L'Alpe d'Huez, France, August 23, 1992

Jeannie Longo leads yellow jersey Leontien van Moorsel up the climb to L’Alpe d’Huez on the ninth and final stage of the 1992 Tour Cycliste Féminin.

The Dutch rider, leading the race by a slim nine seconds, had been told by her coach to not budge from Longo’s wheel on the climb and in spite of the French rider’s visible frustration, (Longo was pictured in the French press making rude gestures in her rival’s direction) there she stayed to the top of the climb, where Van Moorsel won the two-up sprint and confirmed her general classification victory.

The race had been close throughout. Longo, who had won the previous incarnation of the race in the 1980s three times between 1987 and 1989, won the prologue in Paris, defended her lead in the Pyrenees and won the stage five time trial in Toulouse. 

However, Van Moorsel took the yellow jersey in Mende on stage six, and squeezed more seconds out of her rival on the penultimate stage to Vaujany, leaving the race finely poised. Longo was experienced and race-hardened, but in the end had to concede to Van Moorsel’s youth and climbing prowess.

The fiercely competitive Longo was critical of her Dutch rival’s strategy. “That was pathetic,” she said. “It was like riding a sprint on the track; the whole of the stage was leading up to the final 200 metres. Van Moorsel let me do all the work.” For her part, Van Moorsel was unrepentant. “I only had nine seconds on her,” she said. “Under the circumstances it was a perfectly reasonable tactic to employ.”

The Tour Cycliste Féminin in 1992 was an attempt to resurrect a women’s equivalent of the men’s Tour de France. The Société du Tour de France had run a concurrent event to the men’s race, sharing some stage finishes, between 1984 and 1989, before the event was replaced by the short-lived Tour de la Communauté Européene, which ran between 1990 and 1993.

The 1992 version was nothing to do with the men’s Tour organisation, and lasted through to 2009, though it shrank in scale and scope over the years, with the spectacular race-defining battle atop L’Alpe d’Huez in its first edition ultimately being its high-water mark.

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