kelly and Dutchman Bert Oosterbosch (who won the longest time trial at that year’s Tour de France). Saronni and Raas, who were not great time trialists, decided not to start.

The prestigious time trial (then considered to be a virtual world TT championship) covered two laps of a hilly 44.5km circuit at Cannes on the French Riviera. From the yacht marina on the swank seafront of the French resort, the circuit made a counterclockwise loop, soon climbing away from the Mediterranean through the village of Vallauris, to reach the high point at an elevation of 800 feet after 13.4km. The middle third of the circuit was rolling before plunging back to sea level with a completely flat run-in along the coast to Cannes.

Kelly was never in contention and eventually placed 14th, almost eight minutes off the pace, and so added no points to his Pernod score. LeMond, however, was strong from the start. After the opening uphill stretch, only three seconds separated Roche, LeMond and Gisiger. At the second time check, after 30km, LeMond was still one second ahead of Gisiger, while Roche was battling back from a mechanical, 1:17 back in ninth place. By the end of the first lap, LeMond was in the lead, 10 seconds up on Gisiger, and 36 seconds ahead of Roche, who came flying through the start/finish.

The Irishman continued to regain lost time on the long uphill section, where Guimard advised LeMond to conserve his strength for the final kilometers. At the 58.4km split, Gisiger was in the lead by one second over the American, while Roche had moved back to within 17 seconds. But that was as close as it got. The experienced Gisiger, 29, rode away from his much younger opponents down the stretch and won the race by 1:47 over LeMond, with Roche dropping to fifth, 3:03 back.

That hard-earned second place gave LeMond 45 Pernod points, to give him a total of 185 and a narrow over lead ahead of Saronni. Kelly and Raas. The next race in the competition, the Paris-Tours classic, was two weeks away. LeMond rested up in order to recover, and just rode a criterium the following weekend; Kelly raced in the six-day Étoile des Espoirs in the south of France, taking a stage, while Roche, his younger compatriot, took the overall,

Paris-Tours had been raced as Tours-Paris for a decade with the 1983 edition being raced on the reverse route from Blois (near Tours) to the Paris suburb of Chaville. This changed the dynamics of the otherwise flat course, because a series of short, steep hills through the Chevreuse Valley in the final 50km gave the non-sprinters a good chance of breaking away. (This weekend’s edition 99th edition of Paris-Tours is in the traditional direction, but starts 50km west of Paris to enable it to take in a loop that includes some low hills to the south of Tours.)

The hills in the 1983 edition were decisive. World’s silver medalist Adri Van der Poel, the up-and-coming 24-year-old Dutchman, made a strong attack and was marked by Raas’s TI-Raleigh Belgian teammate Ludo Peeters. LeMond was one of the first to react, and he bridged to the two leaders with the excellent Italian, Silvano Contini, and Belgian prospect Jean-Marie Wampers, while Raas followed their wheels into the breakaway.

The six men established a four-minute lead over a 22-strong chase group that contained Kelly and Roche, while Saronni was one of the 94 riders who abandoned the 237km race. LeMond knew he had to watch Raas carefully, because had the wily Dutchman scored the winner’s 60 Pernod points, he would have displaced him from the overall lead. But LeMond was also eager to win, hoping to increase his small advantage over Kelly and Saronni — who would surely come on strong for the following weekend’s Tour of Lombardy.

With 4km to go, Van der Poel made a strong acceleration, and Peeters, defending for Raas, went after him. LeMond tried to close the gap, but Raas simply sat on his wheel. The TI-Raleigh team’s tactics were perfect, and the energetic Van der Poel was beaten in the sprint by Peeters, while Raas sped home in third, ahead of LeMond and the other two.

So, with just one race to go in the Super Prestige Pernod competition, the standings were: 1. LeMond, 205, 2. Raas and Saronni, 175, 4. Kelly, 160. Any of the four could still win, as the Tour of Lombardy would award 60 points to the winner. It was proving to be one of the closest-fought competitions in Pernod history. I’ll bring you the story of that great edition of Lombardia next week.

Previously:
LeMond's first rainbow jersey The exceptionally gifted LeMond