THE ONE THAT DIDN’T GET AWAY

Frenchman Laurent Fignon had endured a series of disappointing seasons after winning the 1983 and 1984 Tours. But he turned up for the 1989 Giro in great form. Procycling looks at a race where everything went right for him

Writer William Fotheringham

Procycling UK - May 2021

When Laurent Fignon won the 1984 Tour de France, the future of cycling seemed to be set in stone. Fignon and his Renault-Gitane team had dominated that Tour to the extent that he was portrayed on the front page of the French cycling bible Vélo with the coverline ‘The Ogre’. Bernard Hinault, winner of four yellow jerseys between 1978 and 1982, finished second, but he was in a different race. It was obvious now: Fignon would dominate cycling for the next few years. 

At the end of July 1984, after Fignon had won the Tour by almost 11 minutes from Hinault and picked up mountain stage wins at will, no one would have predicted that he would win only one more three-week Tour, and that it would take him the best part of five years to do it. But that was how it panned out: after Fignon’s achilles tendon gave out in spring 1985, the rest of his career was a struggle, which would effectively end with two great defeats in the space of a few weeks in 1989. 

Thirty-two years have passed, but the story of Fignon’s Giro should be required reading for Thibaut Pinot if, as seems likely, the volatile Groupama-FDJ leader attempts to become the first Frenchman to emulate ‘the Professor’. The Giro, wrote Fignon, “is one massive commedia dell’arte, where scandals erupt from a couple of words, a vague allusion, a simple gesture, or nothing at all”. The Giro is far removed from what it was during much of the 20th century, but it remains the most theatrical of the grand tours, and Pinot will do well to steer clear of the hype. 

There are plenty of echoes of Pinot’s tortured progress through his chosen sport in the rollercoaster of emotion that Fignon endured over the years. ‘The Professor’ had struggled in major Tours since his comeback in 1986; he didn’t merit the status of favourite at the start of the 1989 Giro d’Italia. If the veteran organiser Vincenzo Torriani had been prepared to pay the Frenchman to start, that was all to do with the profile he had earned in Italy thanks to his back-to-back wins in Milan-San Remo in 1988 and 1989. 

The 1988 corsa rosa had been Torriani’s last in total control, ending a reign that went back to the 1946 Giro, run through the wreckage of World War Two. But although he now shared the day-to-day running of the race with Carmine Castellano, Torriani had put together an utterly brutal route to follow the 1988 race, which had achieved legendary status when he forced it over the Gavia Pass in a snowstorm. 

The Gavia was back in 1989, along with crazily long stages, split days in the mountains, and not a single rest day. Fignon had refused to go near the race since the notorious 1984 edition, when Torriani had engineered a win for Francesco Moser at the Frenchman’s expense. In 1989, however, “he had pushed hard to get us in,” recalled Fignon. “He’d got his chequebook out… but he was the same old bandit, chummy face and a fag constantly on his lips.” 

Beforehand, three riders stood out as favourites: the 1988 winner Andy Hampsten, the Colombian climber Lucho Herrera, who had won the Vuelta in 1987, and the Netherlands’ Erik Breukink, runner-up to Hampsten 12 months earlier. There were outsiders, such as Stephen Roche, recovered from the knee injury that cost him the 1988 season but without a grand tour finish to his name since his Tour win in 1987. And there was Greg LeMond, still hunting the form that had seen him win the Tour in 1986. Everybody had a point to prove, at the very least.

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The first summit finish on Mount Etna, on day two, saw off LeMond: he lost eight minutes. Hampsten dropped a minute on the select group of favourites, but the incident that would probably lose the American his second Giro came in the following day’s team time trial along the coast road to Messina. A black cat was his nemesis. It crossed the road in front of his 7-Eleven team as they wound up for the finish at 80 kilometres per hour, with – inevitably – Sean Yates on the front. 

“He was drilling it, so we were all staring at the wheel in front and most of us didn’t see the cat,” recalled Hampsten. “Sean moved, the next guy swerved, five or six of us fell and there were bodies and bikes everywhere. We were just trying to find a guy who could get up, we’re circling in the road and I’m worried about my team-mates but thinking about the race too. Dag-Otto Lauritzen got up, he was the least hurt, we got going again and he had a flat. It was a disaster. After that we had respect for any Italian cat that crossed the road.” Hampsten crossed to the Italian mainland having lost three minutes in the first three days. 

Breukink took the lead at the next summit finish at Gran Sasso d’Italia, where Hampsten and Fignon clung on to the group of race favourites. The Dutchman relinquished the pink jersey briefly to Acácio da Silva, but regained it a day later at the first long time trial, along the Adriatic coast from Pesaro to Riccione. Behind Breukink, the overall contenders were emerging: Roche, Fignon – who believed he had ridden his best time trial since 1984 for eighth on the day - and the previous year’s fifth overall finisher Flavio Giupponi lay between second and sixth, spanned by just 37 seconds. 

The Dolomites proved critical, beginning with the finish at Tre Cime di Lavaredo, where Merckx had stamped his authority on the 1968 race in a snowstorm. The weather was severe again with intermittent showers giving way to heavy rain and snow at the finish. A long range attack gave Herrera the stage, with Fignon – who said he felt “five years younger” - tempted to go with him, until he was told to hang fire by his directeur sportif, Cyrille Guimard.

A similar scenario with the Colombian at the 1984 Tour at L’Alpe d’Huez had seen an identical response from Guimard. With his career over, Fignon would blame his manager (“less confident than ever”, he said) for depriving him of two legendary wins. “Fignon was on great form,” recalled Hampsten. “I remember LeMond telling me he thought Fignon was the best racer he ever saw. He was riding cleverly, looking for gaps in the stage finishes, taking time bonuses here and there.”

The hierarchy was whittled down again, with Fignon finishing second, just ahead of Breukink and Hampsten, and Roche and Giupponi losing time. LeMond, meanwhile, suffered what he later said was the worst climbing day of his career, losing 17 minutes. The sheer torture of the stage was captured in the diary of Roche’s domestique Paul Kimmage, on the cusp of his transition from bike racer to journalist. 

“The rain started halfway through the stage, turned to sleet, then snow, and we were all frozen. I was ushered into the kitchen of a hotel opposite the finish line and given a basin of hot water and some hot tea. I had almost finished washing myself down when LeMond walked in. I had passed him at the bottom of the climb and he was riding really badly. He was shivering, and didn’t bother to remove his shoes or socks before placing both feet in the basin of water.” 

The next day, said Fignon, was like “Dante’s Inferno”. It was short – for that Giro – at only 130km, but it included five mountain passes. “As we lined up, the first drops of rain began falling,” wrote Kimmage for the Sunday Tribune. On the Marmolada, the third climb of the day, the rain turned to snow. Kimmage wrote of the descent from the 2,000m summit that snow clogged the cogs in his freewheel, that he was turned into a shivering wreck on the bike, reduced to urinating on his fingers to warm them up. Leaving his gloves at the team hotel was a costly mistake. 

At the other end of the race, Fignon was riding into the pink jersey. Usually in such conditions, he felt there was little point in even starting, but this day was different, as his personal soigneur Alain Gallopin had rubbed him down with the hottest Kramer balm, all over. “Legs, lower back, stomach. Oh my God. A hour before the start I was burning so badly that I had to get out of the car… it was foul but I didn’t feel the cold all day,” he said. Fignon was desperate to attack, Guimard desperate for him to ride conservatively; in the event, Breukink collapsed and lost six minutes, putting the Frenchman in the race lead. 

But once again, Fignon had had to endure the Italians ganging up on him, according to Roche. “The only real impact I had on the race was to give Fignon a bit of a dig out when he was halted by a puncture,” recalled the Irishman in his autobiography Born to Ride. “Giupponi and one of the other Italians took off like crazy, which wasn’t the done thing. I drifted off the back of the group and waited for Fignon, then I drove hard on the descent. We caught Giupponi’s group on the early slopes of the climb, where I blew apart.” 

Then, Fignon got lucky. With the foul weather continuing, Torriani had no option but to cancel the next major mountain stage which should have crossed the Tonale and the Gavia en route to San Caterina Valfurva. There was, the Frenchman said, uproar in the Italian press, who accused the organiser of favouring a French win. Hampsten, for his part, believes it was payback from the Italians, who wanted Fignon to win to make up for the episode five years earlier.

“Ridiculous,” was Fignon’s verdict 20 years later. “If Torriani had known my state of health, he would not have hesitated a second before sending the peloton out to endure the snow and altitude.” 

“I had been counting on that stage,” said Hampsten. “I had been waiting for it, and I think I would have moved ahead of him. The roads weren’t that snowy, and when we drove bits of the stage there were furious fans swearing at us. It was an era when races just weren’t cancelled if the roads were passable.” 

Unknown to most, Fignon was now suffering the consequences of a skiiing accident, which had left him with a massive lump on his shoulder that stiffened up in the cold and wet. The effects were seen on the stage 18 time trial, two days after the cancelled Gavia stage: uphill, a mere 10.7km, but in pouring rain. The Frenchman managed only 17th, enabling Giupponi to pull back 34 seconds and closing to 1:15 behind. There were no more Alpine passes, but the stages across the Apennines were hilly enough for Giupponi and the sponsoring newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport to hope. 

Yet again, however, Fignon’s luck was to turn: the weather changed, which he said was “like being dealt an ace”. The antepenultimate stage into La Spezia was to prove that. Fignon had to deal with the opposition on his own as per usual – his Super U team was worthy enough but far from strong – and he just clung onto the lead group over the final climb before winning the finish sprint. Critically, there were bonus seconds on offer, and he stretched his lead a little. 

This being Fignon, however, and this being the Giro, there was one final twist, when he crashed on a descent and enabled Hampsten and Giupponi to drift ahead. “He took a corner a bit fast,” said Hampsten. “He was always active, always attacking, and we were close to the finish, with the race ‘on’. I remember talking to Giupponi, should we go, should we wait, and the consequence was, ‘F*ck it, a race is a race, let’s go for it.’” 

It was a tense chase before they were reeled in, but their move was counter-productive in the end: Fignon was riled and provoked into scoring more time bonus seconds at an intermediate sprint and at the finish. That left him a 91-second cushion to defend in the final time trial. He had been in an identical situation in 1984, but as he wryly noted, “Giupponi was no Moser”. 

One other rider had been feeling better at the back end of that Giro, however. LeMond had been living a nightmare since his shooting accident early in 1987. That near-death experience had been followed by an operation for tendinitis the following July, after which came a falling out with his PDM team. His transfer to the ADR outfit wasn’t ideal, and his form had remained uncertain: decent in the spring, indifferent to awful in the first two weeks of the Giro. 

He had, he said, plumbed the depths mentally. “When I was young, I’d say to myself, ‘So I had a bad day, tomorrow I’ll have a good day.’ Now, it’s, ‘I had a bad day, am I ever going to come back?’” 

The turning point came when his burly Mexican masseur Otto Jacomé noticed that LeMond’s face was grey. LeMond had been taking iron tablets, but moved to injections; there were three early in the Giro, and – although they would now be illegal in cycling due to the no needles rule – they had a drastic effect, to the extent that the day before the final time trial he felt he had been climbing better than he had done all season. The future of cycling had already been on display in that Giro. On June 1, a young Tuscan sprinter named Mario Cipollini had won stage 12 across the flatlands of northern Italy between Mantova and Mira. 

Other riders were starting to make themselves noticed for the first time, as well. Stage 21 from La Spezia to Prato had gone to a shy young man born in Switzerland riding for the Chateau d’Ax team. Gianni Bugno (for it was he) would dominate the next year’s Giro. Hidden in 46th place, an hour behind, was Claudio Chiappucci, an anonymous gregario working for Urs Zimmerman, but next year a contender for the Tour win. 

On stage 9 from L’Aquila to Gubbio, an unknown Danish rider had taken the win. Fignon had noticed him the previous autumn, clocked that he was “reliable and strong” and told Guimard to hire him as a loyal domestique. No one, but no one, would have predicted that seven years later, Bjarne Riis would dominate the Tour de France having learned to push his blood to the limit using EPO, as he later confessed. 

In that final time trial into Florence, LeMond came from nowhere to finish second to Lech Piasecki, just over a minute behind the time triallist on form of the moment, and, as yet, he didn’t have the benefit of the tri-bar extensions he would use to great effect in a few weeks. Foreshadowing the time trial collapse that would cost him a third Tour win, Fignon finished only fifth. “The evening after I won, Guimard came to have a word,” wrote the Frenchman. “He looked me in the eye. ‘LeMond will be up there at the Tour.’” As predictions go, that was right up there with Noah looking at the sky and saying there might be a bit of a light shower. 

LeMond didn’t quite have the insight that his old mentor showed. “Maybe as strong as in 1984,” he concluded when asked about Fignon’s form. But behind his joy at taking a third grand tour, Fignon knew full well that he was a shadow of his old self, far from dominant in the time trials, and intermittently good in the mountains. The rest was history but it was LeMond who would make it at the Frenchman’s expense.