THE ONE THAT DIDN’T GET AWAY
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
