Three Weeks, Eight Seconds

by Tassell, Nige;

  Having encountered salary issues while his son was with La Vie Claire, Bob LeMond had negotiated a front-loaded contract, whereby the first chunk of the annual wage would be paid on 1 January 1989, the day after the contract was signed, sealed, delivered. It never came. Not in January. Not in February. Not in March, April, May…

  In fact, not a cent had been paid by the time LeMond lined up for the start of the ’89 Tour. ‘François was significantly in arrears,’ explains Len Pettyjohn, ‘so we sent a letter to him saying that he was in breach of the contract. The UCI had looked at the contract and the payments, and said Greg was free to leave the team. That was a shock to François. He thought he had it nailed down.’

  Pettyjohn has the utmost sympathy for José De Cauwer. ‘I felt sorry for him that he was tied to Lambert. He was the direct link to the riders. “OK, you’re not getting your salary. You’re not getting the things that have been promised to you.” As a team director, that’s a horrible thing to happen to you. I’d be sitting in his office and I thought there were times when he was just going to throw his phone through the wall. François was a crazy man. He had this ego that thought, just by his presence, he could will things to happen. And he was constantly lying to people. He didn’t have any money. He was playing a shell game – always trying to shift the sponsorship around so he could pay for next week.’

  Nothing ever seemed to be easy for LeMond. Not only was the team teetering on the shakiest of financial foundations, but the quality within its ranks wasn’t the greatest, certainly not for a Grand Tour. For starters, there was only one ADR rider who could remotely be thought of as a climber. LeMond soon realised that he’d be getting minimal assistance when the race hit the mountains. ‘We weren’t a team that was aimed at the Tour de France,’ says Johan Lammerts, by this time LeMond’s room-mate. ‘It was mainly for the Classics races at the start of the season. That changed when Greg joined. He was a little more progressive than others in the team. Belgians are sometimes very conservative and we had conservative riders in our team. But everybody had respect for Greg. He was a Tour de France winner.

  ‘There were expectations, but not necessarily high expectations. Everybody was curious to see if he had recovered well and could perform at the highest level again. The hunting accident wasn’t just a little thing; he still had pellets in his body. But he was still an incredible, super-good rider.’

  Certainly LeMond’s form in the early months of 1989 was lacking. Lacking to the point of provoking an existential crisis. Riding in the colours of co-sponsor Coors Light at the Tour de Trump – the inaugural stage race bankrolled by Atlantic City huckster/future US president Donald Trump – it wasn’t a happy homecoming. Struggling on the climbs, LeMond trailed in 27th overall. ‘He realised that he was attracting little attention as reporters flocked to interview the riders with impressive results,’ reported the New York Times correspondent Samuel Abt. ‘The message was unmistakable: he was yesterday’s story.’ Getting dropped at the Tour de Trump was, says Andy Hampsten, ‘an absolutely unique experience for LeMond.’

  It was an experience that would be repeated, back on European soil and back in ADR colours, at the Giro d’Italia little more than a week later. On the second day, on a moderate climb up the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily, LeMond trailed the winner by eight minutes. Three weeks later, going into the final day time trial, he was in 47th place, nearly an hour behind the about-to-be-crowned champion Laurent Fignon.

  ‘I remember talking to Greg and feeling sorry for him at the Giro,’ says Hampsten. ‘He was genuinely humbled about how terrible he was and was writing off his chances. He was an unknown quantity after his accident, but I wouldn’t write him off. It was Greg LeMond, after all.’ Kathy saw from the closest of quarters how the accident had changed him. ‘He never really had bad days before, but after he got shot, he had a lot of bad days. He was a completely different rider.’

  His team boss, José De Cauwer, was careful not to exert pressure on those vulnerable shoulders, though. ‘We weren’t expecting miracles,’ he later explained to Cycling Weekly. ‘The only question was, “Can we bring him back?”. The Giro was bad. There were a couple of days when he was behind and the race radio would announce Groupe LeMond, six minutes down, seven, eight… I remember he had an insurance policy he could have cashed in if he’d stopped. Collect the money, retire, go do something else. I know he considered it.’

  The low point of his Giro experience was in the wake of Stage 13, where he lost 17 minutes. He put a tearful call in to Kathy who, because of a health scare, had yet to fly to Europe for the racing season and was still in Minnesota. He was on the verge of not just quitting the race, but turning his back on the sport. ‘I just asked him if he thought he’d given it everything. If he’d given it everything and he was really, really done, then OK. But if he hadn’t really given it everything, then it was a momentary depression.’

  A number of factors were coalescing. It wasn’t simply his form on the bike. There was the lack of wages going into the bank account, and there was Kathy’s health scare, which involved the couple’s yet-to-be-born third child. ‘It was a really down period,’ she recalls. ‘We had had a scare with the next pregnancy, my cousin had died in a helicopter crash that week, and Greg wasn’t riding well. He was half a world away. He was depressed. But he was still a person.

  ‘Fans forget that these are still just young men who have marriages and families. When you’re a cyclist, it’s not like being a baseball player or a basketball player. They live in really rough and lonely conditions. A trainer once told me that it takes almost all their human energy just to do their sport. They don’t have a whole lot of extra room for stress. So if you’ve got pressures or your parents are ill, there’s just not a lot of extra room. And your cycling will suffer. You can’t do it all. And they’re humans.’

  Help was soon at hand, though, as dispensed by LeMond’s long-time soigneur, a gentle giant from Mexico by the name of Otto Jacome. He spotted one of the causes of LeMond’s woes; his grey skin suggested an iron deficiency. ‘I told him he needed an iron injection,’ Jacome explained to the author Guy Andrews, ‘but he got mad with me because he never used injections and he was upset because I was suggesting it. The following day, a doctor from the Giro came over to see him and they told him the same thing, that he needed iron. He got a jab – iron with vitamins – and the next day he says “Hey, Otto. I feel so much better now”.’

  A corner had been turned, as Kathy notes. ‘I flew over the night of the iron injection. The kids and I were there, the baby was OK. Everything got better that day. We hit a good patch.’

  The final week of the Giro saw an improvement in LeMond’s riding, culminating in an extremely promising result in the final-day time trial. José De Cauwer had formulated a plan for that particular stage. ‘That day we put the heart rate monitor away and I said, “Give it everything. Let’s see when the engine cuts out.” After six kilometres, he caught one rider. Then another. He ended up taking seven riders that day.’

  LeMond’s second place on the stage naturally delighted him. ‘I’d pretended that I was in contention for the Giro,’ he told Daniel Friebe, ‘just to see where I was compared to everyone else. I’d got myself psyched up and ended up ahead of Fignon. That result blew me away.’

  Most saw that performance as an anomaly, a one-off, a result from which little significance could be extracted. Fignon was one, even if his analysis was at odds with that of his team boss Cyrille Guimard. ‘On the evening after I had won the race in Florence,’ his autobiography reveals, ‘Guimard came to have a word with me. He looked even more worried than usual. He wanted to talk one-to-one and it was important, even though all I was thinking about was celebrating my triumph. He was already concerned about July and looked me straight in the eyes. “LeMond will be up there at the Tour.” I didn’t hide my amazement.’

  Others would have been amazed had they been privy to Guimard’s assessment. A rider damaged by a life-threatening tr
auma, and riding for a wildcard team, did not a Tour de France favourite make, no matter what his past achievements. That was certainly the opinion of British rider Sean Yates, by then enjoying his first season with the American 7-Eleven team. ‘It wasn’t the last-chance saloon at that point for him, but ADR certainly weren’t a major team with a major contract. You’re only as good as your last race and his last two years had not been great. In the Tour de Trump, he was just going nowhere, but he did show a little bit at the end of the Giro. After that, I rode a kermesse and he didn’t look great in that, although he might have been building it back up after the Giro and taking it steady. He certainly wasn’t considered a contender for the Tour.’

  Yates’s former team-mate, the Irish rider Paul Kimmage, recalled how, on the first morning of the Tour, the Fagor team organised a sweepstake at the breakfast table of their hotel. The object was to predict the winner of the Tour three weeks hence. All the obvious names were mentioned – Delgado, Fignon, Mottet, Breukink, their own leader Stephen Roche. Then the team masseur, a Spaniard called Txomin Erdoiza, was asked his opinion and he plumped for LeMond. ‘There was a ten-second pause as we reflected on the American’s chances. The whole table erupted with laughter.’

  The rider-turned-TV-commentator Paul Sherwen admits he shared the majority verdict on LeMond’s chances on the Tour. ‘I rode my last professional races in ’87 and remember seeing Greg at the Nissan Tour of Ireland. His back was pockmarked. It looked like he had measles. Unless you saw Greg’s back at that time, you can’t imagine how bad it was. There was a pockmark every inch of his back. He was like a dartboard. It was pretty scary to look at. Other guys will have seen that. “This guy’s been shot in the back. He ain’t going to win the Tour de France any more.”’

  As François Thomazeau confirms, the press pack was also giving LeMond’s chances short shrift. ‘Nobody fancied LeMond at all. For all of us, he was finished and it was a miracle he managed to make it back on a bike. His team was simply dreadful. We were just glad to see him back and felt more pity than anything else at the start.’

  There were a few dissenting voices, though. LeMond’s room-mate Lammerts notes that, following the Giro, the ADR team took part in a small stage race in Spain, in which LeMond rode well. ‘He could follow the best Spanish riders and that gave him a lot of confidence.’

  And that confidence had also been spotted by the photographer Graham Watson. ‘I knew that LeMond knew this Tour was a do-or-die race for him and that he had every intention of re-finding his winning ways. Only a photographer would have spotted it, but LeMond had a certain glint in his eyes, a sparkle we’d not seen since 1986 – this too went unnoticed by most observers. The French media in particular ignored LeMond because of Fignon’s superior form, a small oversight that would come back to bite them. But, importantly, it let LeMond come into the Tour as an underdog and race more or less unnoticed for a few days.’

  LeMond had never been such an underdog in the Tour before. And, drawing from his wide smile and twinkling eyes, it was fair to say he appeared to be relishing his new-found position.

  It was time to let the games begin.

  THREE

  A MATTER OF TIMING

  ‘Only when the official pushed my saddle did I realise I was late’ – Pedro Delgado

  1 July

  Prologue time trial, Luxembourg, 4.8 miles

  AS HE GLIDES his Land Rover around the quiet, mid-morning streets of residential north Madrid, Pedro Delgado is laughing, his eyes dancing. Laughter shouldn’t really be called for, though. After all, he’s recalling one of the most damaging days of his career as a professional cyclist. And certainly the most embarrassing.

  But time is a great healer. The passing of the decades means that the nerves are no longer raw, that the pain subsided many moons ago. But, nonetheless, the best part of 30 years on, almost all mention of the 1989 Tour’s Prologue focuses on the mistakes of the Spaniard.

  Delgado, wearing the yellow jersey as last year’s champion, had the privilege of being the final rider to charge down the ramp of the Prologue’s start house. And confidence was high following his recent triumph at the Vuelta. ‘I thought I was going to win again,’ he confirms. ‘I was very, very confident about that. I knew I would have to keep an eye on Fignon in the first few days, but once we got to the mountains, there wouldn’t be a problem. My weakest part of the race was always the time trial, sure, but I was very keen to improve at the Prologue. But it was a disaster.’

  At 5.16pm, Sean Kelly – the Prologue’s penultimate rider to set off – headed out along L’Avenue de la Liberté, a blur in his white and black PDM kit as he sped past the thoroughfare’s elegant townhouses and rows of equally elegant trees. Just one rider left to go. The champion. The favourite. The man in yellow.

  As Kelly disappeared into the distance, the eyes of the crowd and the lenses of the press pack returned their collective gaze to the start house. Everyone expected Delgado and his bike to be right there, a tight figure of concentration and intensity preparing the defence of his title. But he wasn’t. The seconds ticked. The seconds dissolved. At 5.17pm came the pips that announced what should have been his departure time. Still no sign. The clock started its count. Seconds became a minute and not a yard had been pedalled. Time was waiting for no man, not even the reigning champion of the Tour de France.

  The growing media throng that was gathering around the back of the start house awaited a glimpse of yellow to appear on the horizon. A besuited official, stopwatch in his left hand, paced up and down inside, all confused hand gestures and shoulder shrugs. The Prologue is supposed to be an incident-free ride that merely warms up the legs for the titanic struggle yet to come. For some, it offers up the chance of wearing the yellow jersey for a day or two, an opportunity they might not otherwise get in this race – in their career, even.

  In short, the Prologue doesn’t usually make headline news. On this day, though, Pedro Delgado ensured it did.

  The start house used for a Prologue or individual time trial in the Tour at this time was little more than the shell of a small beige and cream caravan, albeit one with large picture windows and a seperate entrance and exit. But this tiny structure became the crucible for an incident that would shape the next three weeks – or the next three weeks of one man, at least. But at this point, the rider known as Perico was oblivious to what was occurring. And the clock ticked on, the time accumulating. ‘Deux minutes! Deux minutes!’ went the shout from the officials. Delgado, though, wherever he was, was clearly out of earshot.

  Being a few hundred yards away does tend to put you out of earshot; Delgado had ventured beyond the closed streets reserved for rider warm-ups. ‘A lot of people were crossing those streets,’ he explains. ‘People wanted autographs and photographs, so I felt it wasn’t a very good place to warm up. I was there to win the race, to win the Tour again. So I went farther out from this area. And that’s when the nightmare began.

  ‘I bumped into Thierry Marie, the French time trial specialist, who had already finished. He’s a very nice guy. “Hey Thierry! How are you? Tell me about the course.” He explained that it was varied – up and down, left turns and right turns. “It will suit you well. Good luck!” We were talking a lot and I needed to get to the start line. I was very calm, but when I arrived there, everybody said: “Hey Pedro! Where have you been? You need to start the race!”’

  There was a flurry of cameramen and a cacophony of gendarmes’ whistles as the yellow jersey cut through the tightly packed crowd. Delgado charged up the five metal steps leading into the start house and, thanks to the hand of one of the huffing officials, was sent flying down the ramp. He had arrived two minutes and forty seconds late, although he was actually still oblivious to the extent of his mistake. The absence of race radios – that essential line of communication between rider and team management in years to come – compounded the problem. No one could get word to Delgado in his splendid isolation beyond the warm-up area.

  ‘My
team director, José Miguel Echavarri, said “Go! Go! Go!” I thought I was on time. Very close, but on time. I saw the clock said ‘40, 41, 42…’ and expected to start once it came back to 60 at the top. Only when the official pushed my saddle did I realise I was late. I thought maybe it was only 40 seconds or maybe it was two minutes 40 or maybe it was five minutes 40. I had no idea.’

  Kelly was unaware of the commotion that had erupted back down the road. ‘When you’re preparing for a Prologue in the Tour,’ he explains, ‘you’re just focused. There are riders around you and you’re not aware if something’s happening. Even if a guy going off two places ahead of you misses his start time by 30 seconds or a minute, you don’t really notice. You’re in a tunnel beforehand. You don’t notice anything. You’re so focused doing your final warm-up, getting on the ramp and just going as fast as possible from A to B.

  ‘It was big news, of course. When you heard about it later, you thought “How did he make that mistake?” It’s something that riders do. They just get totally into that zone and they don’t pay attention and forget a little bit about time.’

  Stephen Roche was also a little incredulous as the gravity of Delgado’s error began to sink in. ‘I was sitting in the back of the station wagon, in the boot of the car. We were listening to it and it was very encouraging news. Delgado, one of the main rivals, was already minutes down before the start. It was great. That is the first thing you think about. The Tour is never won on any one day. Every day is another day. But you can lose it all on one day by having a really bad day.

  ‘No one could believe it. But then no one would have thought that I would make the same mistake in 1991.’ That year, Roche was eliminated from the Tour for missing the cut-off time at the team time trial. Then riding for the Belgian Tonton Tapis team, he and the squad had been told an incorrect start time. When the mistake was spotted, the riders were then all informed that they’d actually be leaving ten minutes earlier than stated – all but Roche, that is. He was still out on the warm-up circuit and remained out of the loop. Oblivious and forgotten. The team left without him, leaving the former champion to fend for himself and to ride alone once the error had been revealed to him.