SETTING THE FIRES OF HELL ABLAZE
‘Our lungs were hanging out and we watched each other, almost at a standstill, gasping like a pair of crazy young puppies’ – Laurent Fignon
19 July
Stage 17, Briançon – Alpe d’Huez, 101 miles
YOU DIDN’T NEED to speak a word of French to understand the front page of L’Equipe that morning. As the riders silently took their breakfasts in the hotel dining rooms of Briançon, a gruelling day of three towering ascents ahead of them, the paper’s headline writer stoked up the pressure, emphasising how much the race was now as much about mind games as it was about physical prowess. The headline cut to the quick: ‘POKER DANS ALPE’.
Certainly Stage 17, with its monster climbs of the Col du Galibier, the Col de la Croix de Fer and the totemic Alpe d’Huez rising up into the cloudless blue sky, was likely to be the day that the main protagonists showed their respective hands. With his lead increasing, was LeMond in possession of all the aces? Did Delgado have something up his sleeve? And, with his power and influence visibly on the wane, was Fignon holding nothing more than a busted flush?
The murmur of the press room was that the latter opinion held firm. Channel 4 commentator Phil Liggett certainly appeared to subscribe to this school of thought. His pre-stage opening monologue – filmed that morning and shown as part of the station’s highlights show later that evening – hinted that Fignon was undeniably losing his status as a contender. As he stood on one of the hairpins that defined that day’s last few kilometres up Alpe d’Huez, Liggett delivered his piece to camera, announcing that ‘today we’re expecting a marvellous fight between Pedro Delgado and Greg LeMond’. He was wringing his hands in anticipation. ‘This is where we feel the Tour de France will be decided. Will it be LeMond in yellow tonight or Delgado?’
At the same time that the riders were fuelling themselves up at the breakfast table and chewing over the conjecture in the morning papers, the slopes leading up to the day’s finish were already heaving. Such is the draw of Alpe d’Huez. By 7am, several hundred thousand spectators were on the mountain, many of whom had been there for days, like the hardiest bargain-hunters sleeping rough ahead of the Christmas sales. Territory had been marked, vantage points claimed. Whether perched on an unforgiving boulder or reclined on the roof of a campervan, these fans faced many hours under the baking Alpine sun until the high drama unfolded before them. Those not protecting their perch could be found with paint pot in hand, applying the name of their favourite rider to the tarmac. The paintwork was drying almost instantly in the day’s rapidly increasing temperatures. On these particular slopes, even the most anonymous domestique received a tribute in thick strokes of white emulsion, their name immortalised forever – or at least until the next time the road got resurfaced.
Often the steepest climb of the three-week race, Alpe d’Huez is special to rider and fan alike. Viewed from the air, the road up to the peak clings to a section of mountainside where no road should rightfully exist. If it were on the Italian side of the Alps, it would invariably be likened to a long strand of limp linguini dropped onto the landscape in a random pattern of loops and zigzags. The gradients are severe enough that 21 sharply ascending hairpin bends are required to provide safe passage to its summit.
The Alpe’s legend isn’t based on it being the most inhospitable of the race’s mountains. Usually bathed in tan-friendly sunshine, it doesn’t offer the bleakness of Mont Ventoux’s lunar landscape, nor the rain-lashed conditions often served up by a Pyrenean peak like the Aubisque. And, being a summit finish, those 21 hairpins are only tackled uphill, so a perilous descent is avoided – unlike during the winter months when scores of hire cars cautiously make their icy way down from the ski station, their drivers’ feet never off the brakes, anxious to avoid both the loss of their deposit and the prospect of a spectacular death.
Nor is it Alpe d’Huez’s altitude or length that tests the riders. On this particular day, it was only the third highest peak of the stage, its 6,100 feet outstripped by both the Galibier and the Croix de Fer. And, set against those two much longer climbs, it’s a comparative sprint at less than nine miles. No, Alpe d’Huez is admired and feared in such equal measure simply because – after a day of such severe uphill struggles – the steepest peak has been kept until last.
The Tour’s maiden journey up Alpe d’Huez’s unforgiving slopes was in 1952 when the peloton found a relatively primitive ski resort at its summit. And they’d arrived there bouncing and banging their way up a pothole-studded road that was in urgent need of the attentions of a well-drilled tarmac gang. That year, Fausto Coppi, fourth in the general classification, grabbed both the victory and the yellow jersey, a position he would retain all the way to Paris. The Alpe had proved crucial in determining the final outcome of the race, a tradition it would firmly uphold for decades afterwards.
Although none had previously taken a stage victory here, LeMond, Fignon and Delgado knew Alpe d’Huez well. They weren’t intimidated by its twists and turns, its hairpins and heights. And they knew their history, well aware of how game-changing a surge up its slopes could be to the destination of the overall title. Fignon had first-hand experience of this – twice. Six years previously in 1983, his fifth place on the stage saw him wrestle the yellow jersey from compatriot Pascal Simon; it remained on his back for the remaining six days, all the way up to Paris. History repeated itself 12 months later when, having taken second behind Luis Herrera (the first Colombian and the first amateur to win a Tour stage), the Parisian swapped the tricolour jersey of the French national champion for the maillot jaune. Again, no one else got close enough to touch the hem of this particular garment before journey’s end on the Champs-Élysées.
That year, 1984, Fignon’s then Renault-Elf team-mate LeMond – riding his first Tour and wearing the rainbow jersey he’d won the previous September at the world championships in Switzerland – showed his mettle on Alpe d’Huez’s zigzagging gradients. Having just finished a course of antibiotics for a bronchial infection, LeMond took an impressive sixth, a final surge ending with the scalp of Hinault in the last kilometre. By the time the Tour returned to the mountain two years later, LeMond and Hinault were team-mates on Bernard Tapie’s La Vie Claire squad, but had been engaged in a duel with each other across the Pyrenees and into the Alps. This was despite the older man’s agreement to assist his young colleague in the pursuit of his first Tour title as recompense for LeMond’s selfless loyalty the previous year as Hinault took his fifth overall victory.
The tension between the pair seemed to have dissolved when they linked hands yards from the finish of Alpe d’Huez, Hinault taking the stage win only when LeMond broke from the embrace to gently nudge him over the line first. This sense of fraternity was fleeting. In a post-stage interview – and to LeMond’s astonishment – Hinault gave no assurances that he wouldn’t still attack the American during the remainder of the race.
The Alpe had represented a significant turning point in the 1988 Tour too, ensuring the mountain held a cherished spot in Delgado’s heart. His third place, 17 seconds behind stage winner Steven Rooks, meant he had taken the yellow jersey from Steve Bauer and held onto it for the remaining ten days all the way to the capital.
Despite what Phil Liggett’s monologue suggested, Fignon’s legacy on the Alpe might well count for something. It promised to be a fascinating day of racing, with the identity of the stage winner being of less concern than the identity of the man who would lead the race into the last few days. The three took their places at the table. The pack was being shuffled. The cards would soon be dealt.
***
Between the 11th and 14th centuries, the area around Alpe d’Huez was a hotspot for silver mining, drawing many different nationalities to the region. Fast-forward half a millennium and, every July that the mountain is included on the Tour’s itinerary, many different nationalities are again drawn here. In 1989, while the citizens of France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland were undeniably on the slopes in large numbers, the nation most represented on Alpe d’Huez that year – as in any other – was the Netherlands.
Whether it’s football or cycling, Dutch crowds are no shrinking wallflowers when it comes to showing their enthusiasm for their favoured sport. The exuberant, Dutch-led festivities on Alpe d’Huez have been likened to those at the Glastonbury Festival: both are gatherings that attract massive crowds in a way that more purist fans might look down upon. A more suitable analogy for American onlookers might be tailgating, those pre-match, beer and barbecue gatherings in the car parks of sports arenas that seem to be of equal importance to its participants as the subsequent on-field action.
The venerable cycling journalist William Fotheringham has written brilliantly about the visceral scene on the Alpe, a mountain inhabited, for this one day almost every summer, by a different breed, these ‘mountain people’ who seem to have suspended the usual rules of everyday life. ‘There is so much noise that they don’t hear the cars and vans approaching,’ wrote Fotheringham. ‘They walk in front of them, play chicken with them, keep painting things on the road until they are squashed, and ride their bikes downhill onto the cars’ bonnets.’ At the same time, Fotheringham celebrates the open-access nature of the race. ‘In no sport in the world can the fans get so close to their heroes, look them in the eye, give them water, push them if the judges aren’t looking…’
As someone whose livelihood depends on him being in the burning core of the action, the photographer Graham Watson admits he’s often felt vulnerable on the slopes of the Alpe, in this ‘vertical forest of people’, as Andy Hampsten described it. ‘Both now and then,’ says Watson, ‘it is an ugly scene that leans towards frightening, and one not easily matched with such a genteel sport as cycling. Because of the crowds, Alpe d’Huez is not a great place to work on a moto. The driver has to be extra vigilant and the photographer has to think of his wellbeing should he consider getting off among those masses for a cornering shot or a scenic masterpiece.’
Hampsten would agree that there was ‘definitely an element of danger’ about the mountain when it was loaded with so many people. ‘They’ve got so much alcohol in their bodies that you can smell the odour of them sweating it out,’ he told cycling historian Peter Cossins. ‘They’re out of their minds – so drunk that it turns into a bit of a guessing game.’
That orange is the dominant colour on these particular slopes is down to the fact that, over the years, Alpe d’Huez has frequently been a happy hunting ground for Dutch riders. Prior to the 1989 race, the mountain had been included on the Tour’s itinerary a dozen times. On seven of those occasions, it was a Dutch rider – those men of the legendarily pannenkoek-flat lowlands – who was first to the line. On the Tour’s second stage finish on its slopes, 24 long years after the Tour caravan had first rattled its way to the summit, it would be that son of Rijpwetering, Joop Zoetemelk, who pipped another Benelux rider, Belgium’s Lucien Van Impe, to the stage win. The following year, Zoetemelk’s compatriot Hennie Kuiper claimed victory in the mountain-top town.
This blossoming romance between the Alpe and the race’s Dutch riders became a full-blown affair 12 months later in 1978 when Kuiper repeated the trick, finishing eight seconds ahead of eventual winner Bernard Hinault. Three years, three wins. Never mind the future; the present was very much orange. The attraction was clearly mutual. The mountain seemed to like the way the Dutch riders weren’t intimidated by its gradients, while the Dutch riders – spurred on by vast numbers of spectators from the Netherlands squatting on these narrow verges – were enjoying the morale boosts offered by tens of thousands of their compatriots.
Between Zoetemelk’s virgin victory in 1976 and Steven Rooks’s triumph in 1988, only Hinault in 1986, aided by that fraternal nudge forward from LeMond just before the line, had scored home success here. It may be a French peak, but – for one long hot day almost every summer – it had become that incongruous contradiction: a Dutch mountain.
On that Wednesday afternoon in 1989, Gert-Jan Theunisse upheld the tradition, another man of the flatlands conquering arguably the cruellest peak in the race. After his second place behind Rooks on the Alpe the previous year, he was intent on going one better. And he set his stall out early, first to reach the summit of the Galibier, the stage’s opening stiff climb and, at 8,660 feet, the highest point on that year’s Tour. His efforts were rewarded with maximum King of the Mountains points, stretching his superiority over Robert Millar still further.
By the time he arrived on the lower slopes of the Croix de Fer, the second of that day’s HC climbs, Theunisse had company. He’d been joined by the Italian rider Franco Vona, from the Chateaux d’Ax team, and Laurent Biondi, the Frenchman who was restoring some pride for that demoralised Fagor squad.
They weren’t with him for long. Theunisse calmly shed both Vona and Biondi on the climb and rolled over the rocky summit alone. Nothing could distract him. Those dark eyes were pinned forward, fixed on an eminently possible stage win now that there was almost a minute and a half of clear daylight between him and a chasing pack that contained Millar, LeMond, Delgado and Marino Lejarreta. Theunisse’s team-mates, Rooks and Raúl Alcalá, sat at the back of this bunch, keeping a close eye on those trying to reel in their man further up the road.
After a sharp, no-fear descent, Theunisse hammered along 12 kilometres of flat road that traced the valley floor. By the time he reached Bourg d’Oisans, the small town that signals that the ascent of Alpe d’Huez is nigh, his advantage over the yellow jersey group was in excess of four minutes. As he’d started the day 7’14” down on LeMond, the maillot jaune wasn’t under serious threat, but Delgado’s fourth place certainly was. The Dutchman, his shoulder-length Viking locks increasingly slick with sweat, was flying. He was a photographer’s dream. ‘He looked terrific in his polka-dot jersey, long hair and scary eyes,’ remembers Graham Watson, ‘but it was difficult to be with him in front and also get back to the main fight a few minutes behind.’
Powering his way towards the first of those 21 hairpins, Theunisse would have had a clear view of the names painted onto the tarmac winding its way up towards the peak. Whenever he looked down at the road, he saw his name before him – white paint, block capitals. Or, at least, thanks to the ever-encroaching crowds that turned the road up the Alpe into a long, narrow channel, he’d only see the ‘UNI’ from the middle of his name. But he knew.
Whether Theunisse was taking any gratification from the work of that morning’s brush-toting grand masters was uncertain. With hands locked onto the handlebars and backside never rising from the saddle, there was a complete absence of expression on his face. If that day’s stage was indeed a card game, not only was the Dutchman going to clean the table, he was also wearing his best poker face throughout. No indication of pleasure or pain – no smile of satisfaction, no open-mouthed grimace. Even when he crossed the line, after more than five long hours in the saddle and with the near-certainty that the polka-dot jersey was now his and his alone, there was no emotional reaction. The expression would be the same on the podium a few minutes later. His arms might have been full of flowers and an outsized winner’s cheque for 10,000 francs, but his face was empty, impassive, unreadable.
And that’s the way he appeared not just to outsiders, but also to team-mates. ‘Theunisse was a serious guy,’ confirms Raúl Alcalá. ‘A strange guy. We were almost all good companions on the team, so one guy being more of a stranger doesn’t matter. He never ate with us – he’d eat by himself in his room. He was on his own all the time. He was never open. I didn’t understand him.’ Sean Kelly says it more succinctly. ‘He was a special one.’
Theunisse’s inscrutability wasn’t a mask for nerves ahead of the post-stage drugs test, an obligatory process for the stage winner, plus five other riders. You might be excused for thinking it was after his positive test for testosterone – and ten-minute time penalty – 12 months previously. When, in 1991, the entire PDM squad quit the Tour citing ‘food poisoning’, the whispers – hinting that, as only the outfit’s riders were affected, they were actually showing the symptoms of iffy blood transfusions – were more than audible. Some have suggested that, rather than the more prosaic Philips Dupont Magnetics, the team’s name should stand for ‘Pills, Drugs & Medicines’.
Although he – as with every other tested rider in the ’89 Tour – was found to be clean, the career of the enigmatic Theunisse didn’t trace an entirely happy arc. His was a racing life pockmarked by positive tests. And, aside from keeping the drug-testers busy, he also suffered from – possibly not unrelated – heart problems, resulting in the fitting of a pacemaker at the age of 50. Prior to that, a collision with a car while out training had left him with a severe spinal cord injury and unable to walk for six months.
The finish line of Alpe d’Huez on that July afternoon undeniably marked the zenith of his road-racing career. Not only was it his first and only stage win in the Tour, but it also all but secured his immortality in the race’s annals as a King of the Mountains winner. This was as good as it would get for Gert-Jan Theunisse. Yet you’d never know it from his body language. ‘On the last climb,’ this man of few words noted afterwards, ‘I couldn’t see anything anymore. It was like a black tunnel.’
On any other day, in any other year, Theunisse’s supreme effort would be lauded as a highlight of recent Tour history, a 30-mile solo grind that represents one of the greatest performances to culminate on this particular peak. But on this scorchingly hot day in the French Alps, the Dutchman’s efforts would be cast into long shadow by events a few minutes back down the mountain.
***
Prior to reaching Bourg-d’Oisans, the three main contenders for the general classification had been playing a cagey game, calmly marking each other over the Galibier and the Croix de Fer. But then, while all eyes were peeled in anticipation for Delgado to make his move on the final climb and reduce that still significant time deficit, Fignon blinked first, choosing to execute a plan hatched that morning by himself and Cyrille Guimard. ‘We both knew we wouldn’t have many more chances to turn the race around,’ he later wrote. ‘So I came up with a plan: wait until the start of the climb to Alpe d’Huez and put in the most vicious attack I could at the very first hairpin. That meant really attacking, as if the finish line was only 100 metres away ... Once I got to the Alpe, I could set the fires of hell ablaze.’
At the first hairpin, ‘Virage 21’ (the switchbacks count down to the summit), Fignon went, but LeMond instantly tracked him. Fignon repeated the move; LeMond, who the Frenchman had passively aggressively dubbed ‘the great follower’, came back onto his wheel again. They were a pair of bantamweight boxers, trying to get out of each other’s reach, matching punches but tiring with each round, with each attack. Or they could be seen as a pair of yachtsmen, duelling it out like racing dinghies in the bay, darting and weaving, masters of the blind spot.
Whatever the analogy, the skirmish was taking its physical toll. ‘My legs were on fire,’ Fignon recalled, ‘and I went again, full bore, finding strength from I don’t know where. But a few minutes later, he was back at my side. It was a draw. And we were both unable to take another breath or put any weight on the wheels.’
With the fatigued LeMond doggedly sticking to the wheel of the equally drained Fignon – and with Delgado strangely resistant to putting in the expected attack aimed at tightening the general classification still further – it looked as if the time differences that had separated the trio at the start of the stage would largely remain the same at its end. But such an analysis didn’t factor in the intervention of one man slightly behind them, a man not riding a bike. Cyrille Guimard.
As LeMond’s directeur sportif at Renault, Guimard knew the American’s riding style intimately and thus could quickly identify when his former apprentice’s tank was running empty; the sagging of the shoulders was a conspicuous meter reading of LeMond’s reserves. And here, five years on from Guimard handing LeMond his first Tour start – and four miles from the Alpe d’Huez summit – the Super U manager recognised those exact signs. If his man Fignon was to take possession of the yellow jersey again, these next few minutes were the point at which it could happen. And the boss needed to tell his rider that.
On the packed road up to the ski station, where riders, motorbikes and team cars squashed and squeezed their way through a tunnel of fanatical spectators, Guimard was working hard to get his Fiat Croma up to Fignon. In his way, though, was the Fiat Croma of his counterpart at ADR, José De Cauwer. ‘They both knew my mannerisms on the bike,’ LeMond later explained. ‘They could both see my shoulders bouncing, which for Guimard was a sure sign I was cracking. He was desperately trying to get up to Fignon in the car, but José wouldn’t let him through. They were hitting bumpers, bits of car were dropping off.’ The battle for yellow was temporarily mirrored by the battle for road space between the respective team cars.
‘The commissaire was on the radio,’ De Cauwer told Cycling Weekly, ‘telling me “You have to move to the side”. There were huge crowds and I knew there were not many opportunities to come past, so I kept it like this for two or three kilometres, playing stupid, moving a bit so there wasn’t room.’
Len Pettyjohn was alongside De Cauwer in LeMond’s car. ‘There was no way anybody could get up there. You can’t move up on Alpe d’Huez. Even at the very bottom, there’s too many people. They’re smashing your mirror in all the way. I was sitting in the front seat next to José, pushing people out of the way. You just have to get straight on your rider’s wheel to stop the people from jumping in on top of you.’
Guimard eventually managed to squeeze past De Cauwer and pull alongside Fignon, screaming instructions at his man. ‘Attack! He’s dying!’ Fignon responded that, like LeMond, he too was spent. Into the next kilometre, this four-man yellow jersey pack – Delgado was still with them, aided by his team-mate Abelardo Rondón – began to slow the pace, allowing Fignon to recharge. Then, as they reached the bright yellow 4km banner that briskly fluttered above their heads, Fignon went. A bolt from a gun, those blazing fires of hell.
Within seconds he’d caught Robert Millar, who had valiantly – and in vain – tried to loosen Theunisse’s grip on the polka-dot jersey, and was flying up the mountain. The response, when it belatedly came, was from Delgado, not LeMond. Guimard had read it right: the Californian was gone, the thighs weak, the lungs empty. With no chance of damage limitation, LeMond’s body language was darkening with despair. He was powerless, resigned and, also dropped by Rondón, alone.
Up at the finish line, on a small monitor, Kathy LeMond was watching her husband unravel a couple of miles back down the mountain. ‘I remember freaking out that I could tell that Greg was not great. He was starting to bob a little bit. And when he starts to bob, it’s like “Oh God, he’s struggling”. There was so much anxiety watching him. You just hope so much that he can just hold on, hold on, hold on…’
Delgado, in pursuit of Fignon, caught his prey a mile and a half from the line. With Theunisse already home and dry, the pair duked it out on the wide, much flatter finishing straight, the Spaniard popping out of Fignon’s slipstream to take second place and climb above Charly Mottet into third position overall. Fignon didn’t mind. He was looking at the war, rather than the battle. His eye was on the bigger prize, a prize that Delgado now pretty much conceded he wouldn’t retain.
‘For me,’ says Delgado, ‘that was the day. I might not win the stage, but I could recover two or three minutes. I wanted to break away on the Galibier or the Croix de la Fer before Alpe d’Huez, but I don’t know…
‘I think I started to feel tired with the race. As we say in Spanish, I started to ‘pay the bill’ for everything else that had happened to me in the race. I needed more strength at that moment. I was starting to feel weak near the end of this long race. We arrived more or less together. After that, I said “This Tour de France is not for me”.’
Although he would win at Alpe d’Huez three years later, Andy Hampsten’s race was over well before this point in ’89 and, suffering from a bout of food poisoning, couldn’t remotely entertain thoughts of winning the stage. What made his pain even worse was that no less an éminence grise than Eddy Merckx was riding in the team car directly behind him. ‘I was embarrassed he chose our car,’ Hampsten told Rouleur. ‘He wanted to see me win the stage and he saw me barely struggle across the line in agony.’
His team-mate, Sean Yates, was in no better shape. A frozen lasagne was to blame. ‘I felt like crap from the start,’ he told William Fotheringham, ‘did a mental descent down the Galibier, got back on the Croix de Fer. I was drinking water and puking up, drinking and puking. It was the kind of position where you can get eliminated – I was nervous. “Got to get there, got to get there.” I collapsed when I got to the top at Alpe d’Huez. I was in agony, I was history.’
Someone feeling in better spirits was the Super U rookie, Bjarne Riis, who’d completed his first ascent of the Alpe. ‘Just to ride that mountain is fantastic in itself,’ he smiles. ‘But there’s a huge difference between going flat out for the classement and just trying to finish the stage. I had to deliver Fignon to the bottom of the climb and then he had to take care of himself. I needed to get to the top as easily as possible, because the next day I’d have a job to do again. There are tons of people there screaming at you. Whether you’re at the front or at the back, it doesn’t matter. They’re screaming at you. And then, of course, you come up the mountain hearing that Fignon is attacking and dropping LeMond. And that gives you an extra boost.’
Although Fignon was clearly annoyed he had again missed out on a stage victory atop the Alpe (a particular glory that would forever elude him), the cheers from the French contingent in the grandstand hinted that he nonetheless may well have greater cause for celebration. Needing to take 54 seconds out of LeMond to return to yellow, all eyes and camera lenses were trained further down the road.
LeMond, having seemingly completely blown, was recovering well as the road levelled out in that final mile. He was charging now, his pellet-encrusted body ignoring any pain as he climbed out of the saddle to churn the big gears. Taking the final left-hander onto the finishing straight, he was effectively now riding his favoured discipline, the time trial: he was racing against the ticking of the clock, trying to keep any deficit remotely manageable. Every muscle worked to keep him in touch, to keep those dreams of the top spot on the Paris podium alive. Exhausted, LeMond crossed the line a minute and 19 seconds behind Fignon, who had wiped out that morning’s chunky deficit to claim a 26-second advantage overall. ‘Give Fignon huge credit,’ says Len Pettyjohn. ‘He put the hammer down when he had the chance.’
But while LeMond had again relinquished yellow, this epic race was far from over. ‘It’s not the worst thing in the world,’ he reasoned at the finish line, the sparkle returning. ‘It would have still been hard to keep the jersey. I’ve been very isolated and it’s taken a lot of effort out of me. People don’t see me leading the whole peloton, but when you have to control the race and follow attacks, the mental pressure is exhausting.’ A smile still played on his lips though. ‘I’d have preferred to have only lost it by five or ten seconds, but that’s the way it goes.’
It could certainly have been worse for the American. In those last three miles, Fignon had taken around 26 seconds a mile out of him. If the Parisian had heeded Guimard’s advice at four miles from home, his lead in the general classification would arguably have been unassailable. Indeed, had Guimard been able to manoeuvre his car alongside his team leader quicker, there was a strong likelihood that the titanic battle between Fignon and LeMond would have ended there and then.
On this point, there’s an obvious irony that played into LeMond’s hands. Renowned for his embrace of new technology and equipment at each and every time trial, it was the absence of one particular piece of technology during this particular marathon stage that served him well, as he has since acknowledged. ‘I look back now and think that I’d have been in trouble if we’d had intercom radios.’
He could well be right. Had race radios been used in the ’89 Tour (they weren’t phased in until the ’90s, a move led by team-sponsoring telecoms giant Motorola), the cycling nation may well have been denied that beautifully poised, infinitely intriguing spectacle. Bjarne Riis is a little more dismissive. ‘With or without radios, it doesn’t matter. It’s still up to the riders to make decisions. They still have to think and do things. They are not machines.’
Indeed, this most thrilling of races, one shaped more by the riders’ own thoughts and deeds than by the stricture of team orders, was heading towards the climax that it fully deserved. After nearly 80 hours in the saddle, Fignon and LeMond remained divided by a matter of seconds, not minutes.
There were still a few more hands to be dealt. The game of poker continued. Aces high.
Stage 17
1. Gert-Jan Theunisse (PDM/Netherlands) 5:10:39
2. Pedro Delgado (Reynolds/Spain) +1’09”
3. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) +1’09”
4. Abelardo Rondón (Reynolds/Colombia) +2’08”
5. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) +2’28”
General classification
1. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) 77:55:11
2. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) +26”
3. Pedro Delgado (Reynolds/Spain) +1’55”
4. Gert-Jan Theunisse (PDM/Netherlands) +5’12”
5. Charly Mottet (RMO/France) +5’22”