1989 Tour de France
The 1989 Tour de France was the 76th edition of cycling’s Grand Tour. The race consisted of 21 stages and a prologue, over 3,285 km. Greg LeMond of the AD Renting–W-Cup–Bottecchia team won the race. Laurent Fignon of the PDM–Concorde team finished in second place. Defending champion Pedro Delgado finished third.
About 1989 Tour de France in brief
The 1989 Tour de France was the 76th edition of cycling’s Grand Tour. The race consisted of 21 stages and a prologue, over 3,285 km. Greg LeMond of the AD Renting–W-Cup–Bottecchia team won the race. Laurent Fignon of the PDM–Concorde team finished in second place. Defending champion Pedro Delgado finished third. The 1989 Tour had a starting field of twenty-two teams of nine cyclists. Of the cyclists starting the race, 39 were riding the Tour for the first time. The youngest rider was Jean-Claude Colude, who turned 22 years old on the day of the prologue. The oldest rider was Helmut Wechselberger, at 36 years and 139 days, at the time of the race’s start. The Tour was run 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. Not invited was the Teka team which failed to accumulate enough points in the World Rankings after Reimund Dietzen had left the race following a career-ending crash in the 1989 España Vuelta a Española. The highest-ranked teams in the Fédération Internationale de Cyclisme Professionnel would receive an automatic invitation to the Tour. For 1989, the sport’s governing body demanded that the Tour be run over a longer period of time than the previous 21 days, and the Tour organisers relented in exchange for being allowed to run the race over 23.
days. The first stage of the Tour was held on 1 July 1989 in Luxembourg before taking an anti-clockwise route through France to finish in Paris on 23 July. It was the first Tour to be held over 21 stages, with the 21st stage taking place on 4 July in Paris. The final stage was the 24. 5 km individual time trial into Paris, which was won by LeMond. 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, and is considered one of the best Grand Tours of all time. It is the second overall victory for the American, who had spent the previous two seasons recovering from a near-fatal hunting accident. The defending champion Delgado was considered a strong favourite to win the race but lost almost three minutes on his principal rivals when he missed his start time in the Prologue individual time time trial. Delgado launched several attacks in the mountain stages to eventually finish third, while LeMOND rode defensively to preserve his chances. The PDM-ConCorde team 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.
You want to know more about 1989 Tour de France?
This page is based on the article 1989 Tour de France published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
