CAPITAL GAINS
‘Some Spanish journalists thought that I went slowly so that I wouldn’t be the first rider to ride the race quicker than the winner’ – Pedro Delgado
23 July
Stage 21, individual time trial, Versailles – Paris, 15 miles
AS THE MAN who held the record for the fastest individual performance in the 86-year history of the Tour de France, Sean Yates would have gazed along the route from the Palace of Versailles to the Champs-Élysées and fancied his chances. Slightly downhill and with a discernible tailwind in the air, the hope of glory in the final stage of this epic race was an irresistible prospect. If he were successful, it would represent the very pinnacle of his career, a moment unlikely to ever be equalled.
That Sunday afternoon represented 7-Eleven’s last tilt at some success at the end of a disappointing, misfiring Tour. ‘We hadn’t won a stage and Andy Hampsten had slipped out of contention bigtime. So what was left? It got to the last stage and no one had won anything. Jim Ochowicz said, “I’ll give you $20,000 if you win the last time trial.” Maybe he thought the money would make the difference between winning and not winning. I told him I’d try as hard as I could, whether I was getting $20,000 or not, because that’s what I did. I never rode for money. I liked the way I lived and I liked to ride my bike. It wasn’t that I was saving up for my third Ferrari or anything. Twenty thousand dollars wasn’t suddenly going to make me go 2kph faster.’
Despite 7-Eleven’s trademark relaxed environment, Ochowicz’s wager indicated a man under pressure. 7-Eleven as a company was in serious financial trouble and potential new sponsors needed to be approached. A stage win would certainly help these discussions after the disappointment of Hampsten’s Tour. Success in the Giro was one thing (Hampsten won in ’88 and was third in ’89), but American sponsors wanted success in France, in the sport’s blue riband event. The one being broadcast to the nation on ABC.
Andy was a good athlete,’ says Yates, ‘but he was never a guy – or certainly didn’t portray himself as a guy – who said, “I’m going to fucking win this thing. I will deliver. Boys, you’ve got to be fucking on it.” You’re either like that or you’re not. And that just wasn’t his character.’
Although he rode satisfactorily in some of the Alpine stages, Hampsten wasn’t ever a contender for a stage win. ‘I saw all the battles going on. There were eight or ten of us around LeMond and Fignon, but it was largely the two of them fighting it out. It was ping, bam, boom.’ And it would be the other American who made the headlines back home. ‘I spent my career trying to win the Tour de France and the dirty secret is that it never happened!’
Nonetheless, Hampsten was looking forward to that afternoon’s innovative final stage. ‘It’s fine being sucked along on a free ride down the Champs-Elysées,’ he told Samuel Abt, ‘but arriving alone and not having to share the cheers is a wonderful reward for everybody.’ He came in 28th on the day and 22nd overall. Team-mate Yates fared better, finishing fifth, mirroring his position on the Rennes time trial. But he never got his hands on those ‘20,000 pieces of inspiration’.
The other British rider, Glasgow’s Robert Millar, enjoyed a bittersweet Tour. His brilliant ride to Superbagnères, leading the way over all the day’s big climbs, was arguably the most impressive Tour victory of his career and, although he slipped a position on the GC on the time trial into Paris, his tenth position was his second-highest overall finish. But in the Alps he couldn’t stay in touch with Gert-Jan Theunisse in the pursuit of his other ambition, the polka-dot jersey. He finished third in that competition, the pair separated by Pedro Delgado.
Theunisse’s jersey was one of four that the PDM team brought away from the race. Sean Kelly was in possession of two of them – the green points jersey and the red catch sprints jersey – while the previous year’s King of the Mountains, Steven Rooks, had to be content with winning the combined competition, rewarding the rider showing the most consistency across all the other categories. PDM’s haul was bountiful; four jerseys, four stage wins and four riders in the top ten overall, plus they held off Delgado’s Reynolds squad to take the team competition too.
‘The management were happy with the riders and the results,’ says Kelly, ‘but they were looking at LeMond who had just been with them. “What did we do here? Did we get it wrong? Should we have held on to him?” They didn’t say it directly, but that was something they were thinking about. I could read it. And it’s normal that the general manager and the directeur sportif would think in that way.’ The team’s PR man, Harry Jansen, was more transparent and direct. Speaking of the multiple jerseys their riders had bagged, Jansen admitted ‘we would give them all up for the yellow jersey’.
The Dutch press, though, weren’t too impressed with the haul. Four riders in the top ten, yet none in podium places, let alone winning the race. ‘They thought Theunisse could have been higher, but the tactic was never for the rest of us to support one guy. We all rode our own race.’
Kelly, whose 47th position on the final time trial meant he swapped places with Millar in the GC, had enjoyed one of his best Tours. A stage win remained elusive, and there was no early capture of the yellow jersey that he’d hoped for, but his extremely impressive climbing ensured that the winning of his fourth green jersey was little more than a formality. And it all came well into his thirties.
Certainly the move from KAS had suited him; the removal of all those Spanish stage races from his schedule had meant he was in fine fettle for the Tour itself. ‘I felt much fresher than in previous years, thanks to the programme in the early part of the season. I felt I had more energy. Over the years, fatigue was a problem. Usually, when I got into the second week of the Tour, I would feel it.’
Kelly wasn’t the only PDM new boy to have an impressive Tour. Martin Earley had taken that victory in Pau, as had Raúl Alcalá at Spa-Francorchamps. Despite finishing eighth overall, Alcalá ran out of juice in the final week – or, at least, he didn’t have enough juice left to make a meaningful impression in the Alps. ‘I tried to keep my form as long as possible. For me, the Alps were more difficult than the Pyrenees. When the Alps come first on a Tour, riding Alpe d’Huez is a great feeling. But if the Pyrenees come first, I’d get in trouble in the Alps because I’d get more tired. I always got this feeling from around Stage 13 or 14 onwards. I was there, very near the front at the finishes in 1989, but I didn’t have enough power to win the stages. On the last seven or eight kilometres of a stage, I was going at the same tempo. I see guys go, but I can’t go with them. I was like an automatic car. You put your foot on the gas, but you go the same speed.’
Two climbers who fared better than Alcalá in the high mountains were Charly Mottet and Marino Lejarreta, two diminutive men who finished within a minute of each other. Their respective Tours, though, were rather different. Mottet securely held third place for a week between Superbagnères and Alpe d’Huez, before fatigue appeared to set in and he faded. By contrast, the longer the race went on, the higher Lejarreta rose, finally taking possession of Mottet’s fifth place on the final day in the mountains.
Lejarreta’s compatriot, Pedro Delgado, had – as Laurent Fignon had rudely pointed out to him on the race’s early stages – discovered that the deficit he had to eradicate was too great, especially with Fignon and LeMond being at the height of their powers. As he lined up for the time trial, he was in a quandary.
‘The day before, I was two minutes and 28 seconds behind. I started two minutes and 42 seconds late in Luxembourg. Someone said, “Hey Pedro, maybe you will be the first rider in Tour de France history to ride the race in less time than the person who won it.” At the end, I was more than three minutes down on the classification. I rode the time trial without motivation. First and second places were too distant to recover and, behind me, nobody had put my third position in danger. So I just completed it. Nothing more. But some Spanish journalists thought that I went slowly so that I wouldn’t be the first rider to ride the race quicker than the winner.’
‘The fightback by Delgado even now gets overlooked by the bigger fight,’ says Graham Watson. ‘Looking back, it was amazing how hard Delgado raced because of his early losses. He’d normally have lost many minutes in the long time trial on Stage 5, but instead hit back and used that performance to reach even dizzier heights later on. We will never know if he’d have won that Tour with a safer and normal Prologue, but in all likelihood he would have – and this Tour would never have ended so famously.’
Certainly, Delgado’s irresistible surge up the GC, from the indignity of being the race’s first lanterne rouge after the Prologue, owed plenty to the strength of his team, specifically the dedication of his faithful helpers Induráin, Palacio, Rondón and Gorospe. Indeed, Reynolds were the only team in the whole race to have a full complement of riders taking to the time trial start line at Versailles. All nine members were reporting for duty.
(Delgado might have been the ’89 Tour’s first lanterne rouge, but its final one, the Paternina sprinter Mathieu Hermans, endured a double indignity. Not only did he become, after his victory in Blagnac, the first stage winner to finish in last position, but this wasn’t the first time he’d ended up bottom of the barrel. He was merely repeating his feat of 1987.)
Delgado had been desperate to win the ’89 Tour in order to disprove the doubters, to blow away the clouds of suspicion that had followed him around since the probenecid affair the previous summer. After the Prologue debacle, his furious charge up the GC (which incredibly didn’t include a stage win) was, of course, an attempt to get remotely close to that ambition.
There were no positive tests in the ’89 race, no whispers of chemical enhancement tainting the battle for yellow. Six riders were tested every day: the stage winner, the runner-up, the yellow jersey, second place in GC and two riders selected at random. ‘Testing wasn’t as stringent as it is now,’ says Sean Yates, ‘but that’s probably more to do with the products that are out there these days that they’re searching for. ’89 was before that era.’
While it would be naïve to imagine every single rider in the peloton was squeaky clean, it is fair to judge this race as one of the last classic encounters before EPO arrived and changed the game entirely. ‘In the ’80s and early ’90s,’ explains Stephen Roche, ‘you’d feel a guy with natural talent could still come out and win, because whatever was on the market could increase performance by three to five per cent. So somebody who had a lot of class could beat a guy who was taking something. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, some of the products on the market at that particular time added 30-40 percent increase in performance. So no matter how much class they had, it was impossible for someone who was trying to be clean to beat somebody who had taken something.’
As EPO put its icy paw on the shoulder of the pro cycling ranks, a rider of class like Delgado found himself off the pace, average at best. ‘One year I’m in the first group. The next year, I’m in the last group, like a very bad rider. I did the same as I did every year, so what happened…?’
Back in the late ’80s, Greg LeMond gave the journalist Samuel Abt an overview of drug intake within the peloton. ‘Of course, a small minority of cyclists do use drugs. There are more than 700 professionals in Europe. A lot of them are broke and they’re all human. There are few people who, knowing that if they take something they may do better, are capable of refusing it. But the tests are pretty strict, so I honestly believe there is very little drug use in the major events. In smaller races where there are no drug tests, it can be a different matter. Not everybody in those races is riding on water … It’s mainly the second-raters who do it.’
With no one testing positive, and no clouds of suspicion hanging over the result, as there had been the previous year, nothing could detract from the drama, from the sheer sporting intrigue, of the final day in ’89. With 136 riders having now rolled down the start ramp at Versailles, to be welcomed onto the Champs-Élysées without, as Andy Hampsten explained, having to share the cheers, only two riders remained.
What was left was a duel, a shoot-out, a boxing match. Cycling’s fight of the century.
Fignon vs LeMond.
***
‘There’s a lot to be said about feeling good and not having pressure,’ says Len Pettyjohn. ‘When you’re in the jersey, the collar is very tight.’
As he had for three weeks, the Coors Light team manager, embedded with the ADR team throughout the race, had a front-row seat on that final morning. He could gauge how calm and collected Greg LeMond was and, from across the hotel breakfast room, how Laurent Fignon was tying himself up in knots.
‘That morning we were laughing and having a good time. Greg was very relaxed as he had nothing to lose at that point. He had been out practising on his time trial bike, but there was a problem because the bars were slipping and the mechanic was sitting there cutting up a Coke can to try to put spacers in between the bars. We looked over and there was Fignon, in the back of the parking lot, with time trial bars on his bike. He had them out and was practising. He was looking over at Greg and you could see he was really nervous. So we went in to have breakfast and we were all laughing. We watched the Super U team walk in and Fignon looked over again. Greg waved and smiled. Fignon’s face was white. He was feeling the pressure. You could see the fear.’
The doubts would amplify with each hour that the time trial grew closer. With such a lead on a short stage on the familiar streets of his hometown, how could Fignon fail? Logic was on his side. But there were ways that the presence of technology could precipitate a defeat. Firstly, Fignon could simply be beaten by the physical advantages that the technology gave LeMond, by the appliance of science. Secondly, whether LeMond actually received a boost from his equipment or not, the fear that he might could be enough to tie Fignon in knots too.
It wasn’t as if Cyrille Guimard was a technophobe. Far from it. Over the previous decade, the Super U boss had been in the vanguard of innovation, especially any new thinking that involved aerodynamics. He was the man who introduced Fignon and Bernard Hinault to sloped-framed bikes, as well as becoming an evangelist for the use of disc wheels. But, for some reason, he shied away from the aerobars, despite seeing how they had helped LeMond cut through the wind and the rain on the Rennes time trial. When pushed, he would mumble an excuse, saying how they had actually tested them but found they adversely affected Fignon’s ability to breathe. LeMond was delighted to hear this admission. ‘Thank God people are sceptical…’
‘Winning by ourselves without artificial aids was something we valued,’ Fignon later wrote. ‘And we had an inviolable principle in the biggest races; we would only use new equipment if it had been tested properly before the event. We had to make absolutely certain it was reliable, particularly for the Tour de France where we only ever rode trusty, solid kit that we knew how to use.’
Fignon’s definition of ‘artificial aids’ clearly didn’t include disc wheels. He plumped for two discs for the final time trial, both decked out in the national colours of France to match his tricolour handlebar tape. Such showiness was consistent with the supposed inevitability of the result. Stephen Roche notes how ‘on the Champs-Élysées that morning, there were blue, white and red T-shirts with “Fignon: Winner of the Tour” on them’.
Aside from their presumptuousness (‘They were so sure they’d won that they put on a show’), Roche sees Super U’s decision to use both these disc wheels as fundamentally flawed. ‘That was a huge, huge mistake. That day, coming in from Versailles, all the side streets would have produced side-winds. If it had been a dead straight road with a headwind, it would have been beneficial. But when you had changes in direction and the wind coming in from the left and the right, when it came to taking your hand off the bars to change gear, you wouldn’t do so as you’d be afraid of the wind taking your front wheel. It would be very uncomfortable. If they’d calculated everything precisely, they wouldn’t have taken a risk on a full disc at the front. But because they were so far ahead, they did take the risk.’ So while it wasn’t that Super U weren’t embracing technology to secure Fignon’s place on the podium, it was that they appeared to be embracing the wrong technology.
LeMond, on the other hand, had done his calculations and was insistent that his bike be set up just how he wanted it. ‘I wanted Greg to ride with the front disc,’ admits Len Pettyjohn, ‘but he refused. That was his call. At that time, the nature of wheel aerodynamics was such that you really could get pushed across the road with double-discs. It was dangerous. Greg said, “You know what? I want to go as fast as I can go and I don’t want a distraction. I don’t want anything to bother me. So don’t put that front wheel on.”’
LeMond was also insistent that he wasn’t to be told any of his split times out on the course. That would take the psychology, the thinking, out of his performance, freeing him up for the purely flat-out physical assault. Fignon, however, even if he didn’t want to, would get a sense of how he was riding in comparison with LeMond. Another contribution to add to the ever-growing pile of psychological burdens.
‘When you start losing time,’ says Pettyjohn, ‘it creates panic. That’s just the reality of bike racing. Then you start to push a little harder and you go over the limit. Your heart-rate spikes and then you have to slow down. If you go fast, slow, fast, slow, guess what? You go slow. And getting a message in your ear that you’re losing time when you feel like shit is not a good thing. Everything would be a distraction for Fignon that day.’
Aside from the psychology, Fignon also had a physical issue, one he believed ‘no one suspected a thing [about] because we had imposed a media blackout’. He had developed an excruciatingly painful saddle sore, just below one of his buttocks, right at the point where his shorts touched his saddle. He hadn’t slept well because of it for two nights, and no matter how much embrocation the team doctor administered, the pain wouldn’t subside.
But, despite the psychological and physical pressures heaped up on Fignon, he knew – like almost everyone else – that he was still the overwhelming favourite to be standing atop the podium that afternoon. Yes, LeMond would probably take the stage win, but erasing that time deficit was surely beyond him. ‘I could not lose. I could not see how it could happen. It was not feasible.’ Almost everyone else felt that way too. His team-mate Bjarne Riis believed that 50 seconds would be an ample buffer. ‘Yeah, absolutely. We were pretty confident.’ While a Super U insider would be expected to be calmly optimistic, the impartial photographer Graham Watson agrees with the universal appraisal of the situation. ‘It would have been a drunk or rare bird that stood up before the stage and announced LeMond would beat Fignon.’
There was one person in Paris who doubted destiny – Gregory James LeMond. His resolve, hinted at in those nightly post-stage TV interviews, had grown and grown with each day. LeMond had done the maths and he had convinced himself. He was a believer. And that morning, as Kathy explains, he converted someone else to the faith.
‘My dad was the nicest, most optimistic guy you could ever meet. That morning, when everyone was sitting around the Hilton in Paris, he said he was going to go for a walk. What he really did was take a cab and go to see Greg at the Sofitel. Greg had just come back from his morning warm-up and said, “I feel really good, Dave. I think I can do it.” Dad comes back to the Hilton and tells me he thinks Greg’s going to do it.
‘“Oh my God, Dad. Stop it. That’s impossible.”
‘“No, no. I went and saw him.”
‘“What?! I don’t even talk to Greg on the morning of a time trial. He’s always keyed up.”
‘“No, we had a good talk.”
‘My dad was so sure that Greg was going to win that he took Geoffrey, our five-year-old, and stood by the podium with him so he could see his dad win this thing. My dad believed so much in Greg and I was the naysayer! I was like, “Let’s not be so greedy. Do you know how lucky we are?” We would have been very happy with second.’
As the shadows lengthened in the late-afternoon sunshine, the last two riders circled each other in the warm-up area, two boxers waiting for the other to land the first punch. LeMond certainly didn’t look like someone who might be happy with second place. Instead, with Oakley shades, teardrop helmet and those aerobars, he appeared inscrutable. Invincible, even. Fignon, on the other hand – professorial spectacles, ponytail flapping lightly in the breeze, regular handlebars – looked vulnerable. Beatable, possibly. These last three weeks had been a battle royal between riders, between styles, between philosophies. It was about to be decided once and for all.
Thirty minutes and the champion would be anointed.