The 1989 Tour de France was the 76th edition of the Tour de France, one of cycling's Grand Tours. The race consisted of 21 stages and a prologue, over . It started on 1 July 1989 in Luxembourg before taking an anti-clockwise route through France to finish in Paris on 23 July. The race was won by Greg LeMond of the team. It was the second overall victory for the American, who had spent the previous two seasons recovering from a near-fatal hunting accident. In second place was previous two-time Tour winner Laurent Fignon (), ahead of Pedro Delgado (), the defending champion.
Delgado started the race as the favourite, but lost almost three minutes on his principal rivals when he missed his start time in the prologue individual time trial. The race turned out to be a two-man battle between LeMond and Fignon, with the pair exchanging the race leader's yellow jersey several times. Fignon managed to match LeMond in the prologue, but in the other three individual time trials he lost time to LeMond, who took advantage of aerodynamic elbow-rest handlebars formerly used in triathlon events. Delgado launched several attacks in the mountain stages to eventually finish third, while LeMond rode defensively to preserve his chances. Fignon rode well in the mountains, including a strong performance at Alpe d'Huez which gave him the race lead on stage 17.
In the closest Tour in history, LeMond was trailing Fignon by fifty seconds at the start of the final stage, an individual time trial into Paris. LeMond was not expected to be able to make up this deficit, but he completed the stage at an average speed of , the fastest individual time trial ever ridden in the Tour de France up to that point, and won the stage. Fignon's time was fifty-eight seconds slower than LeMond's, costing him the victory and giving LeMond his second Tour title by a margin of only eight seconds. From stage 5 onward, LeMond and Fignon were the only two men to lead the race. The two riders were never separated by more than fifty-three seconds throughout the event. Owing to its competitive nature, the 1989 Tour is often ranked among the best in the race's history.
The team was the winner of the team classification and had four cyclists in the top ten of the general classification. They also won four of the five secondary individual classifications: Sean Kelly won both the points and intermediate sprints classifications, Gert-Jan Theunisse won the mountains classification and Steven Rooks won the combination classification. The young rider classification was won by Fabrice Philipot from the Toshiba team.
Teams
The 1989 Tour had a starting field of twenty-two teams of nine cyclists. Prior to 1989, the Société du Tour de France, organisers of the Tour, chose freely which teams they invited to the event. For 1989, the sport's governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Cyclisme Professionnel (FICP), demanded that the highest-ranked teams in the FICP Road World Rankings would receive an automatic invitation. The Tour organisers relented in exchange for being allowed to run the race over 23 days instead of the original 21-day period given by the FICP.
Eighteen teams received their invitations through the FICP rankings, while the organisers allocated four teams with wild cards. The Ariostea team would have been eligible to start through their ranking, but decided against competing. This allowed Greg LeMond's team to enter the race. The wild cards were given out to the teams of , , , and . Not invited was the Teka team, which failed to accumulate enough points in the World Rankings after Reimund Dietzen had to leave the 1989 Vuelta a España following a career-ending crash. Of the 198 cyclists starting the race, 39 were riding the Tour de France for the first time. The youngest rider was Juan Carlos Jusdado (), who was 22 years and 205 days old on the day of the prologue; the oldest, at 36 years and 139 days, was Helmut Wechselberger ().
The teams entering the race were:
Qualified teams
Invited teams
Pre-race favourites
Before the 1989 Tour began, Pedro Delgado (), the defending champion, was considered a strong favourite to win the race. He had taken the title the previous year in convincing fashion, with a lead of over seven minutes. Prior to the Tour, Delgado had also won the 1989 Vuelta a España, and was therefore considered to be in good form. However, controversy around a failed doping test during the 1988 Tour put a cloud of suspicion over the reigning champion.
Next to Delgado, Laurent Fignon () was also given a good chance for overall victory. The Frenchman had won the Tour in 1983 and 1984, but his form in subsequent years had been inconsistent. According to German news magazine Der Spiegel, the cycling world had "written [Fignon] off" during four years with few victories after 1984. In 1989 however, a victory at Milan–San Remo and more importantly, the three-week Grand Tour in Italy, the Giro d'Italia, had propelled Fignon back into the spotlight. A strong Super U team surrounding him was also considered to be in his favour.
Stephen Roche () had won the Tour in 1987 ahead of Delgado, but missed the race in 1988 with a knee injury. A strong spring season with victory at the Tour of the Basque Country, second place at Paris–Nice and a top-ten placing at the Giro d'Italia made it seem that Roche was finding his form again.
Several other riders were named as favourites for a high place in the general classification. Charly Mottet (), fourth overall in 1987, had won the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré shortly before the Tour started and was ranked number one in the FICP Road World Rankings, a position that had been held by Sean Kelly () for five straight years. Kelly had never been a strong contender for the general classification, despite an overall victory at the 1988 Vuelta a España. Next to targeting a high place in the overall rankings, Kelly hoped to secure a record-breaking fourth win in the points classification. Kelly's PDM squad also had two talented Dutch riders in their ranks with hopes of a high finish: Steven Rooks, who had been second the year before, and Gert-Jan Theunisse. Since PDM had elected not to start either the Giro d'Italia or the Vuelta a España earlier in the season, the team hoped that their riders, without an additional three-week race in their legs, would be fresher than their rivals. Other favourites included Erik Breukink (Panasonic–Isostar), Andrew Hampsten (), Steve Bauer (), Fabio Parra () and Robert Millar ().
According to Sports Illustrated, Greg LeMond's "name was never mentioned among the pre-race favourites". LeMond had finished every Tour he had entered up to this point on the podium, including the first-ever victory for an American rider in 1986. His career was interrupted when he was accidentally shot by his brother-in-law in a hunting accident on Easter of 1987. About 60 pellets hit his body; his life was saved by emergency surgery, but LeMond struggled to return to professional cycling, leaving the successful PDM team at the end of 1988 and joining the relatively small ADR team. His team was not considered strong enough to help him during stage races, and ADR's financial troubles meant that LeMond had not been paid by his team in 1989 before the Tour started. Even the fee for late entry into the Tour was secured only when LeMond arranged additional sponsorship. With poor performances at both the inaugural Tour de Trump and the Giro d'Italia, LeMond's chances at the Tour de France looked slim. However, he had placed second in the final-stage individual time trial at the Giro, taking more than a minute out of eventual winner Fignon. This led to Super U's team manager Cyrille Guimard commenting to Fignon: "LeMond will be dangerous at the Tour."
Route and stages The route of the 1989 Tour was unveiled in October 1988. With a distance of , it was the shortest edition of the Tour in more than eighty years. The race started on 1 July with a prologue individual time trial, followed by 21 stages. On the second day of the race, two stages were held: a plain road stage followed by a team time trial. There was a transfer from Wasquehal to Dinard on a rest day between stages 4 and 5, and a second transfer between L'Isle-d'Abeau and Versailles after the finish of the penultimate stage. The second rest day was after the mountain time trial stage 15. The race lasted 23 days, including the two rest days, and ended on 23 July.
The race started outside France, in Luxembourg, and passed through the Wallonia region of Belgium, before taking an anti-clockwise route through France, starting in the northwest in Brittany before visiting the Pyrenees and then the Alps. The race consisted of seven mountain stages, two in the Pyrenees and five in the Alps. The highest point of elevation in the race was the Col du Galibier at . In total there were five time trial events including the prologue. Pedro Delgado pointed to stage 17 up the Alpe d'Huez, one of the most prominent mountain-top finishes of the Tour, as the stage most likely to decide the outcome of the race. Unusually, the last of the time trials was held on the last stage of the race, finishing on the Champs-Élysées. This had been the idea of former race director Jean-François Naquet-Radiguet, who had taken over the position from Jacques Goddet and Félix Lévitan in May 1987. Naquet-Radiguet was unpopular in France and was replaced by Jean-Marie Leblanc before the 1989 route was announced, but the final-day time trial remained. It was the first time that the Tour ended with a time trial since 1968, when Jan Janssen overcame a 16-second deficit to Herman Van Springel to win the Tour by 38 seconds, the smallest margin up to 1989.
+ Stage characteristics and winners Stage Date Course Distance Type Winner P 1 July Luxembourg City (Luxembourg) Individual time trial 1 2 July Luxembourg City (Luxembourg) Plain stage 2 Luxembourg City (Luxembourg) Team time trial 3 3 July Luxembourg City (Luxembourg) to Spa (Belgium) Plain stage 4 4 July Liège (Belgium) to Wasquehal Plain stage 5 July Dinard Rest day 5 6 July Dinard to Rennes Individual time trial 6 7 July Rennes to Futuroscope Plain stage 7 8 July Poitiers to Bordeaux Plain stage 8 9 July Labastide-d'Armagnac to Pau Plain stage 9 10 July Pau to Cauterets Stage with mountain(s) 10 11 July Cauterets to Superbagnères Stage with mountain(s) 11 12 July Luchon to Blagnac Stage with mountain(s) 12 13 July Toulouse to Montpellier Plain stage 13 14 July Montpellier to Marseille Plain stage 14 15 July Marseille to Gap Stage with mountain(s) 15 16 July Gap to Orcières-Merlette Mountain time trial 17 July Orcières-Merlette Rest day 16 18 July Gap to Briançon Stage with mountain(s) 17 19 July Briançon to Alpe d'Huez Stage with mountain(s) 18 20 July Le Bourg-d'Oisans to Villard-de-Lans Stage with mountain(s) 19 21 July Villard-de-Lans to Aix-les-Bains Stage with mountain(s) 20 22 July Aix-les-Bains to L'Isle-d'Abeau Plain stage 21 23 July Versailles to Paris (Champs-Élysées) Individual time trial Total
Race overview
Early stages
The prologue time trial in Luxembourg City was won by Erik Breukink, with the second to fourth places taken by Laurent Fignon, Sean Kelly, and Greg LeMond, all six seconds slower. The dominant story of the day was Pedro Delgado. Having warmed up away from the crowd a few hundred yards from the start ramp, he missed his start time with his team unable to find him. He eventually left 2:40 minutes after his designated start, with what time he missed being added on. He eventually finished last on the stage, 2:54 minutes down on Breukink. Though he had conceded only a third of his winning margin from the previous year's Tour, and was therefore still not to be counted out, riders such as Fignon felt that "victory in the Tour was already a distant memory for him" at this stage.