Did you happen to catch The Last Rider when it had a theatrical release? It was June 23, 2023, just before the Tour de France departed, and in the midst of the Tour de France: Unchained Netflix series excitement.
I hope the 1989 Tour de France hasn’t been forgotten. In an era before streaming, before wall-to-wall coverage, it was an amazing race that probably would have played even better with more coverage. Four Tour champs signed in—the winners of five of the six previous Tours—as well as former and defending Giro and Vuelta champs. Starting on stage five, the lead see-sawed between two riders, and it finished the closest Tour in history, with the difference between first and second being only eight seconds. But the bigger thing was that the maillot jaune exchanged shoulders on the very last day, a time trial in which the second-placed rider gained 58 seconds in 24 kilometers to win the race. Both first and second were former Tour winners, and the defending champ got third, after starting the race in last place.
If you don’t know about the 1989 Tour, you should. If you know something about it, you could probably know more. The Last Rider is a movie for both those people.
Director Alex Holmes, who had also directed Stop at Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story, wanted to do another cycling documentary, but with a more positive spin. Seems like he had developed a relationship with Greg LeMond and decided that LeMond’s 1989 Tour win was that feel-good story.
The Mythic Race.
The outlines of the story are well known. LeMond is the guy who won by 8 seconds. LeMond won the 1986 Tour, was been accidentally shot in 1987 and had been barely competitive since. Laurent Fignon was the guy he beat on the last day. Fignon had been teammates with LeMond on the Renault-Elf-Gitane team, which was possibly the Team Sky/Ineos of its day, from 1982-84. LeMond had won the 1983 Worlds, but Fignon had won the 1983 and 1984 Tours, prompting LeMond to leave the team. Fignon, after two golden years, had four bad years and was again in great form, winning the 1989 Giro. The third contender was Pedro Delgado, who had lost the 1987 Tour in a time trial, came back to win in 1988, and was surfing the form of his life as the 1989 Big Loop started.
The movie aims to tell LeMond’s story up to the end of 1989, with the meat of the movie focusing on the ’89 Grande Boucle. The setup is simple. Four talking heads—Greg and Kathy LeMond, Cyrille Guimard, and Pedro Delgado, along with ample footage highlighting the tales.
LeMond, in case you don’t already know, is a talker. And he usually seems fairly unfiltered. Guimard, a Frenchman, was the director sportif of the Renault squad, and had coached Hinault, Fignon, and LeMond. An innovator, great tactician and coach, and a bit of a wizard, Guimard was the head of Fignon’s Systeme U team, and after leaving the team car became a commentator. The Spaniard Delgado was a climber and stage racer at the top of his game in 1989, and after retirement also found himself in the commentary box.
Four heads aren’t enough.
Maybe it’s the influence of seeing so many talking-head documentaries, but I felt that having only four people to recall, ponder, and opine wasn’t enough. A few more points of view, maybe from Andy Hampsten and Steve Bauer–both former teammates of LeMond who rode the 1986 Tour with him and leaders on competing teams in 1989–as guys who might have had real insight. Jose De Cauwer was LeMond’s directeur sportif in ’89 and probably would have had many interesting things to say.
The period footage, while not great in quality, was great in quantity and fabulous to see. Much of the earliest stuff seemed to be LeMond home movies and scrapbook photography. The footage gets better and longer as the chronology moves forward. The differences between the racing world then and now are immense and worth seeing.
While the story is about the race, the subplots are the LeMond love story and LeMond’s many traumas and tribulations. The shooting, which nearly killed him, isn’t the half of it. The physical traumas are pretty awful, but the psychological might have been worse. He was sexually abused as a teen, and while he talks around it, he never quite addresses it directly. Which is frustrating, though LeMond’s personality is such that he seems to find the good side of even those he seems to have profound and bitter disagreements with. The movie, for example, is dedicated to Fignon.
Raconteurs to the rescue.
Despite having only four yakkers appear, their abilities to spin good yarns make up for the seeming deficit. Delgado and Guimard are voluble and engaging. Guimard seems to have known the riders well and has a keen eye for detail. Delgado has an easy smile and quick laugh and makes it seem like the race was a blast, even though his Tour started about as horribly as possible.
The movie lacks some drama because much of the story is well known, especially the ending. The quality of the footage and the few points of view are also limiting, though considering the run time, the movie would have sacrificed some depth if there were more interviewees.
All the same, it’s a good story. Love and suffering and loss and heartbreak and drive are all evergreen themes, particularly in cycling. Happy endings are rare. And the joy can feel permanent on film, though as the subjects relate, it is often fleeting.
It’s rare in this age of niche entertainment and narrowcasting that a bike movie gets a theatrical release. The Last Rider did. That alone makes the movie kind of a big deal, bigger, in many ways, than Unchained.
Why did it slip through the cracks?
In the niche world of streaming, Unchained was present for cyclists, but could have easily been overlooked by non-cyclists. Without working for Netflix it seems impossible to know how the recommendation algorithm works. Outside did its part for Unchained, claiming “’Tour de France: Unchained’ will turn you into a cycling fan.” The subtitle of the article is “The new Netflix series is road cycling’s best opportunity in decades to expand its audience.” A quick tour of several cycling websites indicated that they all reviewed Unchained, even some doing episode recaps, while only three mention The Last Rider, and of those three, only one is a review. While Outside might have loved Unchained, the mainstream media gave far more attention to The Last Rider. According to Rotten Tomatoes, Unchained had five mainstream reviews, while The Last Rider had 23.
From afar, it would seem that The Last Rider did the right kind of outreach, got the mainstream media coverage that is hard for cycling stories to receive, and even made it into theatres, it was overlooked by the cycling world. Considering what should have been a big part of their audience barely received notice of the movie, it actually didn’t do terribly in theatres for a small movie. It took in $57,415 opening weekend, making $147, 979 in domestic box office, and $92,917 internationally, for a worldwide gross of $240,896.
Money and Views.
We know that Unchained had about 22 million views overall. However, what this means is unknown to folks outside of Netflix. It could mean that 22 million people worldwide looked at a minute or more of it, or it could mean 2.5 million people watched second of every episode, or something else. Whatever the specifics, it was good enough that Netflix paid for a season two to be produced. There is no way yet to know if there was a “Netflix effect” on Tour viewing in 2023, though race director Christian Prudhomme thinks there should be.
Making movies is hard.
Funding this kind of movie, any cycling movie, is hard. While Unchained seemed to do great for Netflix, not only do we not know, but it’s hard to see Netflix continuing to fund such movies in the future. Peak Netflix has already passed and the streaming giant, like all streaming services, is becoming more cost conscious in what it greenlights. In terms of seeing these movies produced, the streaming era has made them a pretty tough proposition.
Starting in the mid-1980s and running till about 2010 or so, videocassette and DVD sales could provide a nice backend income stream for filmed entertainment, turning lackluster theatrical sales and an ostensible loss into a slow-burning profit. Hollentour is an example of such a film. But now, it’s hard to imagine a film like The Last Rider making up for a lackluster theatrical release.
The streaming services, like Hulu, Max, Netflix, etc, typically pay a flat fee, and it is, for smaller movies, very much a buyer’s market. Apple TV, Google Play Movies, Microsoft Store, Vimeo, and YouTube have Video-on-Demand where a provider can demand a fee of their choosing and then split the proceeds with the provider. Vimeo offers a 90/10 split after transaction fees to the entity which uploaded the video. Which seems good from afar though the transaction fees I haven’t found yet and evidence is that neither Vimeo nor YouTube is all that popular with producers or distributors.
I’m hoping this movie has turned a profit. That will help keep people interested in making cycling movies. Failure, like success, is often treated like a virus.
The Last Rider is streaming on: Apple TV, Google Play Movies, Hulu, Microsoft Store, Vudu, and YouTube.
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