Three Weeks, Eight Seconds

by Tassell, Nige;

  And that’s the way he appeared not just to outsiders, but also to team-mates. ‘Theunisse was a serious guy,’ confirms Raúl Alcalá. ‘A strange guy. We were almost all good companions on the team, so one guy being more of a stranger doesn’t matter. He never ate with us – he’d eat by himself in his room. He was on his own all the time. He was never open. I didn’t understand him.’ Sean Kelly says it more succinctly. ‘He was a special one.’

  Theunisse’s inscrutability wasn’t a mask for nerves ahead of the post-stage drugs test, an obligatory process for the stage winner, plus five other riders. You might be excused for thinking it was after his positive test for testosterone – and ten-minute time penalty – 12 months previously. When, in 1991, the entire PDM squad quit the Tour citing ‘food poisoning’, the whispers – hinting that, as only the outfit’s riders were affected, they were actually showing the symptoms of iffy blood transfusions – were more than audible. Some have suggested that, rather than the more prosaic Philips Dupont Magnetics, the team’s name should stand for ‘Pills, Drugs & Medicines’.

  Although he – as with every other tested rider in the ’89 Tour – was found to be clean, the career of the enigmatic Theunisse didn’t trace an entirely happy arc. His was a racing life pockmarked by positive tests. And, aside from keeping the drug-testers busy, he also suffered from – possibly not unrelated – heart problems, resulting in the fitting of a pacemaker at the age of 50. Prior to that, a collision with a car while out training had left him with a severe spinal cord injury and unable to walk for six months.

  The finish line of Alpe d’Huez on that July afternoon undeniably marked the zenith of his road-racing career. Not only was it his first and only stage win in the Tour, but it also all but secured his immortality in the race’s annals as a King of the Mountains winner. This was as good as it would get for Gert-Jan Theunisse. Yet you’d never know it from his body language. ‘On the last climb,’ this man of few words noted afterwards, ‘I couldn’t see anything anymore. It was like a black tunnel.’

  On any other day, in any other year, Theunisse’s supreme effort would be lauded as a highlight of recent Tour history, a 30-mile solo grind that represents one of the greatest performances to culminate on this particular peak. But on this scorchingly hot day in the French Alps, the Dutchman’s efforts would be cast into long shadow by events a few minutes back down the mountain.

  ***

  Prior to reaching Bourg-d’Oisans, the three main contenders for the general classification had been playing a cagey game, calmly marking each other over the Galibier and the Croix de Fer. But then, while all eyes were peeled in anticipation for Delgado to make his move on the final climb and reduce that still significant time deficit, Fignon blinked first, choosing to execute a plan hatched that morning by himself and Cyrille Guimard. ‘We both knew we wouldn’t have many more chances to turn the race around,’ he later wrote. ‘So I came up with a plan: wait until the start of the climb to Alpe d’Huez and put in the most vicious attack I could at the very first hairpin. That meant really attacking, as if the finish line was only 100 metres away ... Once I got to the Alpe, I could set the fires of hell ablaze.’

  At the first hairpin, ‘Virage 21’ (the switchbacks count down to the summit), Fignon went, but LeMond instantly tracked him. Fignon repeated the move; LeMond, who the Frenchman had passively aggressively dubbed ‘the great follower’, came back onto his wheel again. They were a pair of bantamweight boxers, trying to get out of each other’s reach, matching punches but tiring with each round, with each attack. Or they could be seen as a pair of yachtsmen, duelling it out like racing dinghies in the bay, darting and weaving, masters of the blind spot.

  Whatever the analogy, the skirmish was taking its physical toll. ‘My legs were on fire,’ Fignon recalled, ‘and I went again, full bore, finding strength from I don’t know where. But a few minutes later, he was back at my side. It was a draw. And we were both unable to take another breath or put any weight on the wheels.’

  With the fatigued LeMond doggedly sticking to the wheel of the equally drained Fignon – and with Delgado strangely resistant to putting in the expected attack aimed at tightening the general classification still further – it looked as if the time differences that had separated the trio at the start of the stage would largely remain the same at its end. But such an analysis didn’t factor in the intervention of one man slightly behind them, a man not riding a bike. Cyrille Guimard.

  As LeMond’s directeur sportif at Renault, Guimard knew the American’s riding style intimately and thus could quickly identify when his former apprentice’s tank was running empty; the sagging of the shoulders was a conspicuous meter reading of LeMond’s reserves. And here, five years on from Guimard handing LeMond his first Tour start – and four miles from the Alpe d’Huez summit – the Super U manager recognised those exact signs. If his man Fignon was to take possession of the yellow jersey again, these next few minutes were the point at which it could happen. And the boss needed to tell his rider that.

  On the packed road up to the ski station, where riders, motorbikes and team cars squashed and squeezed their way through a tunnel of fanatical spectators, Guimard was working hard to get his Fiat Croma up to Fignon. In his way, though, was the Fiat Croma of his counterpart at ADR, José De Cauwer. ‘They both knew my mannerisms on the bike,’ LeMond later explained. ‘They could both see my shoulders bouncing, which for Guimard was a sure sign I was cracking. He was desperately trying to get up to Fignon in the car, but José wouldn’t let him through. They were hitting bumpers, bits of car were dropping off.’ The battle for yellow was temporarily mirrored by the battle for road space between the respective team cars.

  ‘The commissaire was on the radio,’ De Cauwer told Cycling Weekly, ‘telling me “You have to move to the side”. There were huge crowds and I knew there were not many opportunities to come past, so I kept it like this for two or three kilometres, playing stupid, moving a bit so there wasn’t room.’

  Len Pettyjohn was alongside De Cauwer in LeMond’s car. ‘There was no way anybody could get up there. You can’t move up on Alpe d’Huez. Even at the very bottom, there’s too many people. They’re smashing your mirror in all the way. I was sitting in the front seat next to José, pushing people out of the way. You just have to get straight on your rider’s wheel to stop the people from jumping in on top of you.’

  Guimard eventually managed to squeeze past De Cauwer and pull alongside Fignon, screaming instructions at his man. ‘Attack! He’s dying!’ Fignon responded that, like LeMond, he too was spent. Into the next kilometre, this four-man yellow jersey pack – Delgado was still with them, aided by his team-mate Abelardo Rondón – began to slow the pace, allowing Fignon to recharge. Then, as they reached the bright yellow 4km banner that briskly fluttered above their heads, Fignon went. A bolt from a gun, those blazing fires of hell.

  Within seconds he’d caught Robert Millar, who had valiantly – and in vain – tried to loosen Theunisse’s grip on the polka-dot jersey, and was flying up the mountain. The response, when it belatedly came, was from Delgado, not LeMond. Guimard had read it right: the Californian was gone, the thighs weak, the lungs empty. With no chance of damage limitation, LeMond’s body language was darkening with despair. He was powerless, resigned and, also dropped by Rondón, alone.

  Up at the finish line, on a small monitor, Kathy LeMond was watching her husband unravel a couple of miles back down the mountain. ‘I remember freaking out that I could tell that Greg was not great. He was starting to bob a little bit. And when he starts to bob, it’s like “Oh God, he’s struggling”. There was so much anxiety watching him. You just hope so much that he can just hold on, hold on, hold on…’

  Delgado, in pursuit of Fignon, caught his prey a mile and a half from the line. With Theunisse already home and dry, the pair duked it out on the wide, much flatter finishing straight, the Spaniard popping out of Fignon’s slipstream to take second place and climb above Charly Mottet into third posi
tion overall. Fignon didn’t mind. He was looking at the war, rather than the battle. His eye was on the bigger prize, a prize that Delgado now pretty much conceded he wouldn’t retain.

  ‘For me,’ says Delgado, ‘that was the day. I might not win the stage, but I could recover two or three minutes. I wanted to break away on the Galibier or the Croix de la Fer before Alpe d’Huez, but I don’t know…

  ‘I think I started to feel tired with the race. As we say in Spanish, I started to ‘pay the bill’ for everything else that had happened to me in the race. I needed more strength at that moment. I was starting to feel weak near the end of this long race. We arrived more or less together. After that, I said “This Tour de France is not for me”.’

  Although he would win at Alpe d’Huez three years later, Andy Hampsten’s race was over well before this point in ’89 and, suffering from a bout of food poisoning, couldn’t remotely entertain thoughts of winning the stage. What made his pain even worse was that no less an éminence grise than Eddy Merckx was riding in the team car directly behind him. ‘I was embarrassed he chose our car,’ Hampsten told Rouleur. ‘He wanted to see me win the stage and he saw me barely struggle across the line in agony.’

  His team-mate, Sean Yates, was in no better shape. A frozen lasagne was to blame. ‘I felt like crap from the start,’ he told William Fotheringham, ‘did a mental descent down the Galibier, got back on the Croix de Fer. I was drinking water and puking up, drinking and puking. It was the kind of position where you can get eliminated – I was nervous. “Got to get there, got to get there.” I collapsed when I got to the top at Alpe d’Huez. I was in agony, I was history.’

  Someone feeling in better spirits was the Super U rookie, Bjarne Riis, who’d completed his first ascent of the Alpe. ‘Just to ride that mountain is fantastic in itself,’ he smiles. ‘But there’s a huge difference between going flat out for the classement and just trying to finish the stage. I had to deliver Fignon to the bottom of the climb and then he had to take care of himself. I needed to get to the top as easily as possible, because the next day I’d have a job to do again. There are tons of people there screaming at you. Whether you’re at the front or at the back, it doesn’t matter. They’re screaming at you. And then, of course, you come up the mountain hearing that Fignon is attacking and dropping LeMond. And that gives you an extra boost.’

  Although Fignon was clearly annoyed he had again missed out on a stage victory atop the Alpe (a particular glory that would forever elude him), the cheers from the French contingent in the grandstand hinted that he nonetheless may well have greater cause for celebration. Needing to take 54 seconds out of LeMond to return to yellow, all eyes and camera lenses were trained further down the road.

  LeMond, having seemingly completely blown, was recovering well as the road levelled out in that final mile. He was charging now, his pellet-encrusted body ignoring any pain as he climbed out of the saddle to churn the big gears. Taking the final left-hander onto the finishing straight, he was effectively now riding his favoured discipline, the time trial: he was racing against the ticking of the clock, trying to keep any deficit remotely manageable. Every muscle worked to keep him in touch, to keep those dreams of the top spot on the Paris podium alive. Exhausted, LeMond crossed the line a minute and 19 seconds behind Fignon, who had wiped out that morning’s chunky deficit to claim a 26-second advantage overall. ‘Give Fignon huge credit,’ says Len Pettyjohn. ‘He put the hammer down when he had the chance.’

  But while LeMond had again relinquished yellow, this epic race was far from over. ‘It’s not the worst thing in the world,’ he reasoned at the finish line, the sparkle returning. ‘It would have still been hard to keep the jersey. I’ve been very isolated and it’s taken a lot of effort out of me. People don’t see me leading the whole peloton, but when you have to control the race and follow attacks, the mental pressure is exhausting.’ A smile still played on his lips though. ‘I’d have preferred to have only lost it by five or ten seconds, but that’s the way it goes.’

  It could certainly have been worse for the American. In those last three miles, Fignon had taken around 26 seconds a mile out of him. If the Parisian had heeded Guimard’s advice at four miles from home, his lead in the general classification would arguably have been unassailable. Indeed, had Guimard been able to manoeuvre his car alongside his team leader quicker, there was a strong likelihood that the titanic battle between Fignon and LeMond would have ended there and then.

  On this point, there’s an obvious irony that played into LeMond’s hands. Renowned for his embrace of new technology and equipment at each and every time trial, it was the absence of one particular piece of technology during this particular marathon stage that served him well, as he has since acknowledged. ‘I look back now and think that I’d have been in trouble if we’d had intercom radios.’

  He could well be right. Had race radios been used in the ’89 Tour (they weren’t phased in until the ’90s, a move led by team-sponsoring telecoms giant Motorola), the cycling nation may well have been denied that beautifully poised, infinitely intriguing spectacle. Bjarne Riis is a little more dismissive. ‘With or without radios, it doesn’t matter. It’s still up to the riders to make decisions. They still have to think and do things. They are not machines.’

  Indeed, this most thrilling of races, one shaped more by the riders’ own thoughts and deeds than by the stricture of team orders, was heading towards the climax that it fully deserved. After nearly 80 hours in the saddle, Fignon and LeMond remained divided by a matter of seconds, not minutes.

  There were still a few more hands to be dealt. The game of poker continued. Aces high.

  Stage 17

  1. Gert-Jan Theunisse (PDM/Netherlands) 5:10:39

  2. Pedro Delgado (Reynolds/Spain) +1’09”

  3. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) +1’09”

  4. Abelardo Rondón (Reynolds/Colombia) +2’08”

  5. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) +2’28”

  General classification

  1. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) 77:55:11

  2. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) +26”

  3. Pedro Delgado (Reynolds/Spain) +1’55”

  4. Gert-Jan Theunisse (PDM/Netherlands) +5’12”

  5. Charly Mottet (RMO/France) +5’22”

  FOURTEEN

  WIDENING MARGINS

  ‘I was sure I had won the Tour’ – Laurent Fignon

  20 July

  Stage 18, Bourg d’Oisans – Villard-de-Lans, 56 miles

  ‘WE ARE ADVERSARIES. We’ll never be great friends, but we’ll talk to each other now and again. There is no animosity.’

  Laurent Fignon’s words about his relationship with Greg LeMond – delivered to Channel 4’s Paul Sherwen in the evening glow of the terrace of Fignon’s Alpe d’Huez hotel – suggested something of a charm offensive after the ugly nature of his public pronouncements over the previous days. Was this an attempt to heal the growing rift between the two top riders? Or was it designed to project a more conciliatory, less combative public image, in the process appearing more media-friendly?

  If it was the latter, it didn’t last long. The next morning, as he descended the steps of the Hotel La Belle Aurore and climbed into the back of his team car to drive down the mountain to the day’s start in Bourg d’Oisans, Fignon appeared in less outgoing mood. On shutting the car door, and despite the decidedly clement temperatures, he immediately wound the window right up – a barrier of silence between the painfully private man and the prowling, prying press corps.

  By contrast, in the back of his own team car, Greg LeMond’s guard appeared to be down – as was his window. The conversation was perfectly audible. Chewing his thumb, he asked some – possibly rhetorical – questions of José De Cauwer and his Coors Light boss Len Pettyjohn in the front. Uncertainty was hanging in the air. And LeMond’s nerves weren’t eased when the car headed back down the mountain, revisiting the scene of his pain the previous afternoon.

  This wouldn’t be a day for
either man to simply sit tight. That tactic suited neither. The final-day time trial was playing on both their minds. Fignon had to expand his lead to a defendable, safe amount; LeMond had to make sure that whatever his adversary’s lead was come the morning of the Paris stage, it had to give him something to realistically attack on the streets of the French capital. Twenty-six seconds was satisfactory as a carrot, but a target of several seconds fewer would be even better. Matching, or eclipsing, Fignon’s time into Villard-de-Lans was crucial.

  The main contenders would be keeping their powder dry for later in the stage, so a break over the Côte de Laffrey – one led by Fagor’s Laurent Biondi and including two stage winners in Robert Millar and Pascal Richard – was kept on a long leash. This breakaway had dissolved by the time the race arrived at the foot of the Côte de Saint-Nizier. By then, the main contenders weren’t exactly jockeying for position so much as being swept along by the pace-setting PDM juggernaut. The team’s target, alongside trying to break the occupants of the top three GC places, was to reel in Luis Herrera, a remnant of the previous break who had stayed out front. But just as the group was about to absorb the Colombian, one of their number launched a devastating attack. It was an unlikely attacker. It was the yellow jersey. He was off and away.

  ‘My legs had suddenly begun to feel like they used to when I was younger,’ Fignon later wrote. ‘Rooks and Theunisse and the PDM team were setting a searing pace, with no idea that I was about to be the beneficiary. I caught everyone napping and although LeMond and Delgado worked together, they couldn’t keep up. It was an example of my favourite tactic: use a situation in the race to take my opponents by surprise.’