Stage 13 in 1986 – the day Greg LeMond took the Tour de France from Bernard Hinault, or did Hinault let him?
Cycling was war for Bernard Hinault. Not metaphorically, not as a line for a poster, not even as a useful racing attitude. For Hinault it was a condition of being. A bike race was territory to be conquered, enemies crushed, weakness to expose and punish. He did not just want to win; he needed his opponents to understand why they lost.
That’s why Stage 13 of the 1986 Tour, from Pau to Superbagnères, matters beyond the results sheet. Yes, Greg LeMond won the stage. Yes, Bernard Hinault kept the yellow jersey, and the Tour had plenty of road left, but something shifted that day in the Pyrenees. The balance of power changed inside La Vie Claire, inside the Tour, and to some extent inside cycling.
Until then, even when he was vulnerable, even when he was wrong, even when his strength was beginning to ebb, Hinault still carried the authority of a man who had ruled the sport by force of will.
After Superbagnères, that authority was no longer absolute. LeMond was not merely following orders, waiting his turn, or benefiting from a patron’s blessing. He had ridden away from Bernard Hinault in the mountains of the Tour de France, beaten him, and that was new.
To understand what changed we need to look at what Hinault was. He was not simply a 5-time Tour winner, he was the last of a breed; a patron with teeth. Hinault came after Merckx, but he carried something of Merckx’s appetite for winning, while adding a belligerence of his own. Hinault’s nickname, the Badger, suited him because it suggested something low, compact, fierce and dangerous when disturbed, although even that didn’t quite explain him. Hinault’s defining trait was not stubbornness, it was retaliation.
The 1979 Tour de France is perhaps the purest example of what he brought to cycling during his glory years. Hinault was already the defending champion, but he rode as if legitimacy had to be proved every day. The race began in Fleurance, close to the foot of the Pyrenees, and went almost immediately into the mountains. Hinault won 2 of the first 3 mountain stages. He took the yellow jersey on Stage 2 and by Stage 8 he had a modest but useful lead over Joop Zoetemelk.
That lead would have been bigger but for the team time trials. Zoetemelk’s Gan-Mercier team were good at that discipline, and the 1979 Tour contained 2 long team tests in the first 8 stages, one of 87.45 kilometres and another of 90.5. Hinault’s Renault-Gitane squad lost 2 minutes 35 seconds on those 2 days. The Tour, as ever, was not only man against man; it was system against system, team against team, circumstance against temperament.
Then came Stage 9, the mini-Paris-Roubaix. Zoetemelk went with an attack made at the exact moment Hinault punctured. There was no sentimental convention that day, no waiting for the yellow jersey, no modern fuss about etiquette. Zoetemelk found himself ahead with men who knew cobbles, while Hinault was behind, isolated, furious and losing time. He had no team-mates, little help, and no patience for the injustice of it all. He rode on alone to the velodrome finish in Roubaix, cursing everyone and everything. By the time he arrived, Zoetemelk had the yellow jersey by 2 minutes 8 seconds.
Hinault was livid. “Some riders will suffer plenty for what they did today,” he said.
That sentence was pure Bernard Hinault. It turned a race incident into a debt, and he didn’t care who paid. Two days later Hinault won the individual time trial in Brussels. In the Alps he trounced Zoetemelk by 2 minutes 37 seconds in a mountain time trial and took back the yellow jersey. Zoetemelk resisted, even winning on Alpe d’Huez, but Hinault hammered him again in the final time trial. Then, as if overall victory was not enough, Hinault won the final stage on the Champs-Élysées.
That should have been the sprinter’s stage, of course, after a ceremonial parade into Paris, but Hinault won it in the yellow jersey. He won a flat stage the day before as well. It was absurd, magnificent and unnecessary, except to Bernard Hinault. The point was not simply defeating Joop Zoetemelk, it was occupying the entire race.
In 1980 Hinault ran into trouble, abandoning the Tour with knee problems, then returned to win in 1981 and 1982. His bad knees struck again in the 1983 Tour, probably aggravated by bad weather and fighting off the entire Spanish peloton to win the Vuelta in the spring of that year.
Hinault needed surgery, long rehab and was below his best in 1984. He was beaten by Laurent Fignon in the Tour de France, but back at full power in 1985 and won his fifth Tour.
Greg LeMond, his young American team-mate at La Vie Claire, finished second in ‘85. They were the strongest in the race, but the 1985 Tour created a moral contract that defined 1986. LeMond sacrificed his own chance, or at least believed he had, for Hinault. The understanding was Hinault would help him win the following year. Well, that was LeMond’s understanding, anyway. He’d become the first American winner of the Tour de France, but no plan involving Bernard Hinault was ever going to be simple.
At the 1986 Tour press conference, Hinault was enigmatic. The widely known understanding was that it was supposed to be LeMond’s year, only Hinault sounded like he hadn’t received the memo. “Whoever arrives at the mountains with the greatest reserves will win this Tour de France,” he said, adding; “We won’t be giving the Colombians an armchair ride to the Pyrenees.”
Those statements can be read 2 ways. In one they sound like tactical support for La Vie Claire and for LeMond, but they also sound like Hinault was reserving the right to make the race savage. He wasn’t going to carry anyone gently to the decisive point. If LeMond wanted to win, he’d have to win a race made in Hinault’s image… So it proved.
Hinault beat LeMond by two seconds in the prologue, then appeared weaker in the next afternoon’s team time trial, where La Vie Claire underperformed and lost time to Laurent Fignon’s Renault team. Gossip began that LeMond had told CBS Sports that Hinault was deliberately trying to make him lose the Tour. Whether nonsense, misunderstanding or press-room tittle-tattle, the story caught fire because it suited a dramatic narrative.
Hinault reasserted himself in the 61-kilometre time trial at Nantes. Only LeMond, delayed by a puncture, and Stephen Roche were close. Fignon lost 4 minutes and his overall challenge. Hinault’s pre-Pyrenean strategy was working; the Colombians were damaged by the time trials and by the extraordinary pace of the road stages. Lucho Herrera, the best of them, was 8 minutes behind the race leader, Jørgen Pedersen of Denmark.
And didn't stop attacking when he had the yellow jersey
Then Hinault went for it, on the first mountain stage he broke away with Pedro Delgado. LeMond finished third, 4 minutes 36 seconds behind him. It was devastating for the American, trapped by team etiquette, even though Hinault had gone ahead with La Vie Claire’s most dangerous challenger, Delgado.
Chase and you look disloyal, wait and you may all lose the Tour. LeMond didn’t chase and afterwards sounded beaten. “That’s life,” he said. “I guess I’m going to finish second in the Tour de France again.”
Pedro Delgado was less resigned. “That was only the first round,” he said. “Round two starts on Stage 13, when the Tourmalet is the first of four mountain passes.”
It would be one of the defining days of modern cycling.
Stage 13 ran from Pau to Superbagnères, over the Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde before the final climb to Superbagnères ski station. Hinault was in yellow, LeMond was behind but still dangerous. La Vie Claire had the 2 strongest riders in the race, but no unified command. The Colombians still had their pride and mountain ambitions, while Robert Millar and Urs Zimmermann had the strength.
LeMond (left) with Andy Hampsten on the road to Superbagneres
Hinault, because he was Hinault, took the initiative.
He attacked alone; a beautiful, brutal, reckless move. Over the Tourmalet he gained nearly 2 minutes; by the opening kilometres of the Peyresourde his advantage was nearly 3.
LeMond wasn’t just anxious now; he was genuinely alarmed. “If Hinault had held that lead he would have been 8 minutes ahead overall, and that would be the Tour over,” he said afterwards.
If Hinault was helping LeMond, he was using a flamethrower. If he was testing him, he was testing him at the risk of both losing the Tour. And if he was trying to win, Hinault came dangerously close. There are so many ways to read his attack, and the legend of the 1986 Tour depends on the space you put between them.
The first reading is Hinault overestimated himself. He believed he could break everyone, as he had done many times before, that the race would still bow to him; that when Bernard Hinault attacked, others either cracked or fell in line behind.
The second reading is the one Hinault himself prefers to tell. That he was softening the race for LeMond, forcing their rivals to chase, making the Tour harder so that the strongest La Vie Claire rider would emerge. In that version, the Badger was not betraying LeMond but setting him up for victory.
The awkward truth is that both interpretations might be true. Hinault could help and dominate at the same time. He could claim loyalty while making LeMond suffer. He could tell himself that the race needed to be made hard for the good of La Vie Claire, while also ensuring that if LeMond did win, nobody would ever be allowed to say Hinault had handed it to him.
Maybe he was saying he was still good enough to win, if he had wanted to.
Whatever you believe, Hinault raced in a way that preserved his own myth whatever the outcome. If he won, he was the greatest of all time, the first 6-time Tour winner, while defying age, injury and expectation. If LeMond won, Hinault could say; yes, but only because I made the race, only because I burned off all our rivals.
However, the road answered more clearly than any interpretation. Under pressure from Herrera, Millar and Zimmermann, Hinault’s lead began to collapse. From nearly 3 minutes, it was down to 25 seconds in 13 kilometres. The lone attack had done its damage, but it was damaging to the attacker. Hinault sat up and waited. At the foot of the climb to Superbagnères, the group that included LeMond caught him.
Then LeMond rode away.
The final ascent was 16 kilometres, and on it the Tour de France changed shape. LeMond won the stage, and Hinault lost nearly 5 minutes. The yellow jersey was still his, but the power behind it shifted. The strongest man in the race was no longer wearing yellow; the order had been cracked.
Hinault would continue to attack, to unsettle and insist that the race was not over. On Alpe d’Huez he and LeMond crossed the line together in one of the most famous images in Tour history, a tableau of unity that doesn’t quite erase the doubt behind it.
Hinault finished second overall, won the mountains title, and would leave the Tour a giant. But after Superbagnères, cycling’s centre of gravity had shifted.
LeMond’s victory mattered because it was achieved inside the pressure of Hinault’s world. He did not beat a passive champion. He beat a team-mate who attacked as if team orders were suggestions, who treated loyalty as an option, who at best believed even a promised succession should be fought for.
What is certain is that Greg LeMond did not receive his first Tour de France from Bernard Hinault. But you could say Hinault did LeMond a favour, he made the race hard enough to reveal the strongest rider in it.
It was Greg LeMond.
Photos: John Pierce Photosport International and Cycling Legends Collection.
