Indurain
Page 2
As a project, no matter its widely varying location and no matter the money available, the CC Villavés clearly worked well. Riders from as far away as Elizondo, Jaimerena’s town, which was, prior to modern-day tunnels and bypasses, a good ninety-minute drive away on difficult roads, travelled down to join. Barruso’s friendly, undemanding style also proved a draw.
‘Barruso was like a father to us. It didn’t matter if you were good, bad or indifferent as a racer,’ recalls Prudencio. ‘And he’s still the same now. He wasn’t someone to get you to win races, the important thing was to get people to do sport and that they enjoyed it. There’d be a nice bocadillo and glass of Coca-Cola afterwards and that was it, that’s the fundamental thing. He never shouted at us, he never told us about tactics. It was just a question of going out and racing.’
‘We’d go to races nearby in Alsasua, Tafalla, Estella, towns round and about. The cars weren’t as good then, and we’d load them down, no air conditioning. Everybody would pile into the 600 and off we’d go. It was a good time of life. Me and Miguel were never in the same category, we didn’t train together or anything. Four years age difference at that time of life is a world apart. It was only when we were amateurs that we’d train more together and then as pros, every day.’
‘In that era, Pepe was more like a big brother to us all, there was no pressure,’ Jaimerena recalls. ‘They would take us to races, help us out, let us race almost for free. My parents didn’t even have a car at that time, so I’d get a bus down there and then they would drive me all the way home from Pamplona up to here in Elizondo. I don’t know how many kids he had in his own family, but if there were two races on a Saturday and a Sunday, we’d all sleep over in his flat, too. At first there weren’t too many of us in my category, maybe twenty-five or thirty kids in all of Navarre.
‘My feeling towards people like that is one of gratitude, people spending their own free time, all weekend after working all week to drive you around, set up the races, organise it all, and doing it for year after year. And thanks to those people, riders of all kinds have a chance. If you’ve got a family, it’ll be hard to sacrifice your time for them. I can’t help wondering who’s going to do that kind of work when they finally quit.’
It was not only their time Villava’s ‘founding four’ initially had to spend in abundance. It was their money, too – for petrol, for food, for equipment – and property, particularly cars, which the club worked its way through at a tidy pace. Once Barruso’s Seat 600 ‘died’, next to be sacrificed on the club’s long hauls to races was a yellow Renault 5 belonging to Urdaniz and loaned for free to the club. That was followed by a Renault 8 of Almárecegui’s and then a Renault 12 TS, bought again by Barruso. Barruso recounts in the club’s official history that ‘after a few months, I changed the R12’s motor from petrol to diesel, thinking I’d save some money, and the only thing I achieved was to lower its maximum speed to 80 km/h. Driving the way back to Villava from the mechanic’s I was so upset with myself at what I’d done I barely made it.’
By 1984, the club finally acquired its first own vehicle, but Miguel Indurain, who had left two years earlier, has vivid memories of the Seat 600, saying, ‘it was quite something to travel in. The engine would overheat a lot because there were five of us in the car, plus all our bikes and equipment. There were times we’d have to stop on the side of the road to let it cool down.’
As the number of races organised by the CC Villavés slowly increased, starting with just two in 1975, then five in 1976, seven in 1977 and nine from 1978 onwards, so did the number of riders. From seven in 1975, the club had nineteen (including four Indurains) in 1976. Names of figures that would be key to Indurain’s career in the future, like Juan Fernández, a director of the rival Clas-Cajastur team in the mid-1990s, and Marino Lejarreta, the future leader of the rival ONCE squad, started to appear in the list of top three finishers in the races run by the club.
In the mid-1970s, the creation of the local SuperSer team in Pamplona, briefly containing Spain’s greatest Tour de France racer of the time, Luis Ocaña, acted as a beacon for cycling interest. So too, did the Tour de France’s brief visit to Navarre in 1977 (although only in the northernmost area, en route to Vitoria), and the arrival of the Vuelta a España in Pamplona and Villava in 1979. According to contemporary reports, using the Pamplona avenue closest to Villava as a finish proved controversial: the lack of barriers and organisation in the midst of massive crowds helped caused the commissaires’ cars and following vehicles to snarl up the whole area. One top rider, former Giro d’Italia winner Michel Pollentier of Belgium, went flying into a rear window, and suffered severe concussion. Stage winner Sean Kelly had injuries to his head and ear and needed around half a dozen stitches, runner-up Noël Dejonckheere had a badly bruised shoulder, and a middle-ranking Italian sprinter, Daniele Tinchella, fractured his hand.
Pollentier, blood dripping copiously from his face, claimed, ‘We’re risking our lives here every day’ and several riders protested about the lack of police to control the crowds. Tinchella continued to shout ‘criminals’ at the public even as he was being loaded onto a stretcher and Kelly, in his autobiography Hunger, recalls, ‘It was like the running of the bulls … after the finish the lead car was stopped 30 or 40 metres ahead, I squeezed the brakes like they were a pair of nutcrackers but there was no time to stop.’
The next day’s start in Villava was also chaotic, and a TV car and team car had a total of six tyres slashed. But on the plus side, such visits by the Vuelta gave the local youth like Indurain an opportunity to see the real professional racing scene, right on their doorstep. It could hardly fail to make an impression.
As for that September morning in 1975 when Indurain Senior and Miguel came knocking on his door, Barruso says he never received a direct explanation from either father or son, as to why Indurain had decided to opt for cycling. There was, according to Prudencio Indurain, no tradition whatsoever of cycling in any category in the Indurain family history, so that can hardly have been a reason. Not that Barruso ever saw the need for one.
‘They saw we organised races and the boy would have liked the idea of racing. That’s often the way. A lot of them come through that door the first time because they’ve got a friend who’s already racing and the dad turns up.’ It later turned out that what Indurain liked the most was the chance to see other villages in different races, or the soft drink and sandwich the club gave to its young competitors after each event. ‘We still do,’ reflects Barruso. ‘A Coca-Cola or Fanta and a bocadillo of chorizo or ham or mortadela. The minute the race had finished we’d shoot off for the sandwich,’ Miguel says in the official club history, ‘I remember it always went down very well. That period of my life was the best time as a rider, because you don’t feel the obligation to win.’
Once Indurain was part of the club, he was there to stay. For one thing, Indurain’s family, who had agricultural smallholdings on both his mother and his father’s side, had no need to leave the area. By contrast, both of Spain’s two previous Tour de France winners at the time Miguel was growing up, Federico Martín Bahamontes and Luis Ocaña, had had far more tumultuous childhoods: Bahamontes fleeing the bombardments and the death threats to his father in Toledo in the Civil War to work as a road-mender aged twelve; Ocaña and his family becoming economic emigrants in France in the 1950s after years of impoverished existence in eastern Spain.
Indurain’s parents farm was, in fact, the last to survive inside Villava, but one which was set to endure. ‘This is good land and there were no bad harvests,’ points out Prudencio Indurain, ‘why would we want to go?’ The farm was not huge though, and only had one regular farmhand: ‘Of course we’d help, that’s what it’s all about in the country. It was very hard work, the planting, harvesting and so on, but we liked it … ’
The reason for Indurain’s love of the outdoor life is clear: he was born into it, grew up in it, and knew little else. ‘It certainly wasn’t like the town kids here who hav
e to go down to the square to find some open space,’ observes Barruso. ‘They could go out and play on all that land their father owned whenever they wanted.’
Apart from owning the farm together with his brother, Miguel Indurain senior also rented out their tractors and services to other farmers. Indurain’s grandfather, Toribio, had bought land on a nearby hillside for a vineyard and parts of it were sold off for urban development. As one of four original landowners in Villava, they would have enjoyed a healthy profit. Thus the family, according to Prudencio, never reached a point where leaving Villava and the farm was ever considered an economic necessity, and if further proof were needed of that financial stability, according to Barruso, Miguel, like his brother and three sisters, were partly educated at private, fee-paying schools.
The family’s strongly held Catholic faith was almost certainly another major pillar of that inner stability. Navarre is one of the most deeply religious areas of Spain – the nickname for Indurain’s future team, Reynolds, was el equipo de los curas (the priests’ team) – and the Indurain family were practising Roman Catholics. Father Jesús María Zubiri, the now-deceased parish priest who lived just a few hundred yards away from the Indurains and who was a regular visitor, once told the Diario de Navarra newspaper, ‘Since the times of Toribio, the first Indurain I met, the Indurain family have always been very religious … They have passed those beliefs on from one generation to the next.’ He also proudly noted that Indurain took his First Communion ‘just two weeks before he got his first racing licence.’
Not that the Indurains used their financial well-being as a way of keeping themselves apart from the rest of the town, either. ‘They had money but they have never had any airs or graces. They were – and are – the most down-to-earth, humble people you can meet,’ Barruso says. To underline his point, he uses an example from the area he knows best: races. Parents who are overly convinced their children are a cut above will take them to the event but then ‘keep them sitting in their own car, rather than come over to mine for the director’s meeting of all the riders, right up until the start. And the same goes after the race, when they’ll get their kid straight into their own car, rather than attend the debriefing.’ Indurain’s father ‘would never do that and neither does Indurain when he takes his own son to races now.’ Miguel Indurain would later recall that his mother ‘would complain a little when we turned up with our race clothes dirty, but when it came down to it, they would never ask us to quit cycling.’
Despite making money from selling land, farming remained, for many decades, the central element of the Indurains’ lives – both parents and sons. Indeed, there were apocryphal stories that Indurain abandoned the Tour on two occasions in order to help his father with the harvest. Indurain cannot, therefore, be portrayed as the clichéd working-class hero who wanted to escape a world of agricultural hardship to make his fortune by riding his bike: rather, the two areas – Indurain’s love of things rural and his love of cycling – were strongly connected. In 1991, shortly before winning his first Tour, Indurain spent his free time repairing agricultural implements for his father. ‘He would be a good farmer and he drives a tractor better than anyone I know,’ his father once proudly said. For Indurain, the ‘fruits’ of his cycling life were like the harvests at the culmination of a farming season: the tangible confirmation of a job well done.
Even the way Indurain acquired his first racing bike was because of his love of the rural life. When he was around eleven, he cycled to where his father was working with his lunchtime sandwich, and had a drive on his tractor whilst he was eating it. But whilst he was doing so, two individuals walking across the fields decided to steal his bike. To make up for his disappointment, Indurain’s father opted to buy Miguel a second-hand racer, a GAC. ‘Just figure what we would have missed out on had he continued with the old one,’ his father used to joke. With a racer for the young lad, knocking on the door of the CC Villavés presumably seemed like a natural next step.
Although all three of Miguel’s three male cousins – Javier, Daniel and Luis – joined the CC Villavés, it was Miguel and his brother who lasted there the longest. ‘Miguel would get a new bike and then when he outgrew it, he’d pass it on to me,’ Pruden, tall and heftily built like Miguel, once recalled. It was not at all rare, either, for each brother to win a race in the same village on the same day but different categories: Miguel in the under-fifteen infantiles category; Pruden in the under-eleven benjamines.
Such tenacious loyalty to the CC Villavés makes it easy to trace the line of Indurain’s progress as a young rider and his developing strengths and weaknesses, in the club records. For example there are the details of the the twenty-eight defeats he suffered one season at the hands of one particular rival, Joaquín Marcos in the infantiles category. Rather than quit, Indurain clearly rationalised the situation – his rival was one year older than him and therefore was naturally stronger – and kept plugging away. Eventually, it was Marcos who was regularly, relentlessly defeated by Indurain.
It should be pointed out that Indurain had plenty of other options in Navarre at the time had he wanted to leave the CC Villavés. In 1975 there were just 181 registered riders of all ages up to eighteen in the whole of Navarre. But by 1979, following a big upturn in local interest, there were 569: by 1981, 862; and by 1983, 1,332. As Barruso recalls, there were so many clubs and under-18 riders in the area for that the region was divided into five separate areas by the local federation, to ensure that races were not over-booked with starters. (Now, with Navarran amateur clubs down to half their number, there are just two).
But Indurain never moved on. It seems fair to say that with Indurain, such loyalty – be it to a team, to a club, to his village or to his family – is one of the keys to understanding his entire career. Once something or someone had received his approval, it was to be very rare that Indurain would change his mind, or let himself be persuaded to change it.
Slowly but surely, Indurain’s loyalty and persistence started to hone his talent and reap him rich rewards. After four races in which he did not win – his bike wheels were a smaller radius than his rivals’ which may well have been a factor – in 1976 there was no stopping him. ‘As I recall,’ Barruso says, ‘he ran second in his first race [in 1976], in the village of Luquin, and then he made up for that the following one, in Elvetea, where he won.’ That season, Indurain won the staggering total of fifteen races, one more than his closest rival, Pablo Bacaicoa, making him the outright champion of Navarre in his category. All this was achieved despite, as Indurain once said, ‘barely training. My longest training ride at the time would be heading over to my mother’s town, Alzórriz, around 25 kilometres away. If it got to 27 kilometres I was absolutely exhausted.’ Another favourite excursion at the time was up to Pamplona to buy sweets at a stall near the bullring: a 12-kilometre round trip.
Whilst Indurain’s talent for bike racing shone through very early, so too did his reticence about showing his emotions in public – another facet of his personality that would endure until he retired. Barruso remembers that Indurain was not one for celebrating, to the point where he once said, ‘I never remember him making a single gesture of victory until he won on Luz Ardiden [in the 1990 Tour].’ Indurain’s dislike of what he considered showy behaviour could be explained by Father Zubiri’s comments that ‘He was – and has always been – a very normal person, but shy, he didn’t want to stand out. When I went to visit his house I’d see him studying or playing, but always trying to do so without being noticed.’
‘You’d be in the team car and of course you wouldn’t be able to see what was going on,’ Barruso recalls. ‘So afterwards I’d come up to him and say, “Hey, Miguel, how did you get on?” And he’d say in a very quiet voice, “first”. Others, they’d be boasting about it at the tops of their voices, but not Miguel.’
‘That’s how he’s always been,’ confirms Pruden. ‘He’d be happy inside and what he feels – well that’s for him. I know him very well,
I’m his brother, I don’t need him to talk to me to know what he wants. He’s never been a big talker, but he talks a lot when he’s not in public. He’s not shy, he’s just like that.’
Indurain could have done a lot of celebrating had he set his mind to it. ‘He was unbeatable in circuit races. A lot of the time, he’d win alone. He was very, very clever as a racer,’ says Barruso. Nor did he need much advice. ‘I can recall going to Zaragoza with him and we had to sign him onto the list of starters. The race was about to begin so I left him with somebody’s parent whilst I went off to do that. By the time I got back he was already three minutes clear of the field … There was one other rider of his age in the club [Marcos] who would always be trying to get ahead by not working in the break, then winning at the sprints. But in the end, Indurain would get the better of him.’ A very high level of ambition, though, according to Pruden has always been a key part of his personality, even if ‘there’s never been much euphoria. But he’s a winner, he doesn’t let you win even at billiards [a Spanish saying for those who are ultra-competitive]. That winner’s instinct, that’s in him.’
This habit of winning without overly celebrating – as the Spanish say la misa va po dentro, the church service takes place inside the building – meant that Indurain gave the impression that success was something that came naturally, rather than anything special. That slightly mechanical edge towards beating others in races was something his rivals would find intimidating, and which throughout his career gave Indurain a psychological advantage.