Having finished After London, disappointed in the lack of geographical information (I had sadly misremembered), and coming towards the end of Andy Allsopp's excellent Barring Mechanicals, I have picked up again on the Fignon autobiography on the Kindle app. Seems he spends a lot of time saying 'That's how it was' and suggesting the early 80s was a golden age of cycle racing. Maybe it was, and it was certainly a time when some heroic figures competed - Hinault, Zootemelk etc, but I'm not sure.