Slaying the Badger: Greg LeMond, Bernard Hinault, and the Greatest Tour De France by Richard Moore

Author:Richard Moore
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Cycling
ISBN: 9781934030875
Publisher: VeloPress
Published: 2011-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

I was gonna quit the 1985 Tour after Luz Ardiden. I was gonna quit that night,” LeMond says now, his resentment clearly still simmering 25 years later. “Köchli said he didn’t mislead me, but someone in the team definitely said Hinault was just behind. Well, he was way behind.

“It was only at the top I realized, holy shit, I could’ve won the Tour! I don’t know how Stephen Roche was feeling that day, but there’s a moment in a race when you can attack … and then the moment’s gone. We came to a crawl on the Tourmalet after I was told not to ride. I couldn’t attack because all the momentum had gone. It was crazy.

“If you watch the stage the next day, on the Col d’Aubisque, Hinault was dropped four or five times,” LeMond continues. “I basically pushed him up the climb to keep his lead. That’s why it’s not just that stage to Luz Ardiden that made the difference; it was the next day. And it was the stuff I didn’t do in the Alps.

“I mean, I was a very dedicated teammate that year. And so it wasn’t a case of, Hinault had the crash, and he would have been better had he not fallen. The fact is, he had his peak at the first time trial, and then he was slowly going downhill. Everyone can pinpoint Luz Ardiden and say, ‘Well, LeMond could’ve, should’ve …’ but there were other things.” With a resigned shrug, LeMond adds, “I felt I sacrificed a lot.”

Unsurprisingly, Hinault’s take on these events differs from LeMond’s. Of LeMond’s “attack” with Roche, he says, “We said, ‘OK, the only condition is that you drop Roche.’ He couldn’t, so we asked him to come back. When you have the yellow jersey, you defend it by putting Greg at the front. But there’s no point in him being up there with other dangerous riders unless I’m in trouble behind. It’s a race strategy.” Hinault insists he was not in serious trouble; he was always going to come back on the descent, he says.

Asked if LeMond was unhappy afterward, Hinault breezily replies, “No, no.” But that wasn’t what LeMond told the media after the stage, I point out. “I know he said that,” Hinault says with a laugh. “But in general, you don’t attack someone [in your own team] who has the yellow jersey. You settle for following the others. If the yellow jersey is in difficulty and is 3 or 4 minutes behind, that’s when you say, ‘Go, attack,’ but in that instance he didn’t even have any reason to move because he was second overall. All he needed to do was let Stephen Roche do the work for him.”

Hinault insists that the atmosphere in the La Vie Claire team throughout that 1985 Tour was good. “It wasn’t tense,” he contends. And there was, he adds, no division between the French contingent and the others; no “Hinault camp” or “LeMond camp.”

“No. The thing is, if

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