The Last Rider review – fun cycling doc might have been better suited to a biopic

Intimate biography meets fascinating sporting trivia in Alex Holmes’s documentary The Last Rider, following the life and career of Greg LeMond, the first American to ever win the Tour de France. It’s an undeniably exciting story, but that one sometimes feels ill-served by the documentary format, with plenty of sequences that may have made a stronger impression as part of a narrative feature.

Holmes takes the 1989 Tour (the closest race the competition has ever seen) as his focal point, building up to it through LeMond’s journey, including his 1986 Tour victory, to what became a fateful race. We hear about LeMond’s traumatic experiences of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a family friend, a trauma he was able to put behind him through competitive cycling, a joy that was also stolen from him.

His victory in 1986 was marred by foul play from an ostensible teammate before a calamitous shooting accident left him fighting for his life. It’s all obviously dramatic stuff, and nicely grounded by the concurrent love story between LeMond and his devoted wife Kathy, but the presentation isn’t quite as thrilling as it should be.

Holmes takes us from event to event through talking heads and archive footage, and this linearity and formal straightforwardness can leave The Last Rider feeling like just another sports documentary, when its leading man deserves something a bit punchier. That’s not to say that it’s not affecting – these kinds of sporting underdog stories are pretty irresistible and Greg and Kathy make for a truly lovely couple – but I found myself longing for the additional stylistic freedoms a biopic version of the story could have allowed. Cycling can be a tough thing to make cinematic, but with this much rich behind the scenes drama, if any cyclist deserves the big-budget spotlight, it’d be LeMond.

The Last Rider is released in UK cinemas on 23 June.