Three Weeks, Eight Seconds Read online

  Fignon fared better. Ten places and 51 seconds ahead of LeMond at the start of the day, he took third with an impressively strong ride, even if he did ship the best part of a minute to LeMond. Acácio da Silva soon followed Fignon home, but the Portuguese, despite overtaking second-placed Søren Lilholt, was forced to relinquish the yellow jersey that had been in his possession for nearly a week. But the recipient wasn’t Fignon. Remarkably, amazingly, and by a margin of just five seconds, Greg LeMond was the new leader of the race.

  ‘It was like winning the world championship,’ LeMond gushed afterwards to Samuel Abt. ‘It was my best moment in many years. I’m happier than when I won the Tour in 1986. This is the most wonderful day of my life. It’s almost a miracle.’ He set out his ambitions to ABC Television. ‘I was going to be happy to be in the top 20. Now I’m shooting for the top five and, who knows, maybe even better.’ The smile was the broadest it had been for at least two years and those cobalt eyes hadn’t sparkled so much for that long too. ‘I can’t refuse a victory and I can’t refuse the yellow jersey.’

  Cutting a windproof figure through the poor conditions, the aerobars had definitely helped. ‘I didn’t even know if they would make a difference or not,’ LeMond later told the writer Daniel Friebe. ‘The first time I saw them was when [7-Eleven rider] Davis Phinney rode past me at the Tour de Trump that year. I thought “Hmmm, he looks more aerodynamic than me”. So I used them in that first time trial in Rennes and won.’

  Whether assisted artificially by technology or not, LeMond had returned to cycling’s top table. ‘You’d be an idiot if you didn’t think he was back,’ says Hampsten. ‘I’m sure he was playing it down, but he was really honest and frank with his friends on 7-Eleven. He’d say, “I didn’t really expect to win, but I haven’t felt like that for two years or more. That felt really good. I’m psyched. I’m back in the hunt.” We knew he was back.’ Sean Kelly was also an astute judge. ‘That wasn’t a one-off,’ he later said. ‘When you see a rider do a time trial like that over 73 kilometres, you know they are in good form. Everyone noticed.’

  Channel 4 co-commentator Paul Sherwen was a little more circumspect. ‘LeMond indicated that he was in good form, but there had been no serious difficulties in the Tour up to that point. “Good job. Well done. But what’s going to happen next?”.’ Kathy LeMond shared that caution. ‘The one thing he kept saying was, “I haven’t climbed anything. I have no idea if I can climb.”’ Another person close to him – his room-mate Johan Lammerts – agrees. ‘Winning the time trial was great for him, but now he had to wait and see how it would be in the first stages of the Pyrenees. Greg still had some doubts that he might not be able to follow the best climbers.’

  That night, the LeMonds were twin balls of excitement. ‘We didn’t know this was going to come back into our lives,’ explains Kathy. ‘We could hardly sleep. We were so happy. We could not believe it.’

  At the same moment that the happy couple were struggling to sleep, L’Equipe’s printing presses were lurching into action. The next morning’s front page was one very few thought imaginable. Not only was LeMond pictured in the yellow jersey for the first time in three years, but the headline confirmed what had seemed impossible just a week previous: ‘LEMOND : LA RESURRECTION’.

  Stage 5

  1. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) 1:38:12

  2. Pedro Delgado (Reynolds/Spain) +24”

  3. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) +56”

  4. Thierry Marie (Super U/France) +1’51”

  5. Sean Yates (7-Eleven/GB) +2’16”

  General classification

  1. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) 18:58:17

  2. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) +5”

  3. Thierry Marie (Super U/France) +20”

  4. Erik Breukink (Panasonic/Netherlands) +1’51”

  5. Sean Yates (7-Eleven/GB) +2’18”

  SEVEN

  THE GREAT ESCAPE

  ‘There were 180km left. On your own, that’s suicidal’ – Joël Pelier

  7 July

  Stage 6, Rennes – Futuroscope, 161 miles

  THE WAITING STAFF at the hotel hadn’t seen anything like it before. With several hundred anonymous breakfast shifts under their belts, serving coffee and croissants to the holidaymakers of Brittany, this was one they wouldn’t forget in a hurry. The reason? The legions of television crews that had invaded the dining room, making service a little more challenging that morning.

  The focus of the cameras’ attention, the target of their lenses, was the skinny young man in the baggy Coors Light T-shirt. With a freshly poured black coffee and a small pile of yogurt pots in front of him, he was self-consciously trying to ignore their presence, concentrating on carefully chopping a kiwi fruit. The man with the knife was the new leader of the Tour de France.

  Greg LeMond was calm and considered that morning. Not allowing himself to get over-excited, his words were tempered. Whilst naturally thrilled to be in yellow, he was unsure just how long his tenure as the leader of the pack would last. A five-second lead is just a five-second lead, after all. The jersey might only be on his back for a matter of hours. The first time he had got to wear it in the last three years might also be the last time he ever did.

  ‘The mountains’ – this mythical barrier, this test of both body and mind – was a motif that peppered his conversation that first week. Although hopeful that his form thus far would travel with him at altitude, LeMond was acutely conscious of the embarrassment that a very public capitulation would bring, especially if his climbing form continued in the vein of those underwhelming performances he’d put in on the high roads of Italy during the Giro. LeMond simply didn’t know how strong he was. While the Pyrenean and Alpine mountain passes selected for the Tour would be familiar territory to him, he’d nonetheless be riding into the unknown.

  This uncertainty painted those sky-blue eyes a little darker that morning. After breakfast, an interview with ABC outside the hotel showed a man whose customary effervescence was on hold, whose mouth wasn’t readily forming the smile it usually did at the end of each sentence. Some gentle joshing with the 7-Eleven boys at the riders’ sign-in, plus even a handshake from Laurent Fignon, couldn’t distract him. Until this point, LeMond’s days that week had all represented something of an experiment, a test to gauge recovery and strength. No pressure, no expectation. But he was no longer the rider with nothing to lose. Even if – as expected – the GC contenders would be taking things easy following the time trial and with the prospect of the Pyrenees looming in a couple of days’ time, LeMond and his team had to go into defensive mode. They had to keep their wits about them.

  And the first day of that defence of the yellow jersey coincided with the longest stage of the entire three weeks, as the race took a windy, southerly route from Rennes to Futuroscope, a slightly bizarre, apparently futuristic theme park near Poitiers. This one had potential. There was a full 161 miles of tarmac between on which a stage-winning break could be launched. The one that was indeed launched became something of a classic breakaway.

  It was fair to say that, prior to 1989, Joël Pelier’s Tour de France career wasn’t exactly drowning in glory. Indeed, the Frenchman was probably best known for collapsing on the Col du Granon at the end of one of the 1986 Tour’s Alpine stages and being airlifted off the mountain, having slipped into a coma that would last seven hours. After a subsequent ill-fitting season with Cyrille Guimard at Système U in 1987, the following year Pelier joined the Basque-based BH team who, among all their bantamweight climbers, needed a sturdier rider to put some serious legwork in on flat stages in the Grand Tours, specifically the Tour de France.

  On the first stage of the ’89 Tour, his second in BH colours, Pelier fancied abandoning his domestique duties and putting in a surprise attack. His team boss, Javier Mínguez, overruled him, reminding him of his job description. But it was a different scenario less than a week later as the peloton huddled together in the wind and rain en route to Futuroscope. Mínguez performed a
U-turn.

  ‘I don’t know why,’ Pelier later explained to the author Richard Moore, ‘but he gave me carte blanche. During the stage, I went back to the car to get a rain jacket and bidons [water bottles]. There were about 180km left and he asked me why I didn’t attack. It was like he was challenging me. He told me he didn’t think I had the balls to attack because there were too many kilometres left. He was laughing, but it was like a bet or a challenge.’

  Pelier took the bait. With rain jacket and bidons safely delivered to his team-mates, he made his way to the front of the peloton and simply kept riding. The break for glory wasn’t exactly dramatic. It was almost apologetic in the manner he slipped away. Unobtrusive, inconspicuous. It was far from an eyeballs-out, stand-on-the-pedals attack. Pelier just rode calmly away, backside still in the saddle. The peloton seemed fine about it. Compliant, even.

  Pelier wasn’t just making a point to Mínguez; he was also doing the same to Cyrille Guimard, taking the chance to show the Super U boss what he no longer had control over, after releasing him at the end of the ’87 season. And Pelier rapidly created a substantial lead over the peloton, the pack seemingly content to keep the pace pedestrian on a grey day when the sunflowers in the adjacent fields bowed their heads with no sunshine to reach up to.

  The peloton’s compliance was actually blurring into complacency. As Pelier crossed the Loire, the race commissaire’s red Fiat pulled alongside him. In the back seat, an elbow hanging out of the open window, was Bernard Hinault, now gainfully employed, of course, as a race official. Hinault informed Pelier what the time gap was. Seventeen minutes. It may or may not have come as a surprise, but the information would certainly have inspired and emboldened a rider who started the day nearly ten minutes down on LeMond. As things currently stood, and with the pack remaining ambivalent and non-committal a few miles back down the road, Pelier was the virtual yellow jersey on the road.

  If his riding style looked solid, internally he was somewhat less secure. ‘Your mood is changing all the time,’ he told Richard Moore. ‘You believe, you don’t believe, you believe, you don’t believe.’ Faced with such a tantalising scenario, Pelier’s brain was playing tricks. ‘I tell myself that I’m going to win, then I hear the gap is falling quickly and I think “I’m fucked. I’m going to be caught.”’

  But the gap wasn’t falling all that quickly. A crash on the wet roads had brought a new degree of caution to the field; the ferocity of the team cars’ windscreen wipers was an indication of how unwelcome the conditions were. But ADR, aiming to avoid surrendering the yellow jersey after just one day – and to a mere domestique at that – made sure that Pelier’s lead was cut to within an acceptable boundary, one that wouldn’t remove LeMond from the top of the GC. Panasonic also assisted in forcing the pace, eager to preserve Erik Breukink’s fourth place. Although the gap shrank considerably in the final few miles, Pelier held on to finish more than a minute and a half ahead of the pack. Having been out on his own for in excess of four hours and 110 miles, he had recorded the second-longest solo break in Tour de France history.

  But the story didn’t end there. Unbeknownst to Pelier until he crossed the line, his parents had travelled across from eastern France to watch him race. His mother was the dedicated carer of Pelier’s disabled brother, who was on a holiday break at a specialist medical centre. This allowed her a few days’ grace to watch her other son in action for the first time in six years. It appeared to be a happy coincidence that it was on the day that he delivered one of the race’s all-time great individual performances. Or had, thought the odd suspicious mind, Mínguez, the Pelier-baiting BH team boss, known all along?

  Either way, the outpouring of emotion from the Pelier family was irresistible. His father hung over the railings of the grandstand, nearly doubled up as he embraced his son, while Pelier’s mother tenderly cradled her offspring’s flushed face. Up on the podium, the victorious rider made a futile attempt at strangling his tears. It was the only thing he’d failed at all day.

  Stage 6

  1. Joël Pelier (BH/France) 6:57:45

  2. Eddy Schurer (TVM/Netherlands) +1’34”

  3. Eric Vanderaerden (Panasonic/Belgium) +1’36”

  4. Adrie van der Poel (Domex/Netherlands) same time

  5. Rudy Dhaenens (PDM/Belgium) same time

  General classification

  1. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) 25:57:38

  2. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) +5”

  3. Thierry Marie (Super U/France) +20”

  4. Eric Breukink (Panasonic/Netherlands) +1’51”

  5. Sean Yates (7-Eleven/UK) +2’18”

  ***

  8 July

  Stage 7, Poitiers – Bordeaux, 161 miles

  Another surge southwards. Another marathon stage. Another day dictated by the weather.

  The seventh stage was only half a kilometre shorter than the previous day’s monster journey into Futuroscope but, thanks to the continuing wet and blustery conditions, it would mean around 25 minutes longer in the saddle. Transparent waterproof capes were the order of the day and those riders who chose not to wear them suffered the consequences. Greg LeMond was one; he had to ask for special dispensation to swap his sodden yellow jersey for a regular ADR top.

  Unlike the day before, this wasn’t a stage for individual heroics. Setting off from Poitiers (‘where Joan of Arc first started getting into trouble,’ as the man from ABC helpfully informed his viewers), the destination was Bordeaux, scene of more than 70 stage finishes in the Tour’s history. Across those years, Bordeaux had become synonymous with mass sprint finishes. In ’89, the race’s 71st visit to the city, the inability of any of the attempted breakaways to sustain themselves in the grey gloom ultimately ensured it would be another day for the sprinters, a rare chance in this Tour to go into battle against each other.

  At journey’s end, four riders were very slightly clear of the peloton – Histor’s Etienne De Wilde, Helvetia-La Suisse leader Steve Bauer, Jean-Claude Colotti from RMO, and Superconfex’s Patrick Tolhoek, last seen in a meaningful capacity coming third at the Spa-Francorchamps racing circuit. In Bordeaux, it was De Wilde who took the line from Colotti, in the process registering Belgium’s first stage victory of the race.

  The blanket finish ensured that there was no movement in the upper echelons of the GC, but the presentation ceremony did reveal one significant development: Sean Kelly, winner of the points competition in 1982, 1983 and 1985, had been reunited with the green jersey. That he achieved this after getting involved in a nasty crash two-thirds into the stage, one that also injured his team-mate Raúl Alcalá, was a measure of the man’s commitment and quality in his 11th Tour.

  Joining PDM in the close season seemed to have done Kelly the world of good. At 33, he was the most senior rider on the team by a clear five years. Indeed, he also had a good few years on the race’s big three – Delgado, Fignon and LeMond – all of whom were still in their twenties, having been born within 15 months of each other. Fignon, with that thinning hair and spectacles, might have looked like the elder statesman of the bunch, but was actually born in a later decade than Stephen Roche, the boyish-looking Irishman with those butter-wouldn’t-melt brown eyes. This age gap made Kelly’s evergreen form and consistency all the more impressive. By the time Delgado, Fignon and LeMond had each reached the age the man from Carrick-on-Suir was in 1989, each had already raced his last Tour de France.

  Kelly’s performances, though, represented anything but the elder statesman seeing out his career. 1989 was in danger of becoming his finest Tour ever. Five top-ten stage finishes in the first week had helped secure the green jersey, as had 11th place in Bordeaux. He was very much delivering on his PDM contract, one signed only after Greg LeMond’s departure from the team. While they were a well-financed team, they couldn’t afford both the American and the Irishman.

  ‘I had a contract to continue with KAS,’ he explains of his shift across to PDM at the end of 1988, ‘but they stopped team sponsorship. Th
eir boss Louis Knorr, a big cycling fan, had died that year and they decided not to continue with the bike team. I had no choice.

  ‘I’d done a few years with KAS. Being a Spanish team, it was always important that we raced the early-season races like the Tour of the Basque Country and the Tour of Catalonia. I had to ride them, and then the Vuelta a España at the end of April and early May. The programme I was doing at KAS was very busy because I wanted to do the Classics as well as the Vuelta and the Tour. It was so hectic with the team wanting to do all the Spanish races. PDM’s programme was much lighter. When the Classics campaign finished, there would be a rest period.

  ‘PDM were in contact with me pretty much immediately after KAS announced they were pulling out of sponsorship. They made me aware that signing me was about winning the Classics and the green jersey in the Tour de France. Those were the performances they were expecting from me. There was an understanding that to win the Tour or to get on the podium was going to be difficult because I had tried and failed so many times. Maybe I didn’t say it out loud, but in the back of my mind I had that doubt too.’

  PDM didn’t enter Paris-Nice in ’89, so Kelly’s run of seven consecutive wins was brought to a – perhaps premature – end. But there was early success in the team’s colours when he took his second victory at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the one-dayer affectionately known as ‘The Old Lady’. The race provided Kelly with the opportunity to assess the loyalty of his new team-mates. There was no clear hierarchy in the PDM ranks; he had to share leadership duties with fellow new boy Alcalá, Steven Rooks and Gert-Jan Theunisse. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard the saying about too many chiefs and not enough Indians…

  ‘Rooks and Theunisse were good guys,’ he later wrote, ‘but I knew I’d have to keep an eye on them because if I worked for them in one race, I couldn’t be sure they’d return the favour. They couldn’t help it. Dutch cyclists at that time loved a double-cross.

  ‘I knew how political it was. I knew that whatever was agreed in the team meeting before a race was not necessarily binding. And I knew that sometime I’d have to stitch them up before they had a chance to do the same to me.’