The Age Of Excess – Bike Snob NYC

Further to yesterday’s post, as the official Old Crap Test Pilot for Classic Cycle, the latest bike in my charge is a 50/50 crabon/tatinium 2003 LeMond Tete de Course:

It’s flashy, it’s made from exotic materials, and it has modern features such as that fancy kind of shifting where it’s mixed in with the brake levers, yet at 21 years of age it’s officially old enough to drink. Also, it has rim brakes. Therefore, it’s technically a classic.

People are often products of their time, and the same thing is true of bicycles. Given this, in order to truly understand the decadently overwrought hunk of critanium that is the Tete de Course, you must understand what was going on in cycling in 2003. If you’re older than, I dunno, let’s say 40-ish…?, then 2003 might not seem like it was all that long ago–I mean I’m [XX] and to me 2003 still feels like yesterday. However, if you’re like 30 or younger (though I’d be shocked if anyone that young is reading this, if you’re that age you’re probably too busy with the Tick Tocks to read old-fashioned blogs) you may not appreciate how different the commercial cycling landscape was back then–mostly because of this guy:

It may seem borderline sacrilegious to talk about a LeMond bicycle in the context of Lance Armstrong, but the fact is that it’s impossible not to do so. In 2003, when this bike was on sale, Lance Armstrong was one of the most famous people in the world. He won his fifth Tour de France that year, joining Jaques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Indurain in the Five-Timers Club. Of course he was dogged by serious doping allegations and he had plenty of critics in the cycling word (Greg LeMond being one of them), but to the average person in America that didn’t mean anything and he was simply the cancer survivor who had gone from the brink of death to complete domination of the world’s most difficult sporting event. He also started dating Cheryl Crow that year, who was a huge pop star at the time. In 2003 Armstrong was easily as famous as athletes like LeBron James and Travis Kelce are today–and in a sport that nobody in America gave a fuck about to boot. And the bike company whose logo everybody saw underneath that one nut? Trek:

If Armstrong was the most outsized cyclist the sport had ever seen, Trek was the most outsized bike company. Of course there was Trek itself, which was a complete line of road bikes, and mountain bikes, and hybrid bikes, and everything else:

[From here.]

But in addition to that, they had a whole other line of mountain bikes with Gary Fisher:

[From here.]

And another complete line of road and mountain bikes with Klein:

[From here.]

And…and…if that wasn’t enough, they also had another full line of road bikes with LeMond!

[From here.]

Now that’s a shitload of bikes.

As for Greg LeMond, he was of course a legend–a three-time Tour de France champion who had been (and is now once again) the only American to have won it. But LeMond had been critical of Armstrong from his very first Tour win:

So here was Trek, a bike company so big they had two squabbling Tour de France winners under one roof, each marketing a completely different line of bikes. Of course Trek eventually dropped LeMond, and then in a final bit of irony dropped Armstrong just four years later. But in 2003, Armstrong was still cranking out wins, Trek was still cranking out bikes under at least four distinct brand names, LeMond was still cranking out accusations, America was lapping it all up, and it seemed like the good times would never end.

As for the LeMond brand, while Greg LeMond had been famous during his racing career for using cutting edge materials and ushering in the aero era (say “ushering in the aero era” ten times fast), it was Trek’s most traditional marque and offered steel bikes with classic-looking decals, which was highly unusual at a time. However, even the LeMond brand was not immune from the excesses of the time, and in 2003 the Tete de Course was their top-of-the-line offering:

I have absolutely no idea what was going on behind the scenes at Trek. It could be that the Tete de Course was simply a convenient way to get rid of bad OCLV frames (“Hey, the top half’s still good!”), but I imagine the thinking was that the LeMond customer was older and more sophisticated and didn’t want to ride the same bike as Lance Armstrong. But he did want a somewhat exotic bike that would impress at group rides, could afford something special, and was probably deliberating between carbon and titanium for his next purchase. So why not make a bike out of both? Trek weren’t the only ones to try this either. I don’t remember which came out first, but around the same time Serotta started offering its own critanium dentist dream bike, the Ottrott:

But the Tete de Course wasn’t just a bike for monied masters. It was also the Team Saturn race bike:

And yes, road cycling was so flush in the Armstrong era that car companies were sponsoring domestic pro teams and Trek could throw bikes from its various lines all over the place:

And on top of all this, I’m pretty sure the Tete de Course was made in-house at Trek, because they had a whole titanium frame production facility on top of everything else. So they were making the carbon Treks, and the aluminum Kleins, and the titanium LeMonds and who knows what else all in Waterloo. It’s hard to imagine there’s high-end bike production anywhere close to this scale happening in America today.

Anyway, back to the bike:

So how does it ride?

Well, it’s got a titanium bottom half:

And a carbon fiber top half:

In combining the two, the engineers clearly brought out the best qualities of both, and you can distinctly feel the vibration-damping properties of the carbon working in concert with the springy resilience of the titanium chassis:

Just kidding. I mean yes, the bike really does feel great and I love the fit. But the only quality I can attribute specifically to the whole “spine” thing with any certainty is that it’s really light.

As for more practical matters, the bike came to me with a 25mm tire on the front:

And a 28mm tire on the rear:

So how’s the clearance? No problems up front:

But (and this is going to sound dirty) the rear is tight:

Really tight:

Though keeping in mind that the late ’90s and early aughts probably represent the nadir when it comes to road bikes and tire clearance, I was impressed that a 28mm tire fit in there at all:

As for the wheels, Rolf was also a Trek brand for awhile, though these are Rolf Prima which is now a separate company:

Rolf started pushing the whole paired spoke thing in the late ’90s, and you can imagine what Jobst Brandt had to say about that:

Shifting is 9-speed Dura Ace, which works great as you’d expect:

Today there’s electronic shifting and GPS computers, but back then you had Flight Deck:

Though if you didn’t want to spring for the Flight Deck you could always just use this:

That’s an optical gear indicator, not an onboard EPO delivery system.

As one reader noted in the comments yesterday, road handlebars were a hell of a lot wider back then than they are now:

They’re so wide I needed a drone to get an aerial view:

I prefer a traditional bar, but when you’re riding a ticrabium dream machine you might as well just go with it. Same goes for the Zipp crank:

And as another reader noted, Trek was sure to include a pump peg, no doubt as a nod to the LeMond brand’s ostensibly traditional sensibilities:

Just think of how much more weight they could have saved by deleting it!

In any case, it’s called the Tete de Course…

…but they could also have called it the Mullet, because it’s titanium up front:

And carbon in the back:

I look forward to spending more time with it:

At the very least it should keep me away from gluing tubulars for awhile.