The Last Rider: The All-American Comeback Tale of 'Clean' Cyclist Greg LeMond
By Liz Braun
Rating: B+
You don’t need any special interest in cycling to be completely engaged by The Last Rider, a film about the personalities and rivalries behind the cliffhanger event that was the 1989 Tour de France.
The documentary from filmmaker Alex Holmes is centered on American cyclist Greg LeMond and functions almost as a mini-biopic, covering LeMond’s lifelong love affair with cycling and the heyday of his racing career.
Now 62, LeMond is still the only American (the disqualified Lance Armstrong notwithstanding) who has ever won the Tour de France, the gruelling, three-week-long endurance test that takes cyclists 3,400 kilometres — through the mountains — from Spain to France.
The film covers that journey, starting with LeMond’s quick rise to competitive cycling excellence as a teenager growing up in Lake Tahoe. He started cycling with his father as a way to improve his skiing, and his talent was evident very quickly.
By age 20, LeMond was cycling competitively in Europe. In some ways his is a uniquely American story, involving young love — his wife Kathy LeMond is a big part of this film — and tremendous personal loyalty, as well as betrayal, depression, and even a shooting incident.
The Last Rider presents LeMond as a stand-up guy who raced as part of a team, only to be betrayed along the way by cyclists with bigger egos. His relationships with various other famous racers, particularly Bernard Hinault and Lauren Fignon, are laid out here. LeMond’s first Tour win, in 1986, was a bittersweet victory that pitted him against him teammates and sent him into a depression.
That dark period was made far worse by a hunting accident with his brother-in-law that nearly killed LeMond and tore his family apart.
It seems impossible there could be any comeback from the events detailed in the first half of the film, but LeMond’s return (almost literally from the dead) is the triumphant second half of The Last Rider. His entry in the 1989 Tour de France was mostly an exercise to see if he still had what it takes, and watching him battle it out with French rival Laurent Fignon is an edge-of-the-seat experience — even if you already know how the story ends.
The Last Rider features interviews with LeMond, his wife Kathy, French trainer Cyrille Guimard and fellow cyclist Perico Delgado, among others. The movie makes good use of archival news footage of various cycling events and past athlete interviews; director Holmes lets most of the characters speak for themselves via interviews given at the time, and that includes footage of a bad-tempered Lauren Fignon (to whom the film is dedicated) spitting into a camera.
This is a tremendous underdog story, and it works because Holmes shows a viewer exactly who LeMond is and why he was so popular — then as now.
It’s also an interesting trip down memory lane to watch these cyclists compete before the days of doping and scandal (not that it was unknown back then, but still). Another reason that ‘89 Tour stands out in memory, as LeMond says near the end of the film, is because after that it was, “the era of EPO (erythropoietin) and Armstrong.”
This seems like as good a place as any to note that Greg LeMond, who has been an outspoken anti-doper his entire career, was onto Lance Armstrong years before Armstrong was stripped of his Tour titles and banned for life in 2012.
The Last Rider. Directed by Alex Holmes. Starring Greg Lemond, Kathy LeMond , Cyrille Guimard and Perico Delgado. Opens July 2 at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema.