Three Weeks, Eight Seconds Read online

  First published in 2017 by

  POLARIS PUBLISHING LTD

  c/o Turcan Connell

  Princes Exchange

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  Edinburgh

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  in association with

  ARENA SPORT

  An imprint of Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

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  www.arenasportbooks.co.uk

  Text copyright © Nige Tassell, 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-909715-53-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-344-0

  The right of Nige Tassell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

  Designed and typeset by Polaris Publishing, Edinburgh

  Printed in Great Britain by Clays, St Ives

  To the memory of Pat Williamson

  ’Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems

  Henry V, Act II, Scene IV

  CONTENTS

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  PRELUDE

  ACT I: THE FIRST WEEK

  ONE: The Contenders

  TWO: Lazarus Rising

  THREE: A Matter of Timing

  FOUR: Double Trouble

  FIVE: The Man from Monterrey

  SIX: The American Express

  SEVEN: The Great Escape

  ACT II: THE SECOND WEEK

  EIGHT: Mountain Men

  NINE: Yellow Peril

  TEN: Defence of the Realm

  ELEVEN: National Service

  ACT III: THE FINAL WEEK

  TWELVE: L’Americaine Jaune

  THIRTEEN: Setting the Fires of Hell Ablaze

  FOURTEEN: Widening Margins

  FIFTEEN: No Surrender

  ACT IV: EIGHT SECONDS

  SIXTEEN: Capital Gains

  SEVENTEEN: Thirty Minutes from Immortality

  EIGHTEEN: The Aftermath

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  List of Illustrations

  In April 1987, Greg LeMond lies in a Sacramento hospital bed following extensive surgery after being accidentally shot in a hunting accident by his brother-in-law. His wife Kathy describes his body, decimated by buckshot, as being ‘like a colander’. Offside/Presse Sports

  After arriving at the Prologue time trial in Luxembourg nearly three minutes late, defending champion Pedro Delgado finds a long, lonely road ahead of him if he is now to challenge for the yellow jersey. Offside/Presse Sports

  The following morning, last-placed Delgado discusses his predicament with the new Tour director, Jean-Marie Leblanc. That afternoon, he would lose even more time after a disastrous team time trial. Offside/Presse Sports

  Laurent Fignon (centre) is in jubilant mood after leading his Super U squad to an imposing win in the team time trial. Tour debutant and future champion Bjarne Riis (far left) has just won a stage on his first full day in the race. Offside/Presse Sports

  Stage 5 finishes in Belgium, in the unlikely setting of the Spa-Francorchamps motor-racing circuit, home of the Belgian Grand Prix. ‘When you see Formula 1 cars going round it at x miles an hour,’ says Sean Kelly, ‘you don’t realise how steep the bloody hill is.’ Offside/Presse Sports

  Raúl Alcalä takes the applause following his victory at Spa-Francorchamps. Having recently moved from the American 7-Eleven team to the Dutch PDM squad, he becomes the first Mexican rider to win a stage of the Tour. Offside/Presse Sports

  After an encouraging start to the race, Greg LeMond sits in quiet contemplation ahead of Stage 5, the time trial between Dinard and Rennes in Brittany. The American has earmarked the 45-mile stage to be a measure of his form and fitness. Offside/Presse Sports

  On the road to Rennes, LeMond overtakes the Super U rider Christophe Lavainne, one of several riders he passes on the time trial. Not only does his phenomenal ride give him his first Tour stage win in three years, it also puts him in the yellow jersey. Offside/Presse Sports

  Roared on by thousands of flag-waving Basques, Miguel Induráin launches a surprising solo attack on the first day in the Pyrenees. He manages to sustain his advantage until the finish in Cauterets – the first of only two non-time trial stages the Spaniard would win in a career that saw him take the overall Tour title five times. Offside/Presse Sports

  Escorted by his Fagor team-mate and compatriot Paul Kimmage, Ireland’s Stephen Roche limps towards the finish at Cauterets after banging an already injured knee on his handlebar. He withdrew the following morning, but had been determined to finish the stage. ‘You might not start the next day, but you never abandon.’ Offside/Presse Sports

  Robert Millar nips past Pedro Delgado to take the stage win at the ski-station of Superbagnères. A classic mountain stage, it was also the Scotsman’s third – and probably best – win in the Pyrenees. Offside/Presse Sports

  On the scorching hot Bastille Day stage between Montpellier and Marseille, Frenchmen Charly Mottet and Laurent Fignon launch a joint attack, much to the surprise and consternation of their rivals near the top of the general classification. Offside/Presse Sports

  Steven Rooks of the Netherlands wins the mountain time trial into Orcières-Merlette, showing exactly why he finished runner-up to Pedro Delgado in the 1988 race. Offside/Presse Sports

  Sean Kelly had a superb Tour, taking the green points jersey – for the most consistent finisher – for a fourth time. For a big man more familiar with duking it out in sprint finishes, he climbed the race’s sky-high peaks brilliantly. Offside/Presse Sports

  Wearing the polka-dot jersey of the King of the Mountains leader, Gert-Jan Theunisse scores a classic victory at Alpe d’Huez, the latest in a series of Dutch riders to win big on the totemic mountain. Graham Watson

  Laurent Fignon leads the race’s top five riders – (left to right) Greg LeMond, Gert-Jan Theunisse, Pedro Delgado and Marino Lejarreta – into Aix-les-Bains. The order in which they finished on the stage mirrored the order in which they finished overall in Paris. Offside/Presse Sports

  Facing a 50-second deficit – but with the advantage of those controversial aerobars – Greg LeMond considers the task at hand as he leaves Versailles on the heart-stopping final-day time trial. Offside/Presse Sports

  As the last man to go in the final time trial, Laurent Fignon knows how quickly LeMond is riding on the road ahead. Powering along the banks of the Seine, the Frenchman is nonetheless shedding significant time to the American. Offside/Presse Sports

  Having safely negotiated the hairpin in front of the Arc de Triomphe, LeMond now rides flat out down the Champs-Élysées. Does he dare to believe that he’s making the impossible possible? Getty Images

  LeMond is flabbergasted at receiving confirmation that Fignon has fallen short by just eight seconds after three weeks of intense racing. It is one of the greatest sporting comebacks of all time. Offside/Presse Sports

  Having collapsed at the fi
nish line, Fignon is inconsolable at learning that his fastest-ever time trial was still not enough to prevent defeat. He describes himself as being ‘like a boxer who’s concussed’. Graham Watson

  For just a few fleeting seconds on the podium, Fignon manages to share a smile with LeMond and Delgado. The pain, though, would remain with him for the rest of his life. Graham Watson

  Ever the family man, LeMond poses for post-stage pictures back in his hotel room, alongside the ever-supportive Kathy and two-year-old Scott. Getty Images

  Fignon tries to exact revenge on LeMond at the world championships in Chambéry the following month, but the American outsprints everyone to take an incredible double. Offside/Presse Sports

  LeMond’s extraordinary year is capped in December when Sports Illustrated name him their Sportsman of the Year, beating much more established names from American football, basketball and ice hockey. Getty Images

  PRELUDE

  YOU COULD HEAR the helicopter before you could see it.

  It was getting louder, getting closer, with each second. The chop of its blades was cutting right through the peace of the early morning, across the rolling hills and perfect-blue California skies. For those on the ground, it was the best sound of all. It was the sound of hope.

  Usually on highway patrol duty, monitoring the rush-hour traffic on the roads feeding into Sacramento, the helicopter’s crew had had a quiet morning. Easter Monday. A day for commuters to leave their cars on the driveway, to kick back, to relax.

  Quiet until a few minutes ago.

  Rather than attend a minor auto accident, the crew diverted to a more pressing assignment, one they just happened to overhear on the emergency radio. An early-morning, three-man hunting expedition had gone very wrong here in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. One of the hunters, dressed in battle fatigues and crouching in a berry bush, had slowly risen up to assess the positions of his party. A second hunter mistakenly interpreted the upward movement as being that of a wild turkey. His trigger response, from around 30 yards away, inundated the victim’s back and side with around 60 buckshot pellets. The victim was the shooter’s brother-in-law.

  The flashing lights of various emergency vehicles on the ground guided the helicopter pilot to the correct location. As the chopper came in to land, the victim could be seen on a stretcher, his shirt cut open, an intravenous drip attached. He was conscious but, because of a collapsed lung, was finding it difficult to both breathe and talk. He was also bleeding heavily and in need of urgent surgery, but an uncomfortable ambulance ride to the nearest hospital would have very much lowered his chances of survival. Not only would getting airborne speed up the victim’s rescue, but it would also mean that he could be taken to a different medical unit, one that, while further away, was more appropriate for his needs. It specialised in gunshot wounds and trauma, boasting a permanent on-call team employed to stymie Sacramento’s high murder count.

  With the severely wounded patient carefully placed on board, eleven minutes later the chopper landed on the helipad on the roof of the University of California Davis Medical Center. By this time, the hospital had called the victim’s wife. She was at home making breakfast pancakes for the couple’s two-year-old son. ‘Is he dead?’ she asked. ‘No, at this moment he’s alive.’ Eight months pregnant, she was soon on her way, with toddler in the back, driving the 20 or so miles into Sacramento along thankfully quiet roads.

  The surgeons’ diagnosis confirmed the gravity of the situation – and the vital, life-saving intervention of the highway patrol crew. Another 20 minutes and the victim would have bled to death. He had already lost four pints of blood, half the capacity of the human body.

  The next few hours were taken up by surgery as the team repaired his collapsed lung and removed pellets from his liver, kidneys and intestines. But it was too dangerous to get them all out. Those in the lining of his heart couldn’t be removed without open-heart surgery and were left in situ.

  The victim wouldn’t come out of the heavy anaesthesia for the best part of another ten hours, but his wife was allowed to visit him in the recovery room. She was shocked by what she saw. Her husband was suspended above the bed while the staff changed the sheets, blood still dripping from the 60 holes in his back, blotting red onto the crisp, white linen. ‘He was like a colander,’ she later confided.

  But she couldn’t stay with him for long. The shock of the incident had sent her into premature labour; she was having contractions every two minutes. Her destination was a maternity hospital a couple of miles across town.

  The baby, the couple’s second son, didn’t actually arrive for another three weeks. By then, the shooting victim had been discharged and was home, albeit only able to slowly – painfully – move from bed to chair and back again. While the initial pace of recovery would be infuriating for a patient who was anything but patient, his resolve did accelerate the healing process. Just six weeks on from Easter Monday, six weeks after his body was decimated by that buckshot blast, he carefully climbed onto a bike and gently rode for five kilometres.

  At this point, he was still the reigning champion of the Tour de France.

  ACT I

  THE FIRST WEEK

  ONE

  THE CONTENDERS

  ‘I’d again become salesworthy in the eyes of the press. Pictures of the likely winner shift a newspaper or two’ – Laurent Fignon

  TWO YEARS, TWO months and eleven days after Greg LeMond’s gurney crashed through the doors of that emergency room in Sacramento, the American was back in competition in the world’s greatest bike race. It was 1 July 1989 and the occasion was the Prologue time trial of the Tour de France, the opening encounter of that year’s race. It was also LeMond’s first appearance since his victory three years earlier. Back then, he was radiating in the golden glow of the fêted yellow jersey as the Tour’s first North American winner. By 1989, however, he was wearing the lime green and indigo colours of the Belgian ADR squad, a wildcard outfit who’d only been accepted into the race after LeMond himself organised an additional, half-past-the-eleventh-hour sponsor who could cover the team’s entrance fee.

  Here in Luxembourg, the city around which the Prologue was to kick off the Tour, LeMond’s presence was somewhat remarkable. Following the near-death experience of the hunting accident, he had missed the two subsequent Tours, back under the surgeon’s knife for appendicitis and tendinitis respectively. By now, LeMond was a pale shadow of his former formidable self – a man rebuilding his career, learning his craft again, all the while battling demons both physical and psychological.

  Were he signed to a more prestigious, more reliable and better-funded team than ADR, one or two more observers might have taken his participation a little more seriously. But the team’s raggle-taggle roster, allied to his lack of form over the previous 18 months, meant the collective verdict on LeMond was that he was an also-ran. A spent force. Yesterday’s man.

  While the eyes of the Luxembourg crowd were fixed on him, it was more out of morbid curiosity than viewing him as the man most likely to succeed both that afternoon and over the following three weeks. While he didn’t exactly represent a freak show, the talk that day was more about him actually competing than indulging him with talk of possibly being crowned champion ever again. It was LeMond’s bravery that was being admired. This was, after all, a man who still had more than 30 shotgun pellets lodged in various muscles and organs, including that pair in the lining of his heart. By the time he arrived in Luxembourg, he viewed the pellets as ‘part of my body now, part of my character’.

  Nowhere – not on the lips of fans, pundits or bookmakers, nor among the tactical plans of various team directeurs sportif – was the name of Greg LeMond being touted as a serious contender for the title come the peloton’s arrival in Paris three weeks hence.

  Instead, the sensible eyes and the safe money were on reigning champion Pedro Delgado – the clear favourite. An exhilarating climber whose riding style became more explosive the
steeper the gradient, the Spaniard’s triumph on the Champs-Élysées the previous July had been more than comfortable, his seven-minute margin of victory indisputably made easier by the absence of both LeMond and the 1987 champion, Ireland’s Stephen Roche. Delgado’s elevation into the Tour’s history books, though, was a tarnished one.

  After the 17th stage of the ’88 Tour, the French TV channel Antenne2 reported that Delgado had failed a doping test. The next morning, the substance he had been tested positive for was revealed to be probenecid, a drug used to either assist the kidneys or mask the use of anabolic steroids. However, while it was banned by the International Olympic Committee, cycling’s governing body – the Union Cycliste Internationale – had yet to declare it an illegal substance. And the Tour marched to the UCI’s tune. Legally, Delgado had no case to answer.

  ‘I took probenecid just after the Alpe d’Huez stage,’ he explained to the Spanish newspaper AS. ‘We used it to assist draining from the kidneys. If I’d wanted to hide something, I would have had to have used it every day and it only appeared on that one [test].’

  No matter his protestations, suspicions lingered and opinions were aired. A huge question mark floated over the legitimacy of Delgado’s title. The Irish rider Paul Kimmage – who doubled as a correspondent for the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune – likened Delgado to ‘the politician caught leaving the brothel who claims he is only canvassing’. The Spaniard had his supporters too, though. The affair led to a mini international incident when loyal fans stormed the French Embassy in Madrid to protest at their hero’s treatment by the race authorities.

  Nonetheless, controversy had followed Delgado into 1989 when rumours of skulduggery abounded after his victory at the Vuelta a España in mid-May. Having seen off the challenge of Colombia’s Fabio Parra – the pair were separated by just two seconds going into the final days – a Colombian TV crew alleged that they had filmed Delgado giving an envelope to the young Russian rider Ivan Ivanov. Ivanov’s pursuit of Parra on one particular stage had effectively assured Delgado of the race-winner’s crown. The TV crew, armed with little hard evidence, claimed the envelope contained cash; Delgado responded with the counterclaim that, having become friendly with the Russian over the course of the race, he had been merely giving him his address in nearby Segovia.