NO SURRENDER
‘They escaped disaster by the skin of their teeth – and loved the moment tool’ – Graham Watson
21 July
Stage 19, Villard-de-Lans – Aix-les-Bains, 78 miles
GOODBYE TO THE Alps. Goodbye to the mountains.
This final Alpine stage offered a fierce contest, no doubt. It certainly didn’t have the air of a backslapping parade. But the majority of these three-and-a-half hours became a salute to – and a celebration of – the most tenacious, most consistent climbers who had jockeyed and jousted each other over the previous three weeks.
With four not-insignificant climbs ahead of them, the stage was dominated from an early point by the top four in the GC – Fignon, LeMond, Delgado and Theunisse – plus seventh-placed Marino Lejarreta, a man directing a covetous stare towards Charly Mottet’s fifth position. This quintet had already made their move by the time the gradients of the second climb, the first-category Col de Porte, began to tighten. They were more than a minute on the chase group that contained all of the usual suspects (including the three other PDM strongmen – Kelly, Rooks and Alcalá) as they crested the summit. Well, all the usual suspects bar Mottet. He was a further minute back and struggling. Possibly a stage too far. The popular thinking – that a three-week Grand Tour was too much for him to sustain at the top of his game – was proving true.
The same five tore up the Col du Cucheron, each rider with a different motivation. Fignon wasn’t one to defend, to sit at the back of this small bunch to observe and react. He was happy to lead them up the slopes of this second-category climb, perhaps sniffing after a few more seconds to take his advantage over the psychological barrier of a full minute. Delgado was now largely resigned to that third spot, so the priority for him was to shadow fourth-placed Theunisse, and possibly also grab a stage win on the flat roads of Aix-les-Bains. Theunisse, while in no danger of not winning the polka-dot jersey, nonetheless jerked into action whenever anyone launched an attack near any of the day’s summits. He still wanted as many points in the King of the Mountains competition as possible. Not that the easy accumulation of these points ever provoked a smile from him. The grumpiest king since Henry VIII.
If this lead group did survive the day, Lejarreta would be the rider with most to gain. Starting the day a minute and two seconds off fifth place, the Basque rider’s aim was to leapfrog Mottet and Rooks to take the highest Tour placing in his lengthy career. At the rate these five were riding, this looked like a foregone conclusion. And then there was LeMond, spending a large part of the day sitting on the back of the bunch, the other four constantly in his eyeline. Was he going to settle for second or would he attack in order to pare that 50-second deficit down to a more manageable amount for Paris?
Whatever their motivation, everyone was watching everyone else. And when Fignon pulled to the side of the road after dragging the others up on another stamina-sapping charge, his open invitation for someone else to make the pace fell on deaf ears. They simply all snaked behind him as he weaved back and forth across the road in a game of Follow My Leader.
As on the Col de Porte, Delgado was first over the Col du Cucheron, denying Theunisse the maximum points both times. The phlegmatic Dutchman didn’t seem to be too aggrieved about this: the polka-dot jersey wasn’t coming off his back. Delgado led the rest over the summit of the Col du Granier too, but not before a little spicy action on the climb of the race’s last major mountain. With less than a mile of incline remaining, LeMond put in an attack which Fignon was sharp to, quickly neutralising it. LeMond went again. Fignon answered again.
The descent down the Granier’s northern slopes was steep and dangerous, but that didn’t stop LeMond – a man clearly not content with second place overall – from taking some big gambles as they roared down towards Chambéry, the location of the following month’s world championships. He was in search of anything he could get that would improve his chances of causing a shock in Paris, even if it were only a handful of seconds. Fignon, probably an even better descender, wouldn’t let him get a thing, though.
But it wasn’t the descent, with vertical drops just a foot or two away, that caused the five grief. It was a good old-fashioned roundabout. Coming into Chambéry too fast to successfully negotiate the roundabout, Lejarreta ploughed straight ahead into a spectator barrier. The others all followed. All except Delgado, that is, who managed to avoid the fence and stay upright, but sportingly elected not to take advantage of his opponents’ misfortunes by disappearing towards the horizon. The episode symbolised the respect and sense of fraternity within the upper echelons. The photographer Graham Watson noticed it too. ‘Once they’d realigned themselves, TV showed all three podium finishers with beaming smiles on their faces. They escaped disaster by the skin of their teeth – and loved the moment too!’
On the flat roads between Chambéry and Aix-les-Bains, racing along the east bank of the Lac du Bourget, the pace was high, pretty much everyone taking their turn on the front. If it wasn’t for the array of different jerseys, spectators would swear they were watching a well-drilled team time trial.
As expected, once within sniffing distance of the finish, LeMond proved himself to be the man with the most electrifying sprint and took the stage victory to his clear delight. Fignon extended an arm of congratulation, happy to concede LeMond the stage win. Those 50 seconds remained unharmed.
‘I wanted to win today,’ LeMond told Channel 4. ‘That was a big deal for me. I knew if I took Fignon’s wheel, I would win.’ Delgado agrees that the stage win felt inevitable. ‘He waited to win the stage. He was a specialist at that. Maybe, if I was in his body, I would do the same.’ The hard-working Lejarreta got his just reward too, gaining enough of an advantage over Mottet and Rooks to move up into fifth. ‘
While the final five fighting out the sprint finish in Aix-les-Bains had arguably been the most consistent performers in the mountains, their success set others’ shortcomings into sharp relief. Aside from the underachievement of Andy Hampsten, the most conspicuous disappointment in both the Alps and the Pyrenees was the comparative no-show of the Colombians. Fabio Parra, a podium finisher 12 months before, stepped off his bike just after the race left the Pyrenees, while – despite launching the odd, spasmodic attack – Luis ‘Lucho’ Herrera never threatened the upper reaches of the GC. The Colombian cycling revolution, this wave of exciting riders who emerged in the early ’80s, now looked to be on the wane, at least where the Tour de France was concerned.
Delgado, a man with a pair of very capable Colombians in his Reynolds team in ’89, offers his opinion on why the country’s impact wasn’t felt for longer. ‘The Colombian riders rode like they did back in Colombia. I took part in the Tour de Colombia once and everyone flew off from the start. They were competing without tactics. The tactic was attack, breakaway, escape. But to win the Tour, you have to be more controlled. At that time, the Colombians were very, very good climbers, but they didn’t have the discipline to win the race.’ Phil Liggett identified a parallel situation in the commentary box during the ’80s. ‘The Colombian media came in full force,’ he told Bicycling magazine. ‘They would be commentating in a voice fit for a finishing sprint when the race had just left the start town.’
Aside from tactical differences, cultural separation also dogged riders’ progress in the sport’s heartland. ‘The hardest thing for Colombian riders was being in Europe for a month,’ says Delgado. ‘They missed their family and their country. Back then, it was very typical for a Colombian rider like Lucho Herrera to want to go home after the first stage. Fabio Parra, though, understood that he needed to live outside Colombia for a month or two to be a professional cyclist.’ Not that, of course, such an approach did Parra too many favours in 1989, joining the rest of his team in abandoning the race several days before the race reached the Alps.
Raúl Alcalá, the highest-placed Latin American rider in ’89, agrees that distance from home was a major factor for the Café de Colombia team. ‘It costs a lot to bring the team over for a few races, so it was best for them to keep the whole team together for as long as possible in Europe. Sometimes, the Colombians were tired from racing all the time in Europe. They preferred to go back and forth to Colombia. That was perfect for them. They got homesick all the time. They called home to Mama, to Papa to say they’re OK.’
Herrera was the best-placed Colombian in the ’89 Tour, but his 19th place was undeniably a disappointment, more than 36 minutes down on the yellow jersey in Paris. In fact, he finished just one GC position and one minute ahead of his team-mate, Alberto Camargo, the young, largely undistinguished domestique. Furthermore, Camargo’s eighth place into Villard-de-Lans on Stage 18 was higher than any of Herrera’s finishes in the entire three weeks.
Colombia’s most decorated cyclists would each only finish the Tour on one more occasion; Herrera came home 31st in 1991, while Parra finished 13th the previous year, before racking up two further abandonments. But the biggest pin deflating the country’s cycling bubble wasn’t the form of its top riders. On 3 July 1989, just as the Tour was belting around the Spa-Francorchamps Grand Prix circuit, the International Coffee Pact collapsed. Under the agreement, the coffee industry, a fundamental pillar of the Colombian economy, enjoyed protected status for its prices. With this safeguard suddenly removed, the price of coffee dramatically fell by 60% within 24 hours. The first casualty for the National Association of Coffee Growers of Colombia was obvious; the sponsorship of a professional cycling team was now no longer an imaginative marketing tool but an unsustainable luxury. Accordingly, 1989 would be the last time the Café de Colombia team would light up the Tour de France.
In the years that followed, European teams would employ Colombian riders more and more as domestiques. Some might say that the move away from starring roles for the country’s cycling talent was already in place. After all, the Colombians who had most impact in the ’89 Tour were Delgado’s two loyal lieutenants, William Palacio and Abelardo Rondón, who nursed their leader from the lanterne rouge to the podium. Until the arrival of their compatriot Santiago Botero, who won the King of the Mountains jersey in 2000, Colombian eyes drifted away from the Tour de France, and cycling in general, attracted by national sporting success elsewhere, most conspicuously, in football and Formula 1.
As Colombian attention declined, interest in the Tour from the US was at an all-time high. While a handful of American newspapers already sent a correspondent every year to report on the whole race – and ABC gave it airtime with highlights packages – editors across the nation didn’t want to miss out on what LeMond, Fignon and the rest were serving up. Not only was this epic sporting contest offering more twists and turns than the maziest Alpine pass, but LeMond’s back story offered the classic overcoming-the-odds tale that proved irresistible to non-sports fans too. Accordingly, the American presence in the press ranks substantially swelled in that final week, many journalists taking crash courses in this alien, exotic sport.
And LeMond was intent on making sure the drama wouldn’t end until the last pedal stroke of the entire three weeks. He was fired the same question over and over. Did Fignon have too much advantage going into the last two days? ‘No, no no! Fifty seconds is a very good advantage but, I tell you, he’s going to have some sleepless nights.
‘He won’t beat me by 50 seconds.’
Stage 19
1. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) 3:17:53
2. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) same time
3. Pedro Delgado (Reynolds/Spain) same time
4. Gert-Jan Theunisse (PDM/Netherlands) same time
5. Marino Lejarreta (Paternina/Spain) +4”
General classification
1. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) 83:44:32
2. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) +50”
3. Pedro Delgado (Reynolds/Spain) +2’28”
4. Gert-Jan Theunisse (PDM/Netherlands) +5’36”
5. Marino Lejarreta (Paternina/Spain) +8’35”
***
22 July
Stage 20, Aix-les-Bains – L’Isle d’Abeau, 79 miles
‘This was a vacation. A long-awaited vacation.’
You couldn’t blame LeMond – or anyone else in the peloton, for that matter – for taking their foot off the gas. Up until now, it had been one of the most extraordinary Tours ever, full of daring and drama, intrigue and incident. There hadn’t been so much as a single stage that could be described as mediocre. But it was perfectly acceptable if this, the race’s penultimate stage, fell into that category. Everyone needed to take a breath before Paris, after all.
The tenor of the day was set early on when Fignon temporarily exchanged the maillot jaune for Teun van Vliet’s Panasonic jersey. And his playful mood continued, launching a semi-serious attack on this benign peloton, a wholly unnecessary move for the leader of the pack, unless he thought that he could pick up a few more seconds to plump up that 50-second time cushion.
Deprived of the usual final-day mass sprint on the Champs-Élysées, the finish into L’Isle d’Abeau represented Sean Kelly’s last hope of a stage win in the ’89 race. Phil Anderson clearly fancied tasting victory, too. After one such win in the Giro the previous month, the Australian TVM leader wanted to repeat the feat and was anxious – once the attacks starting coming thick and fast on this otherwise most passive of stages – to be part of each and every breakaway. In the end, he went himself, timing his solo break just as the peloton were closing on Histor’s Wilfried Peeters, an earlier escapee.
Anderson was soon swallowed up by the peloton as the teams of the big sprinters prepared to lead out their speedsters for a rare mass sprint – only the third of the entire three weeks. It appeared that Jelle Nijdam, in search of a hat-trick of victories, had the stage nailed when he struck for home 300 yards out. But he had possibly attacked a little too soon and hadn’t legislated for a pair of fast-arriving sprinters in good form. While Nijdam successfully held off the challenge of Kelly, who had to be content with third, the Dutchman was pipped to the line, by the thinnest of margins, by the Italian Giovanni Fidanza. After five top-ten finishes in the race (including second behind Mathieu Hermans in Blagnac, following Rudy Dhaenens’ late crash), the win was certainly deserved for the rookie Chateau d’Ax man.
But that wasn’t it for the day. The riders then crossed to nearby Lyon to board a specially chartered, high-speed TGV train that would take them up to Paris, ahead of the following day’s time trial. It would prove to be a rather interesting journey.
‘The train ride before the final stage is my favourite part of the Tour,’ laughs Andy Hampsten. ‘The maximal kick in the sac for every bike rider was getting on the TGV and being served meat patties that were burnt on the outside and frozen on the inside, and rice that was cooked three months ago. But we knew this. We were smart. We had our own cook and he made us a beautiful pasta salad and chicken breasts. We were having a big picnic. Greg, with his inability to sit down – and with hardly any team-mates left to talk to by this point – was roaming up and down the train. “Hey Greg! Come and sit down.” I wasn’t a threat to him on GC and we were all friends, so we sat him down and fed him.
“Greg, we think you can win this race.”
“Oh no. I know I can win this race.”
‘The main riders were in the first carriage,’ explains Delgado, ‘including LeMond, Fignon and me. Cyrille Guimard was there too. He was opening champagne bottles and toasting me – “Thanks for being such a very good adversary.” I said, “OK, but the Tour de France is not finished yet. Tomorrow is 25 kilometres. Maybe LeMond can recover some time. Maybe, 40 seconds. And maybe you’ll have a puncture or something like that.”’
Delgado shakes his head with disbelief – disbelief he’s been holding for the last three decades. ‘I didn’t understand it. Incredible. Just stay focused for one more day.’ He sighs. ‘That champagne would end up tasting bitter.’ If Delgado had been the one with the 50-second lead, would he have been confident of defending it in the time trial? ‘Oh no, no, no. No champagne. There might have been 50 seconds, but the race isn’t over until the finish line.’ This was a dictum that Guimard instilled in LeMond back in the Renault days of the early ’80s. Perhaps he should have heeded his own advice.
Hampsten tells a similar story about the presumptuousness of the yellow jersey on the transfer up to Paris. ‘On the train, Fignon came to LeMond, in front of some journalists, and congratulated him on his second place. It was all this “after that terrible injury”, “it’s been an honour battling you”, “we’re going back to my hometown and I’m going to be triumphant in Paris”. As they’re shaking hands with photographers and journalists all around, Greg looks him in the eye. He knew his playbook. He got it. But it wasn’t that Larry was trying to do some double or triple psychology. He really thought he was going to hold that 50-second lead. But Greg realised he had completely let his guard down. He was thinking “I’m just going to do a time trial. That gun’s going to go and I’m going to go so fast.”’
Journalist François Thomazeau sees it differently, believing that the race leader was far from cocksure. ‘Not only was Fignon not overconfident, he was full of doubts. I’m sure he started the race with so much fear of losing that he did lose. And he was really injured. You could tell the pressure and doubts on the evening before when the riders took the train back to Paris. I was on that TGV and Guimard was refusing access to the Super U compartment. He was in an extremely bad mood and smelling of whisky, which was never a good sign. You could feel the tension.
As I couldn’t work, I found myself sitting next to Greg. He had been left on his own; not a single journalist on the train was interested in talking to him. While Fignon’s camp was unavailable, LeMond was in great spirits, so thrilled and happy to have made it back to the Tour de France and finishing second. That was the great irony. You had a guy who thought he had lost the Tour and was cheerful as can be, while the guy who was about to win it was tense and refusing to talk! Greg told me his whole story in great detail and you know what? I was so convinced Fignon would win the Tour that I didn’t take notes or record our chat. My worst professional mistake…’
By the time the train arrived at Gare de Lyon in Paris, Fignon was in a black temper. The hordes of photographers and cameramen waiting on the station platform weren’t conducive to an improvement in his demeanour. ‘We had hardly begun to move along the platform before someone bunged the usual camera under my nose and began throwing aggressive questions at me,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘Worn out by the stressful ambience, I spat at a camera crew who were in the way. Just my luck: they were from a Spanish channel against whom I had no grievance at all. Afterwards, as soon as any news story about my arrival at the station was run, the images were played again and again. It wasn’t the best publicity.’
A separate report suggests that the Frenchman issued one cameraman with a not-so-polite invitation: ‘You want a punch in the mouth?’ Fignon himself admitted he gave the man from Channel 5 a shove. ‘I didn’t even think about what I was doing.’
Less than 24 hours later, though, a surprise right hook was coming Fignon’s way. A metaphorical punch, sure, but one that packed enough power to hurt forever.
1. Giovanni Fidanza (Chateau d’Ax/Italy) 3:26:16
2. Jelle Nijdam (Superconfex/Netherlands) same time
3. Sean Kelly (PDM/Ireland) same time
4. Mathieu Hermans (Paternina/Netherlands) same time
5. Carlo Bomans (Domex/Belgium) same time
General classification
1. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) 87:10:48
2. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) +50”
3. Pedro Delgado (Reynolds/Spain) +2’28”
4. Gert-Jan Theunisse (PDM/Netherlands) +5’30”
5. Marino Lejarreta (Paternina/Spain) 8’35”