LeCon's work wasn't groundbreaking; he was saved from oblivion only by Moore's Law. LeCun stood still doing the same thing for decades. But when wave after wave of faster hardware arrived he was finally declared successful.
So if you want to credit success to dumb luck, or to stubbornness, or insanity (as Einstein said: "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." then LeCon is your man. I don't know of any quote where LeCun says something to the effect of: "Well, I knew the hardware would speed up and then my neural net software would work exactly as I designed it to and manifest AI. So I waited twenty years."
IOW It wasn't the LeCunn's surfboard(his software) that handed him success, it was the wave(advancing hardware speeds):
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/race-make-ai-chips-everything-...