Three Weeks, Eight Seconds Read online

  Back down the mountain, another noted climber couldn’t get to grips with the day’s demands. Andy Hampsten had identified this stage as one that he could very much win, a stage almost handmade for him. But on the road, he looked uncomfortable, too passive. Where Rooks and Kelly had grasped the climbs by the scruff of the neck, Hampsten appeared hesitant and unsure, further proof that he was far from a reckless, push-at-all-costs rider whose style invited misfortune. On this afternoon, he was a combination of conservatism and physical discomfort. He was struggling for rhythm. In the saddle. Out of the saddle. In the saddle. Out again.

  ‘I experimented with some wheels that I shouldn’t have,’ Hampsten recalls, by way of an explanation. He had put a rear disc wheel on his bike, an enhancement that the likes of Rooks, Kelly and LeMond had chosen to leave in their respective team cars. ‘That was silly. It was a beautiful mountain time trial, but I blew it. I wanted to win, I took a risk and I did not have the time trial I was hoping to.

  ‘But I’m not blaming the wheels. I certainly wasn’t fit enough. The wheels, which were wobbling and came loose, weren’t helping but it wasn’t just that. I wasn’t physically capable of taking advantage of that gift of a mountain time trial. My weakness in time trials was the negative thoughts that came in. Instead of thinking about crushing people, I would worry about not doing well.’

  Whatever Hampsten was lacking in his mental make-up that day, his compatriot LeMond had in abundance. He hurtled down the ramp of the start house, a ball of energy impatient to get out onto the course. Meanwhile, Fignon sat near the rear steps. Head bowed and resting on his hands, he expelled long, slow, deliberate breaths. His nerves were almost visible.

  If Fignon’s body language emboldened LeMond, the raw speed of his other rival may have concerned him. Delgado was setting the fastest splits at each of the early time checks. At the first, he was 14 seconds up on LeMond. While the stage was way too short to make a race-changing incursion into the leading two’s respective positions, there was a chance that Delgado could eclipse Charly Mottet and break into the top three overall. Seeing how the Frenchman was suffering, this was certainly true. There was an ever-shortening distance between the pair on the road, with Delgado the rider who looked the smoothest, fastest and most in the groove.

  At the second time check, Delgado was 20 seconds up on LeMond, who in turn was 22 seconds up on Fignon. Since his win in 1984, Fignon hadn’t successively negotiated both the Pyrenees and the Alps in the same Tour without, at least on one day, conceding a sizeable amount of time to his rivals. While he wouldn’t lose the Tour today, whatever the time margin he would forfeit to both Delgado and LeMond in the time trial would dictate that there were sterner tests to come, ones that history suggested he wouldn’t surmount. Fignon’s implosion was believed by most to be inevitable. When, not if. This was why observers were increasingly seeing the final showdown of this absorbing race to be between the USA and Spain.

  However, despite Delgado’s fluid-looking riding, there was to be a surprise by the time he arrived at the finish. Rather than setting the day’s fastest time, he came home in fourth position, having lost ground on that final sharp incline. But the issue wasn’t fatigue. ‘On that day,’ he now explains, ‘I started to have a problem with a callus. I felt it more than I felt my legs. I lost my focus and I lost my time. I had a horrible pain. When I crossed the finish line, I was so unhappy. I went straight to the mechanics’ bus and said ‘Give me a knife’. I cut a big hole in my shoe so it wouldn’t rub the callous. I was very stressed. It would have been impossible to pedal after that if I hadn’t cut my shoe. I lost 50 seconds [to Rooks] on that time trial. I was furious. I should have cut my shoe days before. I rode for four days with it giving me pain. But on this Tour, I didn’t know what my mind was thinking. I could have just fixed that problem on the first day it appeared.’

  Delgado came in six seconds slower than his team-mate Induráin, but the pair were outgunned by another Spaniard. Marino Lejarreta, the leader of the unfancied Paternina team, had been quietly making his way up the GC and now, taking second place on the stage, found himself replacing Andy Hampsten in the top five overall. It would be the best stage finish in the ’89 Tour for the experienced Basque rider, an unsung and under-rated presence in the race’s upper echelons. While the big names at the big teams dominated the headlines and the gossip, Lejarreta climbed both the mountains and the leaderboard with guile and stealth. His elevation into the top five was a salute to a deeply committed rider, one who over his career rode in 27 Grand Tours, finishing all but three of them. In addition to winning the 1982 Vuelta – after Ángel Arroyo was disqualified 48 hours after the race for failing a drugs test – Lejarreta was also the first man to ride all three Grand Tours in a single season four times over. This was a man who deserved the odd ray of limelight.

  Mottet, who had stayed within a minute of Fignon and LeMond since the Pyrenees, started to run out of gas. He lost more than a minute and a half to Delgado who, while not usurping the local man’s third place after the time trial, had closed the gap to just 31 seconds. It was simply a matter of time before the big three inhabited the podium places.

  What position on the GC Fignon would occupy in Orcières-Merlette was rarely in doubt. Back at the very first time check, LeMond – using his aerobars again, even if he later announced that ‘the bars weren’t a factor today’ – already had the yellow jersey on the road, his split time being 13 seconds faster than Fignon’s. Wearing a teardrop helmet (while Fignon merely opted for a headband), LeMond rode away from the Parisian and stayed within touch of Delgado. Although the American also struggled on those last few miles – his shoulders rocking, his racing line a little wonky – he finished just nine seconds down on the man from Segovia to take fifth place.

  By the time Fignon inched his way over the line nearly four minutes later, LeMond was back on top, this time by a margin that was eight times the advantage he previously held – albeit still only 40 seconds. Fignon looked defeated, though, the yellow jersey unzipped to his midriff. Ready for easy removal. Ready for surrender.

  Delgado suggested the Frenchman wouldn’t be wearing it again. ‘I can still win the Tour,’ he resolutely told a press conference the following day. ‘At first it was between me and Fignon, but now it is between me and LeMond. I think whoever is in the yellow jersey at Alpe d’Huez will win the Tour.’

  LeMond was his usual mix of excitement and caution in his post-stage interviews. ‘I don’t feel there’s probably any rider riding better than me in the Tour de France,’ he told Channel 4’s Paul Sherwen. ‘Now it’s going to come down to the team factor. I know a lot of riders, especially the PDM team, who’ll be racing against me. It will be difficult to fend them off. It’s going to be difficult for me to chase every break that goes on. I just hope there will be other riders concerned about the overall and not just letting breaks get away.’ After a day of aggressive time trialling, LeMond would be back riding defensively to try to see out the remaining miles of the Alps without incident or misfortune. It might be a tall order. The American was back in yellow, sure, but the race lead remained a matter of seconds rather than minutes.

  In the words of Sherwen’s colleague Phil Liggett, ‘the pendulum swings again’.

  Stage 15

  1. Steven Rooks (PDM/Netherlands) 1:10:42

  2. Marino Lejarreta (Paternina/Spain) +24”

  3. Miguel Induráin (Reynolds/Spain) +43”

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

  5. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) +57”

  General classification

  1. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) 67:50:54

  2. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) +40”

  3. Charly Mottet (RMO/France) +2’17”

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

  5. Marino Lejarreta (Paternina/Spain) +5’11”

  ***

  18 July

  Stage 16, Gap – Briançon, 109 miles

  Greg LeMond took pleasure in a job
well done on the mountain time trial by spending the subsequent rest day taking in the panoramic views of Orcières-Merlette with his wife Kathy and their two young sons. Such devotion to domestic life was rare in the peloton. Most riders happily immersed themselves in the race for every waking moment, three weeks of shutting out whatever life they had away from cycling. A short, tired call from a pay phone in a hotel lobby each evening would be the absolute best that their wives and girlfriends could expect. LeMond was different. He actively sought Kathy’s presence; he felt he rode better whenever she was in close proximity. And she was happy to comply.

  ‘For me, it wasn’t the glamour,’ Kathy reasons. ‘It was work. I never wanted to put an extra burden on Greg. What does he need? How can I make it better? What he was doing was so hard and so demanding. I wasn’t going to bring any problems I’ve got to him. I would never have wanted to increase his burden. He didn’t have space for that.’

  Kathy turned out to be something of a pioneer when it came to infiltrating the inner sanctum of men’s road-race cycling. And she didn’t necessarily do it discreetly, flying under the radar, a largely invisible presence. Barely seen, barely heard.

  Instead, Kathy became a fixture at the finish line of nearly every stage in the ’89 race, in turn becoming an obvious point of interest for the cameras of the world’s media. American ones, especially. ‘In all those previous years, I could barely get to the finish area. I never had a pass. I never had anything. It was just me talking my way past the gendarmes. It was a struggle.

  ‘But in ’89, on the plane transfer after he won the time trial in Rennes, Greg spoke to Jean-Marie Leblanc. “You know what? If I win this thing and my wife hasn’t been able to be with me during this, I’m not getting up on the podium. I could never have done this on my own and you need to take care of her.”

  ‘That changed everything for women at the Tour. The next day, I got a car pass and a neck badge as a guest. That was great for me. I could get to the finish area. I could get to Greg’s hotel more easily. I had a pass to get on the closed roads so I didn’t have two hours of fighting through traffic jams any more. Most of the time I’d go to the start and always to the finish. Then I’d stay with him through his massage. Greg’s different. A lot of riders really didn’t want their families there. It adds stress. But, for some reason, Greg really liked having me there.’

  While the LeMonds were playing happy families, Laurent Fignon was spending his rest day supplying controversial copy to the French press corps. While he admitted that his chances of winning in Paris were dwindling following the mountain time trial, he explained how he was nonetheless still in a position to stop LeMond winning. Relations between the two former team-mates, frosty throughout the race so far, plummeted to well below zero.

  Not that LeMond would have let Fignon’s barbs penetrate, let alone get under, his skin. Fignon frequently deployed psychology in an attempt to unsettle particular riders, but many found his methods unsophisticated and easy to brush off. Among those was Andy Hampsten.

  ‘He really liked psychological warfare. I remember once at the Dauphiné Libéré, I was in a breakaway in an early stage with Fignon, Urs Zimmermann and one or two others. I bonked. I blew up. I ran out of energy and I was really depressed about it. Later in the race, there was a proper mountain stage that I really wanted to do well in. Fignon came up to me that day and spoke to me in English, which he hadn’t done much before, if at all.

  “Oh Andy, you look terrible.”

  “No, I feel really good. I blew up the other day but that was jetlag catching up.”

  “No, no. I can tell. You look terrible.”

  “Larry, give it up. It’s a mountain day. We have five more hours of racing and we have three climbs. Let’s just race. I’m not your main threat. I know what you’re doing and you’re making yourself look like an idiot. So, you’ve been my pal all year and now, just because it’s a mountain stage…”

  ‘I completely called him on it. He started attacking, but I gave Zimmermann a look and we both dropped him. Everyone knew he’d try to psych them out on a mountain day. But he was an amateur at his professor psych-out thing.’ Despite the spectacles and his baccalauréat exam certificate that gave him the nickname of The Professor (at 18, he had enrolled on, but not completed, a university diploma in structural and material science), Fignon couldn’t out-think Hampsten, himself the son of college professors. Real professors.

  If, in the cold light of that July day in Gap in ’89, Fignon was concerned about his outburst over LeMond, he wasn’t showing it. Tanned and with an easy smile, he also seemed unperturbed about a strike by members of the press who, in protesting about his anti-social behaviour towards them, refused to take his picture for the next four days.

  The gravity of the day was certainly not playing on his face. Delgado had called this stage ‘the semi-final’, referencing the charge up Alpe d’Huez 24 hours later to be the stage that would settle the race once and for all. And a challenging day faced them – a day almost exclusively spent heading uphill from comparatively low-level Gap. Two legendary climbs awaited them – the Col de Vars and the Col d’Izoard.

  The Izoard occupies several pages in the history books of the Tour, thousands of riders having passed over it since its debut in the race in 1922. The route from the south to its near-8,000-feet summit passes through the Casse Déserte, an otherworldly landscape that’s geologically closer to the barren moonscape of Mont Ventoux than to the grassy pastures of much of the Alps. It’s very rocky with little sign of life. Bernard Thévenet has called it ‘wild and empty’ – and he should know. For it was on the Izoard’s slopes on Bastille Day in 1975 that the Frenchman defeated Eddy Merckx and opened a lead that proved impregnable on the road to Paris. Not only did the mountain effectively give Thévenet the first of his two Tour victories, it also ended Merckx’s era of invincibility.

  Back in 1989, the action started early on the stage. Very early. Barely three miles out of Gap, a group of 16 riders had gone on the attack, clearly itching to get back to racing after the rest day. None were in danger of remotely affecting the GC – the closest to the yellow jersey was Z-Peugeot’s Bruno Cornillet who was 18 minutes down on LeMond – and all bar two riders would gradually be brought back into the fold by the elite group that had formed behind them. One of these was Johan Lammerts, LeMond’s ADR room-mate and most reliable helper, who was able to provide unexpected assistance to his team leader as the gap closed.

  The tactics of ADR weren’t too sophisticated by this point. Their depleted ranks, never the strongest when at full strength anyhow, meant they had little power or control to exert. The situation must have been frustrating to a directeur sportif with the brains and ability of José De Cauwer (‘tactically someone who was very smart,’ says Lammerts), whose advice to a yellow jersey-wearing LeMond would have barely extended beyond suggesting he sit tight and quell any attacks. There was little more he could do. But ADR did call on the guile of its senior riders, as Lammerts explains. ‘Riders who are experienced know what to do. They don’t need to be informed every minute about what needs to be done. We adapted to situations.’ And, as his former team-mate Andy Hampsten is quick to praise, LeMond boasted ‘incredible tactical sense. He smelled things happening. He knew which buddies to go and ask what was really going on in their little team. He was really, really sharp. He’s just the great wheel-follower? Don’t count on it.’

  LeMond’s sharpness meant he knew what he had to do over the day’s monstrous climbs: be alert to each and every attack, and react accordingly. These might be relentless and from many different quarters. It would be a tough day, both mentally and physically. At first, though, he didn’t need to worry about the attentions of Fignon or Mottet. Both men slipped back on the upper slopes of the Col de Vars, possible admissions that their respective challenges for overall glory had gone as far as they could.

  Without Fignon’s wheel to track, LeMond stuck to Delgado. With every Alpine mile, he was now lookin
g like the only threat to American glory in Paris. Or so it seemed. On the ten-mile descent of the Col de Vars, Fignon characteristically threw caution to the wind to put in an extraordinary recovery, rejoining LeMond’s group in the valley before the Izoard. Mottet too, seemingly burned out an hour or so before, also took his place in this bunch.

  Delgado, running out of tarmac on which to make meaningful inroads on the yellow jersey, launched an attack on the slopes of the Izoard – a typical manoeuvre from him and one which usually bore dividends, one where he’d normally expect to ride away from the bunch. This time, however, he was immediately checked by LeMond and Theunisse who, along with a rejuvenated Mottet, formed a four-man split over the summit. Fignon had been dropped again.

  Having successfully nullified Delgado’s aggression, LeMond was forced to do likewise with an almighty attacking descent from Mottet, one that Cycling Weekly correspondent Keith Bingham, observing the Frenchman skimming through the bends, described as being ‘more at home on the ski slopes’. Behind them, Fignon was also, again, making the best use of gravity, compensating for his deficiencies on the climbs by delivering a masterclass in balls-out descending. The speed as the race headed down towards Briançon wasn’t without its dangers. On one bend, Steven Rooks – with the gravel underneath his wheels loosened by the melting tar – slid to within a tyre’s width of disappearing down the steep mountainside.

  LeMond then attacked further down the mountain, taking with him Mottet and Martial Gayant, whom the pair had mopped up from an earlier attack. Delgado – much happier going uphill than down – held back. It looked for all the world that LeMond had not only stymied the threats of his two main challengers, but had also widened his lead on them. But then, on the long, straight drag up into Briançon, the Spaniard recovered and finished with the same time as LeMond. Their battle had been a draw, but LeMond was undoubtedly the happier rider. One day fewer to survive, one day closer to glory.