It is listed as the most successful cycling team of all time, on cyclingranking.com, with a large margin on the second placed team, Alcyon.[1]
History
Peugeot cycles started producing bicycles in 1882, and from then on it was involved in sponsoring cyclists.
At the beginning of the century a Peugeot cycling team existed.[2] Hippolyte Aucouturier rode Peugeot cycles when he won Paris–Roubaix and Bordeaux–Paris in 1903, and when he was disqualified from the 1904 Tour de France in which he had finished fourth overall, for the illegal use of trains and cars.
Directly after the war, Peugeot cycles was one of the companies that made a consortium that pooled their resources into a collective cycling team called La Sportive. The objective of forming such a consortium was to keep the sport alive in the poor post-war economic situation.
After three years of the La Sportive consortium, Peugeot re-established its separate cycling team, and with Belgian Firmin Lambot won the 1922 Tour de France. During this time the team was known as the Peugeot team, or sometimes the name of a co-sponsor was added, which occasionally was Wolber, Alcyon, Dunlop, Tedeschi, Bianchi-Pirelli.
From 1936 until 1955 the team was the Peugeot-Dunlop team. Yves Petit-Breton (son of the two time Tour de France winner Lucien Petit-Breton) would be a directeur sportif of the team in 1956.[4]
From 1948[5] to 1959[6] there was a Belgiancycling team which was also sponsored by Peugeot, called Elvé-Peugeot.
In 1958, Gaston Plaud became the directeur sportif of Peugeot-BP, where he would stay until the mid seventies. He would direct big names to success, such as Charly Gaul, Pino Cerami, Ferdinand Bracke, Walter Godefroot, Tom Simpson, Jean-Pierre Danguillaume, and the early career of Eddy Merckx.
In 1963 Team Peugeot adopted the black and white checkerboard design,[7] that would be on their white jersey until the team retired from the sport in 1986. During this time the team achieved many successes, such as Tom Simpson winning Bordeaux–Paris in 1963, Milan–San Remo in 1964, and then in 1965 becoming world champion and winning the Giro di Lombardia.
In its final year of existence (1986), the team was managed by Roger Legeay. After 1986, Legeay created the Vétements Z-Peugeot team as a continuation of the Peugeot cycling team. Legeay's team was subsequently renamed Z-Peugeot (1988–89), Z-Tomasso (1990), Z (1991–92), GAN (1993–96) and Crédit Agricole (1997–2008), before being disbanded in 2008. Legeay's team is best remembered for being the team which the American cyclist Greg LeMond rode for when he won the Tour de France in 1990 (when the team was known as Z-Tomasso). Other directeur sportifs of the Peugeot cycling team during its existence included: Leon Van der Hulst, Roland Berland, Robert Naeye, Roger Moreau, Jean Lecocq, Camille Narcy, Serge Beucherie, and Jean-François Guiborel.
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