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On a small patch of unoccupied blacktop in a crowded plaza near the grand palace of Versailles, two riders pedaled bicycles in a warm-up exercise around a tiny oval, riding counterclockwise at opposite poles, like horses on a carousel. Their eyes never met. The two figures were almost mirror images—blond-haired, muscular and taut. After twenty days and three thousand kilometers of racing, Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon were fifty seconds apart in the standings of the 1989 Tour de France. They had traded savage attacks over the three previous weeks, neither man ever leading the other by more than mere seconds. The lead had changed hands three times. Greg had worn the maillot jaune, the race leader’s yellow jersey, for seven days; Laurent had worn it for nine. Now, the jersey hung on Laurent’s back. Greg sat in second place. By day’s end, the Tour would be decided. And no matter who won, this would likely be the closest finish in the seventy-six-year history of le Tour.
On this July afternoon, the circling cyclists readied for a final twenty-five-kilometer dash downhill from the royal château to the finish line on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. This was the time trial, cycling’s Race of Truth, in French the contre la montre—literally, “against the watch.” Savvy observers had surveyed the course and reckoned a middling rider could complete it in about twenty-nine minutes. A great one might win it in twenty-eight. Greg needed to reclaim those fifty seconds from his French rival on this final day of racing, to pull back two seconds for every kilometer raced, in order to win the Tour.
Both Greg and Laurent were men of twenty-eight—young adults in the broad scheme of life, yet aging journeymen in the brief and brutal career of cycling. Each had conquered le Tour before, Laurent in 1983 and 1984, Greg in 1986, each, in turn, enjoying a brief reign atop the precarious pecking order of professional cycling. Then each cyclist had abruptly lost his “form,” a term invoked by cycling writers to describe a rider at his peak. Both had dwelt for years in cycling’s wilderness, missing races, abandoning them, or finishing at the back of the pack. Now, at the signature event of the 1989 cycling season, each man had miraculously recovered his form. Greg and Laurent were back on top—both of them, at exactly the same time, a most inconvenient coincidence. Neither knew how long the second wind might last. If there was to be another victory at the Tour for either of them, the time was now.
As the clock wound down to Greg’s 4:12 p.m. start, television commentators interviewed cycling experts and one another, all asking the same question: Could LeMond catch Fignon?
“It will be close,” predicted Paul Sherwen, a former professional cyclist turned broadcaster, speaking on the live ITV transmission in Britain. “But I think, logically, it’s got to be Fignon.”
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