Jeannie Longo, who was born in 1958, has been France’s most famous and successful female cyclist in the history of competition. During the 25 years of her long career, she has participated in six Olympic Games and won close to a thousand races in all sorts of cycle racing disciplines. She was national champion 49 times,  attained 30 Olympic and world championship medals and won the title of Olympic champion 13 times. Longo won the Tour de France féminin three times and still holds the absolute world hour record. She was designated European Sportswoman of the Year in 1989 and Sportswoman of the Century in 2000. Today she is a Commander of the Légion d'Honneur and Commander in the Ordre du Mérite. Her achievements have acquired such fame that she has a waxwork figure at the Musée Grévin.
Jeannie Longo is an outstanding example of longevity and Excellency in a demanding sport, she also lead the way on preparing for a professional life after competition. Furthermore, her resilient personality was cause for debate in regards to champion’s behavior and athletes’ relationships with sporting federations. Most importantly, Jeannie Longo triggered agitation on the French Sporting community and in general on the French society by motivating discussion over women’s place in cycle sport; she pushed forward female competitive cycling.
Longo's career developed parallel to French sport, society and feminism, from the 1980s to the 2000s. Paradoxically however, the athlete’s success repeatedly threatened her popularity, sometimes due to her often critiqued attitude towards fellow competitors, and many other times merely for being a woman competing in the sport of les géants de la route.  Despite the establishment of the female Tour the France in 1984, throughout her entire career, harsh judgments on Longo continued, as well as her personal difficulties with the federations, symptomatic of the male-controlled media’s unacceptability of a female champion. Dauncey believes that Longo's constant hostility towards the FFC has its roots in the fact that women’s teams are regularly managed by men. Moreover, these men executives never supported her aspiration to undertake responsibilities within the federation. 
Longo’s general behavior has been so rebuked that sports journalists such as Michel Chemin have argued that such is the type of behavior which grants a cyclist the possibility for competing, but does not serve as an example of general conduct in a society. 

​« Ni Jeannie Longo, ni Marie-José Perec ne recevront jamais le prix Orange pour le prix de la camaraderie. […] En ces temps d'austérité et de rigueur où la dialectique est soumission ou démission, Jeannie Longo et Marie-José Perec ont ouvert avec succcès une troisème voie: la rébellion. Il ne s'agit pas ici de chercher le sens de leur comportement au-delà du champ sportif, tant par ailleurs elles peuvent être d'un conventionnel affligeant. » (Chemin, 1995) 
This perspective should be understood as representing the point of view of an institution confronting an athlete who has challenged all conventional notions of acceptability. Jeannie Longo is an example of a modern complex female sporting hero. Her novelty has consequently spawned her private and public identities to fit ill with the traditional expectations of the sporting establishment, the general public, and her fellow athletes. Nevertheless, she is indisputably an icon of French cycling, society and culture.
Jeannie Longo Pekin Olympic Games, 2008. Longo is a symbol of endurance, determination and independence in a sport that continues to be dominated by men. According to the author, H. Dauncy, even Longo admits on having taken upon the “challenge of succeeding in a sport in which women's competitions were not taken seriously and for which the extreme physical exertion required sits uneasily with many widespread assumptions about femininity”
 

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