Originally Posted by
gurana
That LeMond win by 8 seconds was against Laurent Fignon in a time trial and it was the final stage that year. Of historical note, LeMond used aero bars and a then new aero helmet. Fignon had like bullhorn bars and no helmet with long hair in a pony tail to boot. I don't think they were on the same team.
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My assessment then is that as tradition goes, this is a recent phenomenon. As far as this year goes specifically, the gap is too large for any attempt to be realistically made and, barring any mitigating factor as you had pointed out, so it make sense to talk about the winner to be established after stage 20 in definitive terms. However, I think it's just a matter of time before we see two or more riders close in time at stage 21 where this tradition gets set aside. It seems that during the normal course of things, such close gaps at that stage are infrequent though. For my money, I think a possible likely scenario would be a rider being 1st in GC that is weak in the time trial and getting close to caught, or even slightly surpassed on the last TT.
In 1979 Hinault had 3+ min on Zoetemelk going into the final stage but took a 50+km flyer anyway. Zoetemelk eventually latched on but lost the sprint to Hinault. The rest of the field came in 2 minutes later . There wasn't much of a chase because Hinault's and Zoetemelk's teams controlled the pack, and anyway what was the point, 3rd place was almost half an hour down on GC
from Hinault. Who, BTW, had won the bunch sprint the stage before. Zoetemelk then lost an additional ten minutes when he failed a drug test.