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.
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. Their 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.’
And that was how Kelly scored his first victory in PDM colours. ‘When I won Liège-Bastogne-Liège,’ he recalls, ‘I struck out early, maybe 30 kilometres from the finish. I had it in the back of my mind that if I waited and waited and left it down to the sprint, Rooks or Theunisse would go on the attack before then. It was a risky one. I didn’t say it at the time but I did admit, a number of years later, that that was why I went in an earlier breakaway, which is something that as a sprinter I wouldn’t have been doing.’
In order to secure that fourth Tour green jersey, Kelly would need to put in some good performances in the Pyrenees and/or the Alps. Just how this would play with his hard-climbing team-mates remained to be seen. Fascinated observers who had a taste for a little in-house fratricide were salivating at the prospect.
Stage 7
1. Etienne De Wilde (Histor/Belgium) 7:21:57
2. Jean-Claude Colotti (RMO/France) same time
3. Patrick Tolhoek (Superconfex/Netherlands) +2”
4. Steve Bauer (Helvetia-La Suisse/Canada) same time
5. Jean-Paul van Poppel (Panasonic/Netherlands) +4”
General classification
1. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) 33:19:39
2. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) +5”
3. Thierry Marie (Super U/France) +40”
4. Eric Breukink (Panasonic/Netherlands) +1’51”
5. Sean Yates (7-Eleven/UK) +2’18”
***
9 July
Stage 8, Labastide d’Armagnac – Pau, 98 miles
Father Joseph Massie was all smiles. It was a day he’d been waiting for for 30 years, 30 years of hopeless dreaming – and, presumably, rather a lot of praying. But, whether divine intervention or simply the work of the mortal race administrators, those prayers were being answered, those dreams were coming true. The latest stage of the Tour de France was departing from his village.
Massie was no ordinary priest. Massie was a fanatic – a fanatic about cycling. And this fanaticism took him to extraordinary lengths. In 1958, he repurposed the 12th-century chapel in the small fortified village of Labastide d’Armagnac, turning it into a shrine-cum-museum that celebrated life on two wheels. A year later, Pope John XXIII made it official; the chapel would henceforth be known as Notre Dame des Cyclistes, a ‘national sanctuary of cycling and cyclists under the protection of the Virgin, Our Lady of cyclists’.
The chapel became an extraordinary place of pilgrimage for the cycling community, its interior walls adorned with hundreds of cycling jerseys, many of which were donated by the sport’s biggest legends, among them Eddy Merckx, Jacques Anquetil, Luis Ocaña and Raymond Poulidor. The Tour had passed by the chapel five years previously en route to Pau, but 1989 was its crowning glory: to be the point of departure for the 188 riders still left in the race.
Eighty-five miles south of the previous day’s finish in Bordeaux, the village was a hive of activity that morning. Brass bands played, drum majorettes marched. And, most importantly, Father Massie had an audience with some of his cycling heroes. Stephen Roche, Pedro Delgado, Luis Herrera and Greg LeMond were among those lining up to meet the bike-mad priest, with the American presenting him with a yellow jersey to add to the chapel’s collection.
Not that everything went swimmingly that morning. Before the peloton departed, anti-nuclear protesters took advantage of the media circus that had descended on Labastide. They padlocked themselves together, forcing the riders to pick a single-file path through the protest to get to the start line, either pushing or carrying their bikes. From the back seat of the commissaire’s car, Bernard Hinault cast a weary eye over proceedings. A fiery Breton not known for his sympathy for Tour-delaying public protest (on occasion, he got decidedly hands-on with protesters during his riding days), the clothes of officialdom meant he was now a man with responsibilities, a man trapped in his job. Hinault stayed put in his car. The race left the village 15 minutes behind schedule.
After the previous two marathon stages, the day’s itinerary – a much shorter route that broadly traced a due-south path – was warmly welcomed by those requiring recovery and recuperation ahead of the Pyrenees stages. While the GC contenders would still watch each other closely, moves by the race’s main protagonists were unlikely. So an open invitation was issued to the race’s lesser lights: this was a chance for someone who was likely to struggle at altitude in the coming days to etch their name into Tour history forever. Tomorrow would be a struggle, but today could be glory.
With 50 miles of the stage left, there was a strong possibility that that lesser light would be one of four men who had combined to create a significant break. They included the RMO rider Éric Caritoux, wearing the jersey of the French national champion; Michael Wilson, one of two Australians in the Tour; Z-Peugeot’s Philippe Louviot; and the Irishman Martin Earley, another of PDM’s close-season signings.
With the gap between the break and the peloton getting close to three minutes, ADR began to take action and stepped up the pursuit. Their nervousness was caused by the presence of Wilson in the lead group and they took action to reduce, or even extinguish, his position on the road. Of the four breakaway riders, he was the one closest to LeMond, starting the stage five minutes down on the yellow jersey. And he had pedigree that marked him out as a danger. He won the second stage in the 1982 Giro by outsprinting Fignon; he also took a stage in the Vuelta a year later.
Elsewhere, teams took care of their leaders. Delgado was particularly well-protected, cocooned within the protective seal of his domestiques. The objective was to deliver him safely into Pau before he would unleash himself in the mountains the following day. Fignon, though, was his usual self, a mixture of playful and dangerous. He surprisingly attacked the first of the four fourth-category climbs, presumably with the aim of snatching enough seconds back to allow him to arrive in the mountains in yellow.
Fignon’s attack meant the pace of the chase was high and the front group’s lead was reduced to just a minute with 12 miles left. Within three miles though, Louviot, riding his first Tour, made what looked like being the decisive break. Job done. But the other three, rather than surrendering to the approaching pack, instead pulled Louviot back in. As Caritoux slightly relaxed, presumably thinking that the four would slug it out in a sprint, Earley attacked with more than half a mile to go. As he arrived in the market square, the Dubliner glanced back a couple of times before raising both arms to take a famous victory. The smile admitted that this was his career highlight, the defining moment. Right here, right now.
‘I knew I had to attack because I was strong,’ the bespectacled Earley explained at the finish. ‘If I’m ever riding for fourth place, I like to think I can get first just as well. And they weren’t such great sprinters there, so my chances were as good as the rest.’
Earley was a popular winner. The perennial third man of Irish cycling behind those high-achievers Roche and Kelly, it wasn’t his first taste of Grand Tour success, though. That came in the Giro in 1986 when, then riding for Fagor, he again showed his sharp tactical acumen, outfoxing LeMond and ultimate winner Roberto Visentini to take a stage victory in the mountains.
‘Martin was always a great rider,’ says Roche. ‘A great team rider. He was ambitious, but he knew where his limits were. He recognised he wasn’t going to win the Tour, but he knew that on his day he was capable of winning stages. But he wasn’t going to win a stage without looking after his team-mates and his team leader first. He was a guy that a leader – whether in the Classics or the Tour – could count on. Everyone was delighted for Martin when he won that stage. It was compensation for all of the other work he’d put in.’
When he signed for PDM, Kelly had insisted, so strong a domestique was he, that Earley be brought across from KAS too. ‘They had a lot of riders already signed, so it was very limited for places. Martin was the only one I managed to take with me. Everyone within PDM was so excited by Martin winning. He was a helper in the team a lot of the time, but there were occasions when he would be able to ride his own race, but that would be a minimal number of races throughout the year.’
That day’s entry in the diary of the fourth Irish rider in that Tour, Paul Kimmage, also hinted at a sense of national pride at his compatriot’s success. ‘I knew he was going to win. I said it to Kelly about an hour from the finish. I just got this gut feeling he was going to do it. As we arrived in Pau, I strained my ears to the commentary of race speaker Daniel Mangeas. When I heard him shout M-A-R-T-I-N E-A-R-L-E-Y, I waved a triumphant fist in the air.’
With four compatriots in the Tour, cycling in Ireland was in extremely rude health. And there wasn’t really a clear reason why it was so. As the author Ed Pickering has noted, ‘Irish cycling’s run of success in the 1980s was a statistical outlier. In Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche, Ireland had two of the best four or five cyclists in the world.’
Certainly, those two cyclists have never been able to explain why the riches were so great in that particular era. ‘I don’t know,’ shrugs Roche, after being asked about it for the umpteenth time in his life. ‘Maybe it was the genes or maybe it was what we ate – potatoes and cabbage! Whether it’s in the water or it’s in the air, there’s definitely something in Ireland that breeds champions. We’re a small nation and it’s amazing that we do so well. It’s something that’s in the culture and the land and the mentality.’
Kelly draws upon Irish success in other sports at the time to attempt to make sense of it – the Irish national football team under Jack Charlton or the medals won by the country’s distance runners, athletes like Eamonn Coghlan, Sonia O’Sullivan and John Treacy. ‘It was amazing that we had so many riders at the top level. We all just seemed to come along at the same time – it’s something that happens in sport. And when we finished up, there was nobody else there for quite some years. That’s just the way it goes. We had a number of very talented riders at the same time. Of course, if they see another Irish guy who’s doing well, it does motivate them a bit more.’
The degree to which Earley’s victory in Pau was a result of success breeding success is moot. What it definitely represented was an acknowledgment that, within the domestique ranks, lived some riders of great guile and ability.
For the next day, however, the focus would shift back onto the big boys, the stars, the GC contenders. Arriving in Pau, the gateway of the Pyrenees, unscathed and unharmed, the combatants were ready. It was time for those mountain-top battles to commence.
Stage 8
1. Martin Earley (PDM/Ireland) 3:51:26
2. Éric Caritoux (RMO/France) +4”
3. Michael Wilson (Helvetia-La Suisse/Australia) same time
4. Philippe Louviot (Z-Peugeot/France) +6”
5. Laurent Bezault (Toshiba/France) +8”
1. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) 37:11:25
2. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) +5”
3. Thierry Marie (Super U/France) +40”
4. Erik Breukink (Panasonic/Netherlands) +1’51”
5. Sean Yates (7-Eleven/UK) +2’18”