Laurent Fignon is the last Frenchman to have sustained a realistic challenge for victory in the Tour de France. In 1989, on the verge of a third Tour win, he lost on the final day, by a mere eight seconds to American Greg LeMond. Today, he earns a living as a portly and curmudgeonly pundit on French television.

Absent-minded and acerbic, the former professional known as ‘The Professor’ (because he lives in Paris, trained as a vet and wears wire glasses) is a withering critic. Brutal he may be, but he appears to have Christophe Moreau’s number.

Fignon is not a sentimental man. In 1989, when closing on that presumed victory in the Tour, he was asked how morale was in his team. “They’re paid to be my team-mates, not my friends,” he replied, bluntly.

An astute tactician as a professional, he has not been caught up in the wave of ‘Moreaumania’ that has swept France and that yesterday drew French president Nicolas Sarkozy to the Tour.

“Can he win the Tour?” said Fignon of Moreau. “I doubt it. He is too weak in the time trials and on Sunday [at Tignes] he attacked six or seven times, when he’d have been better off forging an alliance with the others, like Valverde, Mayo and Schleck.”

“Moreau made a schoolboy error on the climb to Tignes,” Fignon scoffed, “attacking when the road wasn’t steep enough and into a head wind.”

If Moreau’s ears were burning today it didn’t show, but in this key stage, he was much less impressive and the feeling persists that we may already have seen the best of him. A close look at the race classification suggests that the challenge for final victory will now have a distinctly Spanish flavour.

Most in the Tour press room tonight believe that Alejandro Valverde will beat current Tour leader Michael Rasmussen in the first time trial in Albi, probably by at least enough time to take the yellow jersey. Even so, Rasmussen remains confident after a day spent defending his lead on which he coped expertly with all that was thrown at him.

“There’s no doubt now about who’s the leader of my team,” Rasmussen said after supposed Rabobank team leader, Denis Menchov, slumped to 18th overall, more than seven minutes behind the Dane. “Things are clearer. It was disappointing that Menchov couldn’t get his arse over the Galibier. But it’s a climber’s Tour. Valverde is now my main rival because I know I can handle Iban Mayo in the time trial.”