Demure Tunbridge Wells was anything but disgusted: its citizens lined the High Street three deep. Biddenden, Bethersden and Horsmonden were en fete. Cream teas were dished out from village halls. Pubs were clearly open all day. Local farmers were charging up to £5 for parking. There were even T-shirt touts. The police estimate the crowds may have reached one million. Apart from a little road-painting – not something the highways departments approve of – they were a decorous but rapturous guard of honour. The atmosphere was that of a coronation procession in days of yore.
What shocked above all about Le Tour’s first visit since 1974 was how unBritish the occasion looked, apart from the inevitable rain shower of course. The 1974 visit had been furtive, with the authorities unwilling to close any roads; yesterday the closure was better in many places than the Tour enjoys in France. And the people came out of their houses in droves, setting up barbecues and picnic tables, Thermos flasks and ice-boxes, waving glasses of wine and warm beer at the caravan. The sight of old ladies sitting outside their cottages in camping chairs waiting for the race to arrive is indelibly French; yesterday it was common from Capel-le-Ferne to North Chailey.
The day’s heroes were suitably pan-European. Spain’s Francisco Cabello ran out the winner after a 100-mile joint effort with France’s Emmanuel Magnien. The Spaniard, who is under a suspended ban after testing positive for the steroid Nandrolone in February, left the Frenchman on the final climb of Elm Grove in Brighton, then held him off to the finishing line on the seafront. Magnien finished just ahead of Italy’s Flavio Vanzella, part of Tuesday’s team time-trial winning GB-MG team, who took third on the day and whipped the yellow jersey off the back of his own team leader, Johan Museeuw.
Chris Boardman celebrated his fourth place – just ahead of a ravening bunch – with clapping hands and the double-arm salute usually reserved for victory. But it was more than Pyrrhic: after spending most of Tuesday chivvying his team-mates before losing the yellow jersey, he showed his ability to recover from such a setback by holding off the field for a whole lap of the demanding Brighton finishing circuit.
Though Cabello and Vanzella took the glory, the hearts of the crowd – and 90 per cent of the placards and road graffiti – were wholly given to Boardman and Sean Yates. Boardman was overwhelmed by the support, but Yates was typically low-key. He respected to the letter the Tour tradition that the local man is given a little breathing space to say Hello to his family, with a brief attack in the Ashdown Forest and a long hug for his wife Pippa. “Yates the king, Boardman for prime minister” a placard read.
As ever European unity was not totally harmonious. Museeuw and Vanzella’s GB-MG team are half-Italian, half-Belgian, and the Italians opted out of helping Museeuw and the Belgians defend the yellow jersey. As a result he was forced to call on his fellow-countrymen in the Lotto team for help in the chase behind Magnien and Cabello. Transfers on the Tour are rarely happy either and the trip through the Eurotunnel was not pleasant, for much of the race cavalcade and the riders faced delays of up to 90 minutes. The press also suffered, which did not bode well for Eurotunnel’s write-ups in the French and Italian newspapers.
The 1994 Tour saw two other key events: Sean Yates’s brief acquisition of the yellow jersey, and – on the same day – Greg LeMond’s abandon in what turned out to be his last Tour. LeMond had given an immense amount to the race, but his exit went almost unnoticed. He has resurfaced in recent years as a strident campaigner against doping, and against Lance Armstrong in particular.
Greg LeMond retires
3 December 1994
There will be no magic comeback this time. Greg LeMond, the first English-speaking cyclist to win the Tour de France, will officially announce his retirement today. Fittingly, he will do so at a gala dinner in Hollywood. After that his only contact with the sport is likely to be in the law courts as he prepares to sue his old team.
LeMond’s first Tour win came in 1986, but his dramatic victory in 1989 caught imaginations worldwide. Not only was his 8 second winning margin the closest result in the race’s history, captured on the final short time-trial stage of the three-week race, but it came two pain-racked years after a shooting accident in April 1987 left him within 20 minutes of bleeding to death. Many, including the race organisers, were reduced to tears.
LeMond went on to win the world championship a few weeks later. Only a handful of cyclists, notably Eddy Merckx and Stephen Roche, had managed to win both events in the same year, but LeMond still had 30 buckshot pellets in his body, including two in his heart lining. Others had been removed from his liver, kidney and intestines. A few weeks later, to complete the dizzy rise from also-ran to top dog, he signed cycling’s biggest ever contract: $5.5 million over three years with the French Z team.
It has been downhill all the way since in a steepening curve of decline: LeMond’s third Tour win, in 1990, was overshadowed by criticism that he had failed to win a stage, and that his form had been appalling since the early season. Since then he has fought almost continual ill health and poor fitness: his last two attempts to complete the Tour, this year and in 1992, ended in ignominious withdrawal. LeMond’s only explanation is that he has “sub-acute lead poisoning” that has made it impossible for him to perform.
After starting every year since his 1990 Tour victory convinced he could come back and defy his critics again, he is bitterly disappointed at finally being forced to admit defeat. At his home in Minnesota, he said: “I imagined being able to pull off another Tour de France and world championship at least. If you had told me in 1990 I would win only three Tours I would have said you were crazy. I have been constantly hoping to regain form, but I have always been struggling.”
LeMond kept faith with the managers who had brought him to Z when the team was taken over by France’s nationalised insurance company GAN, but his persistent inability to justify his salary with the necessary results, coupled with the rise this year of England’s Chris Boardman, has inevitably embittered relations. Now he is threatening a lawsuit to regain money he says he is owed. “They suck,” is his verdict.
“Last year, when I had a year to run of a two-year contract, they dragged me to Paris. I had to take a pay cut or they would go to court. They dropped my salary $400,000. Then they stopped paying me as of September 1.” LeMond claims Boardman’s victories this year, and his spell in the Tour’s yellow jersey in July, have led to the rest of the team being ignored in favour of the Englishman. He said that, with Boardman, the team manager is “like a puppy following his father”.
LeMond is no stranger to controversy: last year he fell out with his father over the management of his cycle company. Relations with his former team-mate Bernard Hinault, whom he beat to win his first Tour in 1986, are still strained. When Hinault won the 1985 Tour, with LeMond second, he promised to help the American win the following year. Amid intense speculation, that continues to this day, LeMond did win in 1986, but maintains the Frenchman did everything in his power to make him lose.
Hinault, who attacked persistently during the race on the spurious ground that he was softening up the opposition, denies the charge, but claims he could have won if he had so wished. “That’s total bullshit,” said LeMond. “Everything he did was to screw me.” To keep it quits, he now says that in 1985, when he played the role of the dutiful team-mate behind Hinault, he could have won.
When team leaders quit the Tour they are allowed to climb into their team’s official cars, where they are protected from the gaze of the public. When LeMond abandoned the race on the back roads of Brittany this year, he was relegated to the “broom wagon” that patrols behind the riders to sweep up those who drop out. His look of stunned disbelief as he was carted to the finish was as anguished as his grin had been ecstatic on the Champs-Élysées only five years previously.
The following year, Boardman returned to the Tour after a promising performance in the Dauphiné Libéré where he finished second to Indurain. But his Tour ended almost as it began when he
crashed in the prologue time-trial. Again, this piece from the Guardian the following Monday is written on the assumption that the readership may not have read the previous day’s Observer.
“I was going from the gun. I’d ride the same again”
3 July 1995
Stephen Roche, the 1987 maillot jaune, always liked to say that whereas the Tour could not be won in a single day, it could easily be lost in one. Chris Boardman, who came in search of experience, learned that lesson in the hardest possible manner after crashing in Saturday evening’s prologue time-trial [in Saint-Brieuc]. He was picked up off the tarmac by his team manager like a stricken child and taken to hospital, his Tour over, after breaking two bones in his ankle and one in his wrist.
As he was carried on to one of the Tour organisation’s private jets in pouring rain at Dinard airport yesterday morning, to be taken to Manchester and on to Arrowe Park hospital in the Wirral for an ankle operation, Boardman said: “I was going from the gun. I wanted to win. In retrospect you can say it was my fault for racing hard. It was my responsibility to decide, that’s what I’m paid for.”
It was a decision which, had it paid off, would have won him both a second spell in the yellow jersey and fulsome praise for his courage. He reckoned he was only 600 metres from the end of the most dangerous section of the gloomy, rain-soaked 4½-mile course, little more than 90sec into a target time of 9min, when he fell. “There was one more corner, then it was uphill all the way to the finish.”
When his prologue came to its sudden end Boardman was only 2sec down on the eventual stage winner, Jacky Durand, who had ridden in earlier dry conditions. The Englishman had already raised eyebrows as he courted disaster on the course’s toughest three turns, his back wheel skidding on the drenched white traffic markings.
To fit in with the growing demands of television and attract holidaymakers from the nearby beaches, the Tour organisers had scheduled the last riders to start in twilight. Nocturne races are popular in Brittany and Normandy, and are highly atmospheric – until it rains. Saturday’s downpour turned the event into a 45mph Russian roulette with the maillot jaune as jackpot and a tarmac scraping as booby prize.
Boardman explained: “In the dim light you couldn’t see which bits of the road had grip and which were smooth. It was a matter of luck which line you took because it was so dark. It was like riding on ice. Once you had chosen a course you had to stay with it.”
On a shallow left-hander where riders were being radar-timed at 48mph, rider and bike parted company. Boardman slid down the tarmac on his hip and elbow, stopped only by the kerb, as behind him his GAN team car aquaplaned out of control and came within inches of running him over.
With blood dripping from a deep cut in his elbow, Boardman leant against the barriers before limping to his bike in a vain attempt to start moving again. It took just a couple of pedal strokes for him to accept the inevitable. As he tried to regain his composure he was almost hit by the next rider on the road, Maurizio Fondriest of Italy.
“You race so many times that you will fall off in one race,” he said. “I’d ride the same way again. It’s the Tour de France, everyone is on the edge, everyone skidded.”
The 1995 Tour de France was won by Miguel Indurain, who took victory for the fifth successive year. The race was marred by a fatal accident when the Italian Olympic champion Fabio Casartelli fell on the descent from the Col du Portet d’Aspet in the Pyrenees. As a tribute, the following day’s mountain stage was “neutralised” by mutual agreement among the riders.
A procession in memory of Casartelli
20 July 1995
Fabio Casartelli’s six remaining team-mates crossed the line together in an emotional finish to the 16th stage of the Tour de France here [in Pau] yesterday. Riders were credited with some eight hours’ road time, but no stage placings were announced.
This is unprecedented. The Motorola riders finished side by side, a few hundred metres clear of the bunch, a gesture not seen since the death of Britain’s Tommy Simpson in 1967. It was the Tour’s way of paying tribute to Casartelli, the Italian Olympic champion who died after crashing in the Pyrenees on Tuesday.
After speaking briefly to some of the team leaders all six Motorola riders came to the front with 10 kilometres to go. With expressionless faces they led the field into town and, when one of them – the New Zealander Stephen Swart – punctured, the whole field waited for him and a rider from a rival team dropped back to pace him back to the bunch.
[In 2001, Swart was to be the first rider to give a witness statement to the Irish writer David Walsh that pointed at Lance Armstrong’s use of banned substances.]
Two kilometres from the line someone behind the rear Motorola rider put on the brakes and the six were permitted to cross the line together. “It was a unanimous decision,” said Italy’s Eros Poli, a stage winner last year. “We’re all married and we can imagine our wives and children being bereaved like Fabio’s.”
Casartelli’s death had stunned this close-knit community, men who like coal-miners and fishermen earn their livelihood by ignoring danger on a day-to-day basis. Laurent Jalabert and Alex Zulle’s ONCE team wore black ribbons. “Everyone was very emotional,” said Jalabert, the points leader.
Led by Swart the six Motorola riders rode to the start together amid respectful applause, climbed the podium in line to sign the riders’ register, then retreated to their team cars to await the minute’s silence. For some of their fellows this proved too much. Max Sciandri was among those in tears and the double world champion Gianni Bugno offered him a comforting arm.
The Col du Soulor, first mountain of the day, is one of the Tour’s most magnificent playgrounds, a vast circus of peaks dotted with old snowdrifts above the dazzling green of the high meadows. The road performs a vast horseshoe turn across the gentler slopes on one side, clinging impossibly to the cliffs on the other. It was climbed with the pace and mood of a funeral cortege, with the prime at the top awarded to Motorola’s former world champion Lance Armstrong. The first intermediate sprint of the day was given to Swart.
The Col de Marie-Blanque and Col de Soudet, intended to be the final obstacles in Miguel Indurain’s magisterial progress to his fifth Tour win, were climbed some 45 minutes behind schedule, with the favourites controlling the pace at the front. Their feelings were summed up by Jalabert: “No one wanted to race.”
Two days later, Armstrong won the stage into Limoges, turning that stage into a further tribute to Casartelli. The emotional resonance of this victory is important for what followed in the next 17 years: Armstrong’s raw emotion captured the mood of the moment. Already a likeable champion, it made him all the more likeable. And when Armstrong finished first in the 1999 Tour, this day was still fresh in many minds.
Armstrong makes his fast, moving point
22 July 1995
As befits the only Texan in the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong is one of its larger-than-life characters. Miguel Indurain never says he is going to “kick ass” on a particular stage, whereas the 25-year-old from Austin leaves nobody in any doubt as to his emotions at a given moment.
So it was yesterday, when Armstrong approached the line at Limoges to take the second Tour de France stage win of his career. It followed a 25-kilometre solo break reminiscent of the escape which won him the 1993 world championship in Oslo, the same year he won the Verdun stage of the Tour. First he pointed to the sky with an index finger above his head, then with both index fingers. Then he blew a two-handed kiss and pointed again.
It was as moving a tribute to Armstrong’s former Motorola team-mate Fabio Casartelli, who died after crashing on a descent in the Pyrenees, as Wednesday’s collective show of emotion by the peloton, who let Armstrong and his five remaining team-mates cross the line together, a little way in front, after riding the whole stage in slow-moving cortege formation.
After the finish Armstrong was in tears, as he had been on Wednesday. “I did it for one person. I started suffering in the las
t few kilometres but I had Fabio in my mind the whole time. He motivated me the whole way. I felt very bad at the end but I kept thinking about him. I did it for him. In the past I have won bike races and I tried to make a little show because I think the show is good for the people. Today was no show. I was only trying to recognise Fabio.”
As well as a tribute to the late Olympic champion, Armstrong’s victory was a personal triumph at the end of a stage completed at an average of 27mph through the woods of the Dordogne. Having lost what looked like an assured victory last Saturday, when he was out-sprinted by Russia’s Sergei Outschakov at Revel, Armstrong was taking no risks in what was his team’s last chance for a stage win this year.
Armstrong broke away from a 12-man group, which never looked as if it was going to find the collective willpower necessary to catch him. “I didn’t like my chances in a sprint,” he added. “I had a feeling nobody would react. There were too many of them.” Bales of hay lined the back lanes of the Dordogne and Haute Vienne regions as the holiday crowds waved the riders through. Indurain’s 1995 harvest is almost complete as well: nothing short of an act of God will prevent him winning today’s 30-mile time-trial around the Vassivière Lake, where Greg LeMond clinched his 1990 victory.
With that in the bag, all that will remain is tomorrow’s traditional promenade to the Champs-Élysées, where victory number five should be completed, and he equals the record of Belgium’s Eddy Merckx and the Frenchmen Jacques Anquetil and Bernard Hinault.
Miguel Indurain did indeed go on to win that Tour, meaning that since Armstrong’s disqualification from the results, he is the only man with five consecutive Tour victories to his name. The Spaniard is renowned as a “boring” Tour champion. This is unfair. He was a rider who could attack when he needed to. In hindsight, I think I am a little unfair to Indurain in the following piece in describing him as a rider who only took the Tour seriously; he was always prominent in the world championships, for example. However, I would stand by the point that he was the first rider to specialise in the Tour, to the detriment of cycling as a whole.
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