From the short-lived magazine Velo Business

In the early '90s, VeloNews introduced a trade magazine: Velo Business. My short columns
ran under the heading Maynard's Closet. The readership was shop owners and employees. Each column featured an image, usually of a bike show badge or some bit of memorabilia. I believe this one ran with a badge from the training camp. You know, you can convince yourself that you're a pretty good rider - if you don't ride with Greg LeMond...


Maynard's Closet, December...

In the early '80s, Greg and Kathy LeMond lived in Rancho Murietta, east of Sacramento. An outfit called Racing Cycles organized a few Greg LeMond Training Camps there.

Winning Magazine assigned me to participate in a camp and write about it. I wrote the piece but it never ran. Perhaps Winning planned its own camps. Like my article, they never appeared.

Two incidents stick out. In Greg's den, I watched him open a box shipped from France and unpack a funny-looking white(!) pedal, complete in itself, needing no toeclip or strap.

It was, of course, the first Look pedal we'd ever seen. In the next year or so, LeMond and Bernard Hinault put those pedals on every bike-mag cover and nearly every bike, all around the world. Changed cycling forever. Was the first LeMond-Look contact promising?

Greg hefted that first one and frowned. "Awful heavy," he said.

And I remember descending at the limit of my limited courage on a rock-strewn, chuckholed, abandoned mine road during that camp. As I plummeted white-knuckled down the nearly vertical hill, LeMond passed me, totally casual, making the Roadrunner noise to let me know he was there.

Beep, beep. Beep, beep.

I THINK he made four beeps. I really only heard two...