Three Weeks, Eight Seconds

by Tassell, Nige;

  LeMond was also the beneficiary of Fignon being unable to stay with the pace. A further 13 seconds were gained from the Super U man, pushing the lead to 53 seconds. It would be the widest margin between the pair in the entire three weeks of the race.

  All of these attacks and counterattacks detracted from the performances of the two riders who finished ahead of the elite group. Bruno Cornillet had stayed out all day after that very early breakaway and took second on the stage, his highest placing in all the ten Tours of his career. Two and a half minutes up the road, though, was another survivor of that early break. Riding in the scarlet jersey denoting his status as the Swiss national champion, Pascal Richard had been at the head of the stage for all but those first three miles and thoroughly deserved his victory. Having only lasted three days in his debut Tour the previous year, the 1988 cyclo-cross world champion was showing the potential he could bring to road-racing.

  But Richard’s impressive solo success was outgunned by what was occurring higher up the GC. Mottet had had a particularly eventful day, looking like he was slipping down the leaderboard before reviving and putting in a series of punishing attacks on the Izoard. But if he harboured any ambitions of finishing in yellow in Paris, the world number one knew this was an outside bet. ‘After the time trial,’ he says, ‘I knew it would be too difficult for me to win the Tour, but I gave it a go on the Izoard.’ If he couldn’t take the overall victory, Mottet was clearly at least going to dig deep to protect his podium place from Delgado.

  The day had been one of LeMond’s more proactive in the mountains and his sustained renaissance, after the near-death experience of the hunting accident, continued to surprise the seasoned, heard-it-all-before press room. ‘It was simply unbelievable,’ says François Thomazeau, the Reuters correspondent. ‘It was probably more astonishing than Lance Armstrong’s recovery from cancer, because Greg’s team was terrible and because he seemed a much more fragile person than Armstrong was. He was very, very lean, and extremely fidgety, always complaining of little pains and bugs. He was like a racehorse.’

  Fidgety would describe him well. And he was fidgety for good reason. ‘I’m worried about everybody,’ he told Channel 4. ‘I’m afraid of everybody and I’m going to watch everybody. But I’m mainly going to watch Delgado from now.’

  The growing consensus was that Laurent Fignon was now an irrelevance when it came to the destiny of the yellow jersey. But, as he sought sleep in his Briançon bed that night, other ideas were forming in the Frenchman’s brain.

  Stage 16

  1. Pascal Richard (Helvetia-La Suisse/Switzerland) 4:46:45

  2. Bruno Cornillet (Z-Peugeot/France) +2’34”

  3. Charly Mottet (RMO/France) +4’50”

  4. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) +4’51”

  5. Martial Gayant (Toshiba/France) same time

  General classification

  1. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) 72:42:30

  2. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) +53”

  3. Charly Mottet (RMO/France) +2’16”

  4. Pedro Delgado (Reynolds/Spain) +2’48”

  5. Steven Rooks (PDM/Netherlands) +6’05”

  THIRTEEN

  SETTING THE FIRES OF HELL ABLAZE

  ‘Our lungs were hanging out and we watched each other, almost at a standstill, gasping like a pair of crazy young puppies’ – Laurent Fignon

  19 July

  Stage 17, Briançon – Alpe d’Huez, 101 miles

  YOU DIDN’T NEED to speak a word of French to understand the front page of L’Equipe that morning. As the riders silently took their breakfasts in the hotel dining rooms of Briançon, a gruelling day of three towering ascents ahead of them, the paper’s headline writer stoked up the pressure, emphasising how much the race was now as much about mind games as it was about physical prowess. The headline cut to the quick: ‘POKER DANS ALPE’.

  Certainly Stage 17, with its monster climbs of the Col du Galibier, the Col de la Croix de Fer and the totemic Alpe d’Huez rising up into the cloudless blue sky, was likely to be the day that the main protagonists showed their respective hands. With his lead increasing, was LeMond in possession of all the aces? Did Delgado have something up his sleeve? And, with his power and influence visibly on the wane, was Fignon holding nothing more than a busted flush?

  The murmur of the press room was that the latter opinion held firm. Channel 4 commentator Phil Liggett certainly appeared to subscribe to this school of thought. His pre-stage opening monologue – filmed that morning and shown as part of the station’s highlights show later that evening – hinted that Fignon was undeniably losing his status as a contender. As he stood on one of the hairpins that defined that day’s last few kilometres up Alpe d’Huez, Liggett delivered his piece to camera, announcing that ‘today we’re expecting a marvellous fight between Pedro Delgado and Greg LeMond’. He was wringing his hands in anticipation. ‘This is where we feel the Tour de France will be decided. Will it be LeMond in yellow tonight or Delgado?’

  At the same time that the riders were fuelling themselves up at the breakfast table and chewing over the conjecture in the morning papers, the slopes leading up to the day’s finish were already heaving. Such is the draw of Alpe d’Huez. By 7am, several hundred thousand spectators were on the mountain, many of whom had been there for days, like the hardiest bargain-hunters sleeping rough ahead of the Christmas sales. Territory had been marked, vantage points claimed. Whether perched on an unforgiving boulder or reclined on the roof of a campervan, these fans faced many hours under the baking Alpine sun until the high drama unfolded before them. Those not protecting their perch could be found with paint pot in hand, applying the name of their favourite rider to the tarmac. The paintwork was drying almost instantly in the day’s rapidly increasing temperatures. On these particular slopes, even the most anonymous domestique received a tribute in thick strokes of white emulsion, their name immortalised forever – or at least until the next time the road got resurfaced.

  Often the steepest climb of the three-week race, Alpe d’Huez is special to rider and fan alike. Viewed from the air, the road up to the peak clings to a section of mountainside where no road should rightfully exist. If it were on the Italian side of the Alps, it would invariably be likened to a long strand of limp linguini dropped onto the landscape in a random pattern of loops and zigzags. The gradients are severe enough that 21 sharply ascending hairpin bends are required to provide safe passage to its summit.

  The Alpe’s legend isn’t based on it being the most inhospitable of the race’s mountains. Usually bathed in tan-friendly sunshine, it doesn’t offer the bleakness of Mont Ventoux’s lunar landscape, nor the rain-lashed conditions often served up by a Pyrenean peak like the Aubisque. And, being a summit finish, those 21 hairpins are only tackled uphill, so a perilous descent is avoided – unlike during the winter months when scores of hire cars cautiously make their icy way down from the ski station, their drivers’ feet never off the brakes, anxious to avoid both the loss of their deposit and the prospect of a spectacular death.

  Nor is it Alpe d’Huez’s altitude or length that tests the riders. On this particular day, it was only the third highest peak of the stage, its 6,100 feet outstripped by both the Galibier and the Croix de Fer. And, set against those two much longer climbs, it’s a comparative sprint at less than nine miles. No, Alpe d’Huez is admired and feared in such equal measure simply because – after a day of such severe uphill struggles – the steepest peak has been kept until last.

  The Tour’s maiden journey up Alpe d’Huez’s unforgiving slopes was in 1952 when the peloton found a relatively primitive ski resort at its summit. And they’d arrived there bouncing and banging their way up a pothole-studded road that was in urgent need of the attentions of a well-drilled tarmac gang. That year, Fausto Coppi, fourth in the general classification, grabbed both the victory and the yellow jersey, a position he would retain all the way to Paris. The Alpe had proved crucial in determining the final outcome of the race, a tradition it would
firmly uphold for decades afterwards.

  Although none had previously taken a stage victory here, LeMond, Fignon and Delgado knew Alpe d’Huez well. They weren’t intimidated by its twists and turns, its hairpins and heights. And they knew their history, well aware of how game-changing a surge up its slopes could be to the destination of the overall title. Fignon had first-hand experience of this – twice. Six years previously in 1983, his fifth place on the stage saw him wrestle the yellow jersey from compatriot Pascal Simon; it remained on his back for the remaining six days, all the way up to Paris. History repeated itself 12 months later when, having taken second behind Luis Herrera (the first Colombian and the first amateur to win a Tour stage), the Parisian swapped the tricolour jersey of the French national champion for the maillot jaune. Again, no one else got close enough to touch the hem of this particular garment before journey’s end on the Champs-Élysées.

  That year, 1984, Fignon’s then Renault-Elf team-mate LeMond – riding his first Tour and wearing the rainbow jersey he’d won the previous September at the world championships in Switzerland – showed his mettle on Alpe d’Huez’s zigzagging gradients. Having just finished a course of antibiotics for a bronchial infection, LeMond took an impressive sixth, a final surge ending with the scalp of Hinault in the last kilometre. By the time the Tour returned to the mountain two years later, LeMond and Hinault were team-mates on Bernard Tapie’s La Vie Claire squad, but had been engaged in a duel with each other across the Pyrenees and into the Alps. This was despite the older man’s agreement to assist his young colleague in the pursuit of his first Tour title as recompense for LeMond’s selfless loyalty the previous year as Hinault took his fifth overall victory.

  The tension between the pair seemed to have dissolved when they linked hands yards from the finish of Alpe d’Huez, Hinault taking the stage win only when LeMond broke from the embrace to gently nudge him over the line first. This sense of fraternity was fleeting. In a post-stage interview – and to LeMond’s astonishment – Hinault gave no assurances that he wouldn’t still attack the American during the remainder of the race.

  The Alpe had represented a significant turning point in the 1988 Tour too, ensuring the mountain held a cherished spot in Delgado’s heart. His third place, 17 seconds behind stage winner Steven Rooks, meant he had taken the yellow jersey from Steve Bauer and held onto it for the remaining ten days all the way to the capital.

  Despite what Phil Liggett’s monologue suggested, Fignon’s legacy on the Alpe might well count for something. It promised to be a fascinating day of racing, with the identity of the stage winner being of less concern than the identity of the man who would lead the race into the last few days. The three took their places at the table. The pack was being shuffled. The cards would soon be dealt.

  ***

  Between the 11th and 14th centuries, the area around Alpe d’Huez was a hotspot for silver mining, drawing many different nationalities to the region. Fast-forward half a millennium and, every July that the mountain is included on the Tour’s itinerary, many different nationalities are again drawn here. In 1989, while the citizens of France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland were undeniably on the slopes in large numbers, the nation most represented on Alpe d’Huez that year – as in any other – was the Netherlands.

  Whether it’s football or cycling, Dutch crowds are no shrinking wallflowers when it comes to showing their enthusiasm for their favoured sport. The exuberant, Dutch-led festivities on Alpe d’Huez have been likened to those at the Glastonbury Festival: both are gatherings that attract massive crowds in a way that more purist fans might look down upon. A more suitable analogy for American onlookers might be tailgating, those pre-match, beer and barbecue gatherings in the car parks of sports arenas that seem to be of equal importance to its participants as the subsequent on-field action.

  The venerable cycling journalist William Fotheringham has written brilliantly about the visceral scene on the Alpe, a mountain inhabited, for this one day almost every summer, by a different breed, these ‘mountain people’ who seem to have suspended the usual rules of everyday life. ‘There is so much noise that they don’t hear the cars and vans approaching,’ wrote Fotheringham. ‘They walk in front of them, play chicken with them, keep painting things on the road until they are squashed, and ride their bikes downhill onto the cars’ bonnets.’ At the same time, Fotheringham celebrates the open-access nature of the race. ‘In no sport in the world can the fans get so close to their heroes, look them in the eye, give them water, push them if the judges aren’t looking…’

  As someone whose livelihood depends on him being in the burning core of the action, the photographer Graham Watson admits he’s often felt vulnerable on the slopes of the Alpe, in this ‘vertical forest of people’, as Andy Hampsten described it. ‘Both now and then,’ says Watson, ‘it is an ugly scene that leans towards frightening, and one not easily matched with such a genteel sport as cycling. Because of the crowds, Alpe d’Huez is not a great place to work on a moto. The driver has to be extra vigilant and the photographer has to think of his wellbeing should he consider getting off among those masses for a cornering shot or a scenic masterpiece.’

  Hampsten would agree that there was ‘definitely an element of danger’ about the mountain when it was loaded with so many people. ‘They’ve got so much alcohol in their bodies that you can smell the odour of them sweating it out,’ he told cycling historian Peter Cossins. ‘They’re out of their minds – so drunk that it turns into a bit of a guessing game.’

  That orange is the dominant colour on these particular slopes is down to the fact that, over the years, Alpe d’Huez has frequently been a happy hunting ground for Dutch riders. Prior to the 1989 race, the mountain had been included on the Tour’s itinerary a dozen times. On seven of those occasions, it was a Dutch rider – those men of the legendarily pannenkoek-flat lowlands – who was first to the line. On the Tour’s second stage finish on its slopes, 24 long years after the Tour caravan had first rattled its way to the summit, it would be that son of Rijpwetering, Joop Zoetemelk, who pipped another Benelux rider, Belgium’s Lucien Van Impe, to the stage win. The following year, Zoetemelk’s compatriot Hennie Kuiper claimed victory in the mountain-top town.

  This blossoming romance between the Alpe and the race’s Dutch riders became a full-blown affair 12 months later in 1978 when Kuiper repeated the trick, finishing eight seconds ahead of eventual winner Bernard Hinault. Three years, three wins. Never mind the future; the present was very much orange. The attraction was clearly mutual. The mountain seemed to like the way the Dutch riders weren’t intimidated by its gradients, while the Dutch riders – spurred on by vast numbers of spectators from the Netherlands squatting on these narrow verges – were enjoying the morale boosts offered by tens of thousands of their compatriots.

  Between Zoetemelk’s virgin victory in 1976 and Steven Rooks’s triumph in 1988, only Hinault in 1986, aided by that fraternal nudge forward from LeMond just before the line, had scored home success here. It may be a French peak, but – for one long hot day almost every summer – it had become that incongruous contradiction: a Dutch mountain.

  On that Wednesday afternoon in 1989, Gert-Jan Theunisse upheld the tradition, another man of the flatlands conquering arguably the cruellest peak in the race. After his second place behind Rooks on the Alpe the previous year, he was intent on going one better. And he set his stall out early, first to reach the summit of the Galibier, the stage’s opening stiff climb and, at 8,660 feet, the highest point on that year’s Tour. His efforts were rewarded with maximum King of the Mountains points, stretching his superiority over Robert Millar still further.

  By the time he arrived on the lower slopes of the Croix de Fer, the second of that day’s HC climbs, Theunisse had company. He’d been joined by the Italian rider Franco Vona, from the Chateaux d’Ax team, and Laurent Biondi, the Frenchman who was restoring some pride for that demoralised Fagor squad.

  They weren’t with him for long. Theunisse
calmly shed both Vona and Biondi on the climb and rolled over the rocky summit alone. Nothing could distract him. Those dark eyes were pinned forward, fixed on an eminently possible stage win now that there was almost a minute and a half of clear daylight between him and a chasing pack that contained Millar, LeMond, Delgado and Marino Lejarreta. Theunisse’s team-mates, Rooks and Raúl Alcalá, sat at the back of this bunch, keeping a close eye on those trying to reel in their man further up the road.

  After a sharp, no-fear descent, Theunisse hammered along 12 kilometres of flat road that traced the valley floor. By the time he reached Bourg d’Oisans, the small town that signals that the ascent of Alpe d’Huez is nigh, his advantage over the yellow jersey group was in excess of four minutes. As he’d started the day 7’14” down on LeMond, the maillot jaune wasn’t under serious threat, but Delgado’s fourth place certainly was. The Dutchman, his shoulder-length Viking locks increasingly slick with sweat, was flying. He was a photographer’s dream. ‘He looked terrific in his polka-dot jersey, long hair and scary eyes,’ remembers Graham Watson, ‘but it was difficult to be with him in front and also get back to the main fight a few minutes behind.’

  Powering his way towards the first of those 21 hairpins, Theunisse would have had a clear view of the names painted onto the tarmac winding its way up towards the peak. Whenever he looked down at the road, he saw his name before him – white paint, block capitals. Or, at least, thanks to the ever-encroaching crowds that turned the road up the Alpe into a long, narrow channel, he’d only see the ‘UNI’ from the middle of his name. But he knew.

  Whether Theunisse was taking any gratification from the work of that morning’s brush-toting grand masters was uncertain. With hands locked onto the handlebars and backside never rising from the saddle, there was a complete absence of expression on his face. If that day’s stage was indeed a card game, not only was the Dutchman going to clean the table, he was also wearing his best poker face throughout. No indication of pleasure or pain – no smile of satisfaction, no open-mouthed grimace. Even when he crossed the line, after more than five long hours in the saddle and with the near-certainty that the polka-dot jersey was now his and his alone, there was no emotional reaction. The expression would be the same on the podium a few minutes later. His arms might have been full of flowers and an outsized winner’s cheque for 10,000 francs, but his face was empty, impassive, unreadable.