In the months leading up to the Tour de France of 1989, after years of struggle with injury, Laurent Fignon had installed himself once more as the world’s best cyclist; the biggest beast in cycling’s jungle.

His overall victory at the Giro d’Italia that year had marked him out as the man to beat come the main event, the Tour de France in July, and during those three weeks a cat and mouse battle would take place; between Fignon, and the American Greg LeMond. It would result in the closest finish in Tour history.

Although yet to reach his 30th birthday, Fignon had already admitted privately that 1989 was his swansong, and the last year he would be physically able to win the Tour de France. As he put it in typical poetic fashion, “the final flowering of my physical ability”.

LeMond, on the other hand, appeared to be mired in physical frailty. The Tour de France winner of 1986 had suffered injuries in a hunting accident in 1987 and had shown little in the way of Grand Tour-winning form since. While Fignon had been busy winning the Giro d’Italia, LeMond had been suffering through the Italian mountains in that same race.

From the off in 1989, LeMond and Fignon completed the 7.8km prologue course in identical times to finish in joint second place. While this was nothing more than an opening skirmish it seemed to confirm Fignon as the favourite, and suggested that LeMond might just have some form after all.

The scene was set.

As the race panned out LeMond had the advantage in the individual time-trials, while Fignon snatched it back in the mountains, but neither ever gained a decisive lead; at one point the American managed to eke out a lead of 53 seconds, but as the race reached Paris and a final stage 24.5 km time-trial, Fignon seemed secure with a 50 second cushion at the head of the race.

Most observers felt that 50 seconds would be more than enough for the win, and certain prominent French newspapers even had their front pages (showing a victorious Frenchman, of course) all but ready for publication.

But during that fateful final time-trial there were two other factors, beyond the simple ability to spin the pedals faster and more powerfully than the other man, which came into play.

For a couple of stages prior to that final lap around Paris, Fignon had been suffering from a severe saddle sore. Despite the pain, he never believed it would cause him to lose anything like 50 seconds to LeMond, though he apparently barely slept the night before the final showdown and couldn’t even spin the pedals during his pre-race warm up.

Perhaps of greater consequence was LeMond’s use of ‘tri-bars’ of the style that are standard nowadays, allowing a time-trialling cyclist to achieve a flat, aerodynamic position on the bike. In 1989 they were a recent innovation, and Fignon claims that he didn’t want to risk using them himself, as they had not been approved for use in competition.

LeMond and his team were clearly happy to take the risk, leaving his rival to suggest that the American was operating outside then rules, saying many years later: “Winning by ourselves without artificial aids was something we valued."

Artificial aids or not, the point is that prior to that final stage, Fignon felt he had plenty of time to play with; for LeMond to win he would have to gain 2 seconds per kilometre on the road.

As the final man out of the start gate, and with LeMond on the road ahead and laying down markers, time checks were coming through to Fignon, and he soon realised that gaining 2 seconds per kilometre is exactly what LeMond was doing. 

When the time-checks stopped coming through from his team boss, Fignon surely knew it was a bad sign: “All I did was go flat out…I didn’t know what my pulse rate was, but my lungs, on the other hand, were beyond my control and were doing their own thing as best they could. I was asphyxiating.”

By the 11.5km mark LeMond had gained 21 seconds on Fignon, and he powered on to the finish to leave himself exhausted and gasping, but with a challenging time on the board. As Fignon attempted to reel him in and limit his losses, it was clear to those watching that this was not the imperious, flowing Laurent Fignon of previous days, but a man in the midst of a great struggle.

As he collapsed at the finish, in amongst a scrum of people, someone broke the news: ‘you’ve lost Laurent’. LeMond had beaten Fignon by 58 seconds to give him, after more than 3,000 km’s of racing, a dramatic overall win by 8 seconds.

Fignon was in shock. He went through the motions – the press duties and podium presentations – and the following morning the ‘Fignon tragedy’ was all over the papers.

“The morning after,” Fignon explained, “was when the hardest bit began. I kept counting in my head: eight seconds, eight seconds….what a derisory amount of time it was. You can’t do anything in eight seconds!”

Despite apparently dwelling on the issue for many years he eventually came to make sense of those eight seconds, writing in his 2009 autobiography about the need to ‘burst the abscess’, and referring to his career in terms of ‘before and after’; his defeat being the tipping point, of course.

He even suggests that 23rd July 1989 might be the day when cycling itself changed; as he puts it, “the craftsmen were beaten by mass-production”.

Later in 1989 Greg LeMond went on to become UCI World Road Race champion, and followed that up by winning the Tour de France again in 1990, for the third time in his career, confirming a fact that sometimes gets lost in the drama surrounding Fignon’s dramatic defeat: the American was a truly formidable bike racer – an all time great.

Upon Laurent Fignon’s death from cancer in 2010, at the tragically young age of 50, LeMond said of his great rival: “We were team-mates, competitors, but also friends. He was a great person…when he lost that the Tour de France in 1989 it was one of the few victories where I felt we both won.”

For many years, Fignon had found himself fielding questions about that dramatic final day in the 1989 Tour. As the famous and slightly dog-eared anecdote has it:

“Ah, I remember you: you’re the guy who lost the Tour de France by eight seconds!"

“No, monsieur, I’m the guy who won the Tour twice.”

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About the author
PT Linsley
Cyclist and writer