The Last Rider film review — portrait of a cycling star from the pre-doping days

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For fans of competitive cycling, the story of Tour de France-winner Greg LeMond will be a familiar one, a major part of the sport’s lore. But for the rest of us, especially those who might struggle to name any cyclist other than the disgraced Lance Armstrong, The Last Rider represents an accessible if doggedly conventional underdog tale.

Armstrong is only mentioned in passing at the end, which seems a little curious given that his story overlapped significantly with that of fellow American LeMond and his wife Kathy, both of whom were interviewed in Last Rider director Alex Holmes’s previous documentary, Stop at Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story. It’s as if Holmes and his team want to remind us of a time when the sport wasn’t dominated by performance-enhancing drugs and the cyclists were proper athletes and stand-up chaps, albeit on a broad spectrum of niceness.

California-born LeMond comes across here as one of the good guys, a kind-hearted striver, survivor of various traumas, and devoted husband and father. The late Laurent Fignon, however, LeMond’s biggest rival in the 1989 Tour de France, was clearly less cuddly. Irascible and always combative, Fignon trash talks the competition and at one point spits at a journalist’s camera lens, just because he can. Still, the film is dedicated to him, and LeMond, fellow rider Pedro Delgado and coach Cyrille Guimard all speak fondly yet honestly about his ferocious talent.

Mixing in the usual talking heads with ample archive material, the film rolls along at a steady clip, and climbs to a nerve-shredding climax with grace. Some might even find that it punctures their long-held prejudices against cycling as a spectator sport.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from June 23 and available on demand from August 7