Jan LeGrand Baanfiets

Jan LeGrand was a successful cyclist who won the national track championship of the Netherlands in 1966. But it was not his career as a cyclist which made him become a Dutch legend. It was his ambition to build the most competitive racing frames. And Jan LeGrand became known as a genius frame builder. Already during his active career he built all his racing frames by himself. After his active career as a cyclist in the late sixties he started to work for the Amsterdam cycling shop Presto as frame builder. Presto bikes are still known for being simply great. During the mid 70ties LeGrand was hired by Peter Post to be the chef mechanic of the famous TI-Raleigh-Team. When TI-Raleigh became Panasonic he was still involved in the development of the PR-6000 team bikes. He also built bikes for the Sugino racing team. And it was LeGrand who built the lightest bike of its time which weighed only 5,600 grams. He built it for Roy Schuiten, a very successful time trial cyclist who tried to break Eddy Merckx’s hour record twice with it. But unfortunately the altitude of Mexico City was not in favour of Schuiten. LeGrand already planned to use solid wheels for this bike. But the UCI only allowed such wheels first when Francesco Moser went to set a new record. In 1980 Joop Zoetemelk won the Tour de France riding a bicycle from Jan LeGrand. All together 25 world titles were won with the bikes from Jan LeGrand. It says LeGrand put his name only on bikes of customers he knew personally. Although this chapter of the bike’s history is lost, the bike has all what is fascinating about historical racing bikes: It is fury and purely beautiful in one. It brings you back to its time. It makes you feel a tension in the air and makes you smell the sweat of a velodrome. It makes you hear the shouting and cheering of the audience. It demands you to have a ride on it. And it goes like an arrow. It leaves no doubt why still today the bikes of Jan LeGrand are regarded as a highlight of the Dutch bicycle racing history.