Three Weeks, Eight Seconds

by Tassell, Nige;

  Certainly the move from KAS had suited him; the removal of all those Spanish stage races from his schedule had meant he was in fine fettle for the Tour itself. ‘I felt much fresher than in previous years, thanks to the programme in the early part of the season. I felt I had more energy. Over the years, fatigue was a problem. Usually, when I got into the second week of the Tour, I would feel it.’

  Kelly wasn’t the only PDM new boy to have an impressive Tour. Martin Earley had taken that victory in Pau, as had Raúl Alcalá at Spa-Francorchamps. Despite finishing eighth overall, Alcalá ran out of juice in the final week – or, at least, he didn’t have enough juice left to make a meaningful impression in the Alps. ‘I tried to keep my form as long as possible. For me, the Alps were more difficult than the Pyrenees. When the Alps come first on a Tour, riding Alpe d’Huez is a great feeling. But if the Pyrenees come first, I’d get in trouble in the Alps because I’d get more tired. I always got this feeling from around Stage 13 or 14 onwards. I was there, very near the front at the finishes in 1989, but I didn’t have enough power to win the stages. On the last seven or eight kilometres of a stage, I was going at the same tempo. I see guys go, but I can’t go with them. I was like an automatic car. You put your foot on the gas, but you go the same speed.’

  Two climbers who fared better than Alcalá in the high mountains were Charly Mottet and Marino Lejarreta, two diminutive men who finished within a minute of each other. Their respective Tours, though, were rather different. Mottet securely held third place for a week between Superbagnères and Alpe d’Huez, before fatigue appeared to set in and he faded. By contrast, the longer the race went on, the higher Lejarreta rose, finally taking possession of Mottet’s fifth place on the final day in the mountains.

  Lejarreta’s compatriot, Pedro Delgado, had – as Laurent Fignon had rudely pointed out to him on the race’s early stages – discovered that the deficit he had to eradicate was too great, especially with Fignon and LeMond being at the height of their powers. As he lined up for the time trial, he was in a quandary.

  ‘The day before, I was two minutes and 28 seconds behind. I started two minutes and 42 seconds late in Luxembourg. Someone said, “Hey Pedro, maybe you will be the first rider in Tour de France history to ride the race in less time than the person who won it.” At the end, I was more than three minutes down on the classification. I rode the time trial without motivation. First and second places were too distant to recover and, behind me, nobody had put my third position in danger. So I just completed it. Nothing more. But some Spanish journalists thought that I went slowly so that I wouldn’t be the first rider to ride the race quicker than the winner.’

  ‘The fightback by Delgado even now gets overlooked by the bigger fight,’ says Graham Watson. ‘Looking back, it was amazing how hard Delgado raced because of his early losses. He’d normally have lost many minutes in the long time trial on Stage 5, but instead hit back and used that performance to reach even dizzier heights later on. We will never know if he’d have won that Tour with a safer and normal Prologue, but in all likelihood he would have – and this Tour would never have ended so famously.’

  Certainly, Delgado’s irresistible surge up the GC, from the indignity of being the race’s first lanterne rouge after the Prologue, owed plenty to the strength of his team, specifically the dedication of his faithful helpers Induráin, Palacio, Rondón and Gorospe. Indeed, Reynolds were the only team in the whole race to have a full complement of riders taking to the time trial start line at Versailles. All nine members were reporting for duty.

  (Delgado might have been the ’89 Tour’s first lanterne rouge, but its final one, the Paternina sprinter Mathieu Hermans, endured a double indignity. Not only did he become, after his victory in Blagnac, the first stage winner to finish in last position, but this wasn’t the first time he’d ended up bottom of the barrel. He was merely repeating his feat of 1987.)

  Delgado had been desperate to win the ’89 Tour in order to disprove the doubters, to blow away the clouds of suspicion that had followed him around since the probenecid affair the previous summer. After the Prologue debacle, his furious charge up the GC (which incredibly didn’t include a stage win) was, of course, an attempt to get remotely close to that ambition.

  There were no positive tests in the ’89 race, no whispers of chemical enhancement tainting the battle for yellow. Six riders were tested every day: the stage winner, the runner-up, the yellow jersey, second place in GC and two riders selected at random. ‘Testing wasn’t as stringent as it is now,’ says Sean Yates, ‘but that’s probably more to do with the products that are out there these days that they’re searching for. ’89 was before that era.’

  While it would be naïve to imagine every single rider in the peloton was squeaky clean, it is fair to judge this race as one of the last classic encounters before EPO arrived and changed the game entirely. ‘In the ’80s and early ’90s,’ explains Stephen Roche, ‘you’d feel a guy with natural talent could still come out and win, because whatever was on the market could increase performance by three to five per cent. So somebody who had a lot of class could beat a guy who was taking something. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, some of the products on the market at that particular time added 30-40 percent increase in performance. So no matter how much class they had, it was impossible for someone who was trying to be clean to beat somebody who had taken something.’

  As EPO put its icy paw on the shoulder of the pro cycling ranks, a rider of class like Delgado found himself off the pace, average at best. ‘One year I’m in the first group. The next year, I’m in the last group, like a very bad rider. I did the same as I did every year, so what happened…?’

  Back in the late ’80s, Greg LeMond gave the journalist Samuel Abt an overview of drug intake within the peloton. ‘Of course, a small minority of cyclists do use drugs. There are more than 700 professionals in Europe. A lot of them are broke and they’re all human. There are few people who, knowing that if they take something they may do better, are capable of refusing it. But the tests are pretty strict, so I honestly believe there is very little drug use in the major events. In smaller races where there are no drug tests, it can be a different matter. Not everybody in those races is riding on water … It’s mainly the second-raters who do it.’

  With no one testing positive, and no clouds of suspicion hanging over the result, as there had been the previous year, nothing could detract from the drama, from the sheer sporting intrigue, of the final day in ’89. With 136 riders having now rolled down the start ramp at Versailles, to be welcomed onto the Champs-Élysées without, as Andy Hampsten explained, having to share the cheers, only two riders remained.

  What was left was a duel, a shoot-out, a boxing match. Cycling’s fight of the century.

  Fignon vs LeMond.

  ***

  ‘There’s a lot to be said about feeling good and not having pressure,’ says Len Pettyjohn. ‘When you’re in the jersey, the collar is very tight.’

  As he had for three weeks, the Coors Light team manager, embedded with the ADR team throughout the race, had a front-row seat on that final morning. He could gauge how calm and collected Greg LeMond was and, from across the hotel breakfast room, how Laurent Fignon was tying himself up in knots.

  ‘That morning we were laughing and having a good time. Greg was very relaxed as he had nothing to lose at that point. He had been out practising on his time trial bike, but there was a problem because the bars were slipping and the mechanic was sitting there cutting up a Coke can to try to put spacers in between the bars. We looked over and there was Fignon, in the back of the parking lot, with time trial bars on his bike. He had them out and was practising. He was looking over at Greg and you could see he was really nervous. So we went in to have breakfast and we were all laughing. We watched the Super U team walk in and Fignon looked over again. Greg waved and smiled. Fignon’s face was white. He was feeling the pressure. You could see the fear.’

  The doubts would amplify wi
th each hour that the time trial grew closer. With such a lead on a short stage on the familiar streets of his hometown, how could Fignon fail? Logic was on his side. But there were ways that the presence of technology could precipitate a defeat. Firstly, Fignon could simply be beaten by the physical advantages that the technology gave LeMond, by the appliance of science. Secondly, whether LeMond actually received a boost from his equipment or not, the fear that he might could be enough to tie Fignon in knots too.

  It wasn’t as if Cyrille Guimard was a technophobe. Far from it. Over the previous decade, the Super U boss had been in the vanguard of innovation, especially any new thinking that involved aerodynamics. He was the man who introduced Fignon and Bernard Hinault to sloped-framed bikes, as well as becoming an evangelist for the use of disc wheels. But, for some reason, he shied away from the aerobars, despite seeing how they had helped LeMond cut through the wind and the rain on the Rennes time trial. When pushed, he would mumble an excuse, saying how they had actually tested them but found they adversely affected Fignon’s ability to breathe. LeMond was delighted to hear this admission. ‘Thank God people are sceptical…’

  ‘Winning by ourselves without artificial aids was something we valued,’ Fignon later wrote. ‘And we had an inviolable principle in the biggest races; we would only use new equipment if it had been tested properly before the event. We had to make absolutely certain it was reliable, particularly for the Tour de France where we only ever rode trusty, solid kit that we knew how to use.’

  Fignon’s definition of ‘artificial aids’ clearly didn’t include disc wheels. He plumped for two discs for the final time trial, both decked out in the national colours of France to match his tricolour handlebar tape. Such showiness was consistent with the supposed inevitability of the result. Stephen Roche notes how ‘on the Champs-Élysées that morning, there were blue, white and red T-shirts with “Fignon: Winner of the Tour” on them’.

  Aside from their presumptuousness (‘They were so sure they’d won that they put on a show’), Roche sees Super U’s decision to use both these disc wheels as fundamentally flawed. ‘That was a huge, huge mistake. That day, coming in from Versailles, all the side streets would have produced side-winds. If it had been a dead straight road with a headwind, it would have been beneficial. But when you had changes in direction and the wind coming in from the left and the right, when it came to taking your hand off the bars to change gear, you wouldn’t do so as you’d be afraid of the wind taking your front wheel. It would be very uncomfortable. If they’d calculated everything precisely, they wouldn’t have taken a risk on a full disc at the front. But because they were so far ahead, they did take the risk.’ So while it wasn’t that Super U weren’t embracing technology to secure Fignon’s place on the podium, it was that they appeared to be embracing the wrong technology.

  LeMond, on the other hand, had done his calculations and was insistent that his bike be set up just how he wanted it. ‘I wanted Greg to ride with the front disc,’ admits Len Pettyjohn, ‘but he refused. That was his call. At that time, the nature of wheel aerodynamics was such that you really could get pushed across the road with double-discs. It was dangerous. Greg said, “You know what? I want to go as fast as I can go and I don’t want a distraction. I don’t want anything to bother me. So don’t put that front wheel on.”’

  LeMond was also insistent that he wasn’t to be told any of his split times out on the course. That would take the psychology, the thinking, out of his performance, freeing him up for the purely flat-out physical assault. Fignon, however, even if he didn’t want to, would get a sense of how he was riding in comparison with LeMond. Another contribution to add to the ever-growing pile of psychological burdens.

  ‘When you start losing time,’ says Pettyjohn, ‘it creates panic. That’s just the reality of bike racing. Then you start to push a little harder and you go over the limit. Your heart-rate spikes and then you have to slow down. If you go fast, slow, fast, slow, guess what? You go slow. And getting a message in your ear that you’re losing time when you feel like shit is not a good thing. Everything would be a distraction for Fignon that day.’

  Aside from the psychology, Fignon also had a physical issue, one he believed ‘no one suspected a thing [about] because we had imposed a media blackout’. He had developed an excruciatingly painful saddle sore, just below one of his buttocks, right at the point where his shorts touched his saddle. He hadn’t slept well because of it for two nights, and no matter how much embrocation the team doctor administered, the pain wouldn’t subside.

  But, despite the psychological and physical pressures heaped up on Fignon, he knew – like almost everyone else – that he was still the overwhelming favourite to be standing atop the podium that afternoon. Yes, LeMond would probably take the stage win, but erasing that time deficit was surely beyond him. ‘I could not lose. I could not see how it could happen. It was not feasible.’ Almost everyone else felt that way too. His team-mate Bjarne Riis believed that 50 seconds would be an ample buffer. ‘Yeah, absolutely. We were pretty confident.’ While a Super U insider would be expected to be calmly optimistic, the impartial photographer Graham Watson agrees with the universal appraisal of the situation. ‘It would have been a drunk or rare bird that stood up before the stage and announced LeMond would beat Fignon.’

  There was one person in Paris who doubted destiny – Gregory James LeMond. His resolve, hinted at in those nightly post-stage TV interviews, had grown and grown with each day. LeMond had done the maths and he had convinced himself. He was a believer. And that morning, as Kathy explains, he converted someone else to the faith.

  ‘My dad was the nicest, most optimistic guy you could ever meet. That morning, when everyone was sitting around the Hilton in Paris, he said he was going to go for a walk. What he really did was take a cab and go to see Greg at the Sofitel. Greg had just come back from his morning warm-up and said, “I feel really good, Dave. I think I can do it.” Dad comes back to the Hilton and tells me he thinks Greg’s going to do it.

  ‘“Oh my God, Dad. Stop it. That’s impossible.”

  ‘“No, no. I went and saw him.”

  ‘“What?! I don’t even talk to Greg on the morning of a time trial. He’s always keyed up.”

  ‘“No, we had a good talk.”

  ‘My dad was so sure that Greg was going to win that he took Geoffrey, our five-year-old, and stood by the podium with him so he could see his dad win this thing. My dad believed so much in Greg and I was the naysayer! I was like, “Let’s not be so greedy. Do you know how lucky we are?” We would have been very happy with second.’

  As the shadows lengthened in the late-afternoon sunshine, the last two riders circled each other in the warm-up area, two boxers waiting for the other to land the first punch. LeMond certainly didn’t look like someone who might be happy with second place. Instead, with Oakley shades, teardrop helmet and those aerobars, he appeared inscrutable. Invincible, even. Fignon, on the other hand – professorial spectacles, ponytail flapping lightly in the breeze, regular handlebars – looked vulnerable. Beatable, possibly. These last three weeks had been a battle royal between riders, between styles, between philosophies. It was about to be decided once and for all.

  Thirty minutes and the champion would be anointed.

  SEVENTEEN

  THIRTY MINUTES FROM IMMORTALITY

  ‘Eight seconds for 3,500 kilometres is not much, but that is the law of sport’ – Cyrille Guimard

  THE LAST TWO gladiators prepare for battle.

  4.12pm

  Greg LeMond lifts his cherry-red Bottecchia bike up the metal steps of the time trial start house for the fourth and final time in the 1989 Tour de France. All three other occasions have been vital in getting him to this particular juncture, in keeping him just about within touching distance of Laurent Fignon, but this is the one that will matter. If he gets it right, this is the time trial that the world will remember forever.

  He allows himself a quick glance up the boule
vard that stretches into the distance before him. Just a glance, though. His eyes, encased in those Oakleys, look back down to his thighs. Spending the next 15 miles almost exclusively in the tuck position, this will be his view for the next half-hour. Or notably less, if things go to plan.

  The fingers of the official’s right hand count down the last few seconds before departure and off he roars.

  4.14pm

  Fignon takes his place in the start house, electing not to wear a helmet or sunglasses. He’s not wearing the headband he wore for the mountain time trial either. The hair isn’t even all pulled back out of his eyes; what remains of his floppy fringe hangs and sprouts in different directions. He looks far from invincible. The pursed lips and occasional nervous glance confirm this.

  4.15pm

  LeMond is on the charge at an impressive lick, upholding his one tactic: to go as fast as he can for as long as he can, not unlike a 400m runner asked to run the 10,000 metres at their normal one-lap pace. Having already passed through the Porchefontaine neighbourhood, he flies under the railway viaduct in the suburb of Viroflay.

  4.16pm

  LeMond bears left onto the Avenue Roger Salengro. The Sunday afternoon crowds are thick here, raising their hands to shield squinting eyes from the sun.

  Their hearts skip a beat when his bike momentarily, and inexplicably, wobbles. He’s immediately back on the straight and narrow, though. It will be the only time in the whole run that LeMond looks remotely human. The Guardian’s correspondent refers to him, in his crouched position, as ‘a praying mantis in search of the Fignon fly’.

  4.18pm

  Fignon now reaches the Avenue Roger Salengro, but the news is of concern. Despite having only been on the road for four minutes, he is already seven seconds down on LeMond. The psychological pressure just got upped by a notch or two.