Churchill (might have) said, “History is written by the victors.” I doubt sincerely he had bike races in mind, but I think the truism holds. Most American people understand the 1989 Tour de France as a legendary victory by the virtuous American Greg Lemond over the cynical and prickly Frenchman Laurent Fignon. It’s a comeback story (Lemond had been shot the year before) and a revenge tale (Fignon talked an awful lot of s*#t) and a thriller (the American won by just 8 seconds). If you like your endings neat and tidy and happy, that tale of the 1989 Tour is available.
Watch the film The Last Rider and you’ll get that version, but also, subtly, a couple of other versions. There are, even in this Lemond hagiography, alternate perspectives, subtexts and facts not so easily dismissed. The primary sources here are Lemond and his wife Kathy, and the focus is on them, everything they went through (and it was a lot). But Pedro Delgado, third on the podium, also appears frequently, giving his impressions of Lemond, Fignon (second), and his own failure to win. Fignon is not present, except in archival footage, because he died of cancer in 2010.
There is a brilliant and sympathetic Fignon biography well worth reading. It does much to counterprogram the notion of the Frenchman as mere foil to Lemond as hero. Dude won the Tour twice, and very nearly a third time. His career was much more than a time trial in 1989.
Delgado, winner in ’88, had been a big pre-race favorite, but he actually arrived late to the start of the opening prologue time trial by 2:40, which put him firmly behind the eightball and well off the lead. To compound his mistake, he lost more time in the team time trial (4:32), so after the first day of the race he was in last place, more than 7 minutes back.
He spent the next three weeks chasing every second he could to get back into the race. He finished 3:34 behind Lemond in Paris, so less than a minute if he’d been on time to the prologue, and he hadn’t killed himself then to limit his damages, would he have been stronger in the team event? Would the whole thing have been very different without that deficit at the start, if Delgado had been right in the mix and capable of pulling the yellow jersey on himself? His Reynolds team was strong, and everyone rides harder in yellow.
There’s a strong argument to be made that if Delgado had merely shown up and performed modestly well on Day 1, then he would have won this Tour going away. Instead, he flung the door open for the drama that ensued.
Keep in mind that Lemond was on no one’s GC radar. All his results in ’88 and early ’89 had been lack luster and the prevailing view was that he was done as a team leader. That he began to claw his way into contention was a huge surprise, pulling the yellow jersey on after the TT on Stage 5.
Fignon complained during the race that Lemond wasn’t doing enough work, that he was disrespecting the maillot jaune by hiding in the wheels when the hard miles were being made. It was both a fair point and an easy one to make. Fignon’s Super U–Raleigh–Fiat team was much, much stronger than Lemond’s ADR squad, who were nobodies in the pro peloton at the time. After coming back from the shotgun blast that wrecked his 1987 and nearly his career, no one wanted to offer him a contract. ADR took the risk, but other than a very young Johann Museeuw, they didn’t have the legs to mount a yellow jersey campaign. Lemond had to hide.
Fignon was strong, but also on the comeback trail. He’d won the Tour in 1983 and ’84 but then lost a few seasons to injury. The French press had buried him in the meantime, which is why he was so notoriously pugnacious with reporters and so distrustful of how his story would be written. Prior to the start of the Tour he’d won the Giro, with Lemond nowhere in sight.
The Last Rider makes much of Lemond’s being shot and recovering. The hunting accident obviously took a huge toll on his body, but also, we learn, on his mind. Overcoming that injury is really the platform for the legend-making the film effects.
But Fignon had his own physical challenges. Famously, he developed epididymitis, which is an inflammation of the tube that connects the testicle to the vas deferens, on Stage 19, the day before the fateful time trial, the day Fignon lost the Tour by 8 seconds. One of his testes was massively swollen. It’s said he didn’t sleep the night before and struggled to sit in the saddle.
Meanwhile, Lemond showed up to Stage 20 bristling with strength and kitted out with aero bars and an aero helmet, while Fignon showed up with bullhorns and a ponytail. The pros were just coming around to aero accessories. The UCI hadn’t defined what was in and out of bounds yet. Fignon complained the Lemond’s setup was illegal, but it wasn’t. It was maybe just “unsporting” in the Frenchman’s mind.
And so, Lemond won, overhauling a seemingly unsurmountable deficit, and cementing his legend. It was one of the most exciting and interesting races in Tour history.
Of course, big changes were coming, much more than a set of ugly aero bars could signify. The 1989 Tour marks an inflection point for the pro peloton, the last hurrah before oxygen vector doping swept the roads of clean cyclists. The proliferation of specialized equipment began in earnest too, not just aero bars, but purpose-built TT bikes and more. All of that would complicate the story of pro cycling, though the lesson of 1989, it seems to me, was that we didn’t need any of those things.
The victors will write the first version of the story, but if you look there are more stories in one race than you can hold in your head at any one time. The Last Rider tells fragments of just three of them, and it only just scratched the surface.