Indurain

by Alasdair Fotheringham

  Contributing to that ‘superhuman’ factor was Indurain’s gift for avoiding crashes and accidents. ‘During all his time with us, he might have broken his arm once, but that’d be about it,’ Barruso says. ‘I never saw him fall, apart from once in a race near Irún where the entire team, all six of them, went down – and I wasn’t there anyway.’ His ability to handle stressful situations also shone through early on. During another race as a teenager, two rivals began throwing bidones at each other, one of which struck Miguel a glancing blow, and which could have hit him full on. Indurain was frightened, but whilst the case ended up going to court, he did not protest: it was not his concern.

  ‘Indurain had a great gift, which was his interior calm,’ observes Manolo Saiz, director of the ONCE team that acted as Indurain’s greatest rivals inside Spain throughout his career. ‘But to my way of thinking, one of his best qualities as a racer was his father’s attitude towards life, which Miguel applied to cycling. The idea, the real countryman’s idea, that you have to sow in order to reap, but that things take their natural time. People try and separate sport from life, give it different values, but you can’t. Those values that you learn from your environment are the ones you apply to sport.’

  Aged fifteen, Indurain moved up to the cadets’ category, where as Barruso states ‘he won fewer races, but that was due to team tactics. At that level, there were just four or five squads in a lot of races, so it was rare to get enough collaboration between them for breaks to be pulled back. His climbing, though, gradually got better.’

  Indurain, therefore, was denied many opportunities of unleashing his fast finish from the bunch, the strongest card in his suit. Back when he was very young, on flat finishes with a curve to the right more than those with a curve to the left, Indurain was all but unstoppable. As a cadet, though, he still won eight races, in a single season three of them against riders in the amateur category, another level higher, and his progress was only briefly broken as an unwanted result of a trip to Ponferrada to race the National Championships in 1981. A bad case of sunstroke in a team time trial was followed by a rare crash when Indurain was caught up in a mass pile-up in the bunch on a downhill and suffered a broken wrist. Even though he was still suffering from his wrist injury, in a race immediately afterwards in Sanguesa Indurain still managed to blow the field apart on one climb, the Leyre, to soften up the opposition for his team-mates. He only stopped pedalling, Barruso later said, when he was beyond a state of normal exhaustion – the kind of selfless performance that gained Indurain numerous friends in his club.

  Persistent, talented and generous towards his team-mates: there seemed to be no end to Indurain’s gifts on the bike. But Barruso adds another two – Indurain, even as a youth, was remarkably thorough, and above all he knew how to suffer. ‘It was good that he was a fantastic bike handler, he had won a load of gymkhanas, maybe thirty a year,’ Barruso says. ‘What made a bigger difference was his endurance, because others in the club were equally good at the technical side of it. I remember when one of the other amateurs got signed by Reynolds. After a year they kicked him out. He’d get to the 100-kilometre mark [in races] and then he’d crack.’ Not, it seemed, Miguel.

  On top of that, ‘He was always very methodical. It didn’t matter if it was a big family meal, one of those that always go on and on, if it got to half past three and half past three was time to go training, he’d be up from the table and off out to ride.’ The question is almost inevitable – did Barruso see the young Miguel Indurain as a Tour winner? He says, in all honesty, he did not: ‘a World Champion maybe, but he reminded me more of a [Francesco] Moser or a [Sean] Kelly.’

  ‘His condition was supernatural, it’d make your hair stand on end to see how good he was,’ adds Juan Carlos González Salvador, who, together with his brother Eduardo, would cross paths with Miguel at races from a very young age. ‘I first met him when I was a junior, eighteen or so and I was racing in a nearby region, Alava, in the Basque Country at the time and winning a lot, but there weren’t many events there so we’d go to Navarre. Miguel was top dog in Navarre and I was pretty much the same in Alava, so although we got on very well, there was a lot of rivalry between us. ‘

  Juan Carlos González Salvador recognises that Indurain’s natural talent on a bike left his rivals demoralised even before a race started. ‘It did my head in, though, because he worked a lot on his parents’ farm. As the elder brother of the family he had a lot of jobs to do and barely had time to train. I was absolutely obsessed with racing, I lived for it, and it would cost me heaven and earth to beat him. I almost had to cheat to do it. I could beat him in a sprint. Just. But if you went on a break with him, it was absolute torture. Even though he hardly trained, he was that good.’

  Juan Carlos González Salvador agrees that Indurain’s racing philosophy owed much to his agricultural roots: ‘His attitude was, “I’m a decent, hard-working type, but I know that if I’m going to get a return for that work, it’s like planting a kilo of potatoes, I have to put the work in, care for them and make sure they come through well – and I won’t get it through talking.’” As the rider who perhaps knew Indurain the best in his first five years as a professional, Dominique Arnaud, puts it, ‘He had the wisdom of a countryman, he’d know how to stand back, look around, reflect and then act, like all rural people. The word in French is sagesse. Taking the time not to react too quickly. That kind of calm, that always being tranquilo, that comes from the country.’

  Perhaps given his consistency throughout his career, it’s no surprise that Indurain’s thoroughness, calmness, bike handling skills and innate brilliance at racing – as well as not crowing about his superiority – were all facets that he showed from a very young age. But as an amateur Indurain showed no sign of one of the chinks in his armour as a professional: a dislike of racing in the cold and wet. That, however, was more circumstantial, according to Barruso: ‘When he raced with us, the races were short ones, just fifty or sixty kilometres, not like the professionals which are six hours on a bike. I’ve seen him win races in Pamplona when it was snowing and he was only wearing a hairnet helmet [as was the custom at the time]. It was more of a problem when it was hot, he used to suffer from allergies’ – a problem that was to dog him throughout his career.

  Father Zubiri also described the young Indurain as ‘cold’. But this was not, it appears, in a negative sense, rather that ‘he finds it hard to exteriorise his feelings’. That did not mean that Indurain could not empathise with others in his squad or, indeed, in general. As Barruso once said, ‘If it was a race where he had to work for another team-mate, he’d do that without complaining. He always collaborated, he was polite, everybody liked him. He was basically a guy who didn’t cause problems. And if he was quiet in professionals, as an amateur, he was even quieter.’

  Juan Carlos González Salvador believes Indurain’s quietness is hereditary. ‘His father was very similar, very friendly and somebody you’d get to like very quickly, but it wasn’t because of how he talked. Miguel’s the same, he thinks “What’s the point of talking if I’m not going to say anything?” But when Miguel finally does say something, you know it’s worth writing down.’ Yet that reticence also meant that in crucial areas of his career, Indurain left it up to others to understand what he wanted. In the eight years Indurain spent at the Club Villavés from 1975 through to the end of 1982, Barruso says Indurain ‘never once said that he wanted to be a professional. Whilst he would go on racing in different places, it was us who talked to José Miguel Echavarri [the manager of Indurain’s longstanding professional team Reynolds] about when Miguel was going to turn amateur.’

  The reason why Barruso went to see Echavarri that autumn after the village festival had ended was that October was an unofficial deadline for signing the top crop of young riders turning amateur the following season. ‘He told me he’d already seen Miguel, he knew what he was worth … But the Reynolds management hadn’t said anything to Miguel. And October went by, November a
nd December and after four months, he called me to say Miguel was in.’

  At this point Barruso says it was not clear that Indurain was going to be heading towards Reynolds: ‘There were other teams interested in him, particularly the local Racesa squad. It took such a long time for Reynolds to call, he was beginning to get nervous and he was very close to signing for them.’ It is intriguing to think what direction Indurain would have taken had he ended up with another squad, rather than what turned out to be his lifelong team. As it was, once he had started with Reynolds, Indurain’s career path quickly became close to being set in stone.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Little Priests

  In 2005, the sports section of the newspaper El Diario Vasco published a report on the Hostal Manolo, a small, family-run hotel in a quiet, paved square in the Basque village of Zegama. The article described a gathering there of a group of around a dozen men, all in their late thirties or forties. Amongst them were Prudencio and Miguel Indurain.

  The reason for their meeting up was to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the birth of the Reynolds amateur team. For years, Hostal Manolo was the unofficial headquarters of the squad. Run by a team soigneur, Manolo Arrizkoreta, the amateur riders from outside the Basque Country and Navarre lived in the hostal during the season for up to a month at a time, whilst the others would join them there for races.

  Between races, their bikes were stored in the garages next door. At the end of the day, Arrizkoreta would give them a massage, then they would head down to the hotel restaurant, run by his wife María Luisa Echarte. Here, they ate their meals every evening, before heading upstairs to the hostal’s simple bedrooms. An hour’s drive from Pamplona and the Reynolds service course and conveniently close to the Basque sierras of Azkorri, there were training rides aplenty, and in a village with just over 1,200 inhabitants, few distractions. Having Zegama as a base was yet another indication of how closely linked Navarran cycling is to its Basque equivalent, still considered the powerhouse and heartland of Spain’s cycling culture.

  The Hostal Manolo continued to be the amateur team’s base until it disbanded in 2000. But if the sponsor had changed by then to Banesto, the memories lived on. When María Luisa Echarte died in September 2001, the Spanish riders on the professional team, many of whom had lived for long spells in the Hostal Manolo, dedicated all their wins on that year’s Vuelta to her. ‘The team bosses were delighted with the place,’ El País reported on her death. ‘The riders were kept on a leash but simultaneously they felt like they were at home.’

  Both Arrizkoreta and María Luisa were keenly aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the characters in their charge. If there were riders who felt like sneaking out for a few evening drinks, María Luisa would keep a disapproving eye on them throughout the supper beforehand. If she knew that someone had a habit of coming into the kitchen for a furtive midnight feast, ‘then she would hide the biscuit jar.’

  At the same time, Jaimerena – by then the directeur sportif for the amateur team – ‘would send her the evening menu of what we could have, and he specifically banned us from having any of her homemade cake,’ José Luis Rubiera, a Banesto amateur and later a pro with Kelme and US Postal told El País. She did not take kindly to having her food criticised, either: ‘If somebody complained that their the steak wasn’t well done enough,’ Carlos Sastre, the future Tour de France winner, said to the newspaper, ‘she’d get a hunk of fresh meat and take it outside, cut it up with an axe and chuck the raw steak on the rider’s plate.’

  In 2005, when the earliest generations of riders met up again for a commemorative reunion, Indurain was by far the most famous of those present. On the bar walls – the hotel had closed down when María Luisa Echarte learned she had cancer – Indurain’s yellow and pink jerseys from the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia were in pride of place. But amongst those dozen who gathered in 2005 were other well-known Spanish riders like Juan Carlos González Salvador, a Spanish national champion in the 1990s, Iñaki Gastón, one of Sean Kelly’s greatest lieutenants, and all-rounder Vicente Ridaura. Indurain towered above them all in terms of palmares, but these riders were still winners of solid, middle-ranking races, many of which are now long defunct: the Volta a Galicia for Ridaura; stages of the Vuelta a Aragón for González Salvador; or the hill-climb to the Basque sanctuary of Arantzazu for Gastón.

  Go to Zegama today and although Hostal Manolo, a sturdy three-storey building with its shutters firmly down looks to have closed down, over the last couple of decades there have been few other changes, as is the case with Villava. From where the village lies at the head of a valley dotted with pinewoods, there is still just one main road leading south out of Zegama and one main road leading north over a winding, six-kilometre-long pass set amidst snowcapped mountains.

  Streams and rivers form a patchwork of waterways across the village centre – where the tallest building is a sizeable church – with its two small bars and one tiny guesthouse. Inside one bar, there are handwritten notes in a hybrid of Spanish and Basque offering sandwiches of chorizak and lomeak and on a door nearby an invitation to join an upcoming protest against the installation of some telephone antennae has been tacked up on the frame. A large Basque ikurriña flag flaps in the breeze outside the town hall. But as for posters of Indurain or a signpost outside the village proudly announcing his team’s connections with Zegama? If present, they are well hidden.

  Equally, apart from the Indurains and Jaimerena, it is hard to find former Reynolds amateurs who still live locally: in 2005 Gastón worked in the chemicals industry in the Basque Country; Ridaura was a fireman in Requena in Valencia, five hours south; others were in León, a four-hour drive to the west. A few, like Marino Alonso, had proved impossible for the organisers to find. Those that did turn up gave Manolo Arizkorreta a plaque, as a token of their appreciation. Although as El Diario Vasco sagely observed, ‘if Miguel Indurain had been the team’s only rider, the whole squad’s existence from beginning to end would have been amply justified.’

  Miguel Indurain’s career as an amateur with the Reynolds squad was spellbindingly brief and jaw-droppingly successful. In less than two years, Indurain managed to become Spain’s youngest ever amateur national champion at eighteen, win the Navarran regional championships, take part in the Los Angeles Olympic Games, race several semi-professional events and sign his first contract with his lifelong professional team. On a personal level, there were key developments too. Indurain began working with one of the two directors who was to shape his career: Eusebio Unzué, responsible at the time for the Reynolds amateur squad. The two were not just connected through racing: Unzué’s family were local agricultural seed merchants, and had the Indurains as customers. ‘But we didn’t get a discount,’ Miguel Indurain once pointed out with a wry grin.

  The first key point in Indurain’s fast-tracking into the professional world was actually a non-event. He was excluded from Spain’s then obligatory year-long military service programme because there was a surplus in required numbers. This meant that unlike one of his key rivals as a junior, Joaquín Marcos, Indurain did not face the risk of a twelve-month break in his progress. Some riders doing the mili were allowed to continue training as a special concession from their commanding officers, but others, like Marcos, were not. As he later recollected, the long spell away from racing indirectly wrecked his potential career as a pro.

  Indurain, by contrast, was heading in the opposite direction: cycling was his only real option after his academic education slowly fizzled out. His primary and secondary school teachers, interviewed at length by the local media during the years when Indurain attained star status in Spain, tended to describe him as an unexceptional student who never gave them any problems. ‘He was no better and no worse than others,’ Jesús Guembe Iriarte, his English teacher at a religious secondary school in Pamplona, told the Diario de Navarra. ‘He had no problem getting on with everybody, but he didn’t stand out that much. He was out of the school pretty quickl
y at the end of each day, onto the bus for Villava, with his cousin Daniel and brother Prudencio.’ Guembe Iriarte recalled ‘numerous conversations’ with Indurain about cycling, particularly concerning Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault, and that he ‘always brought some wonderfully large sandwiches.’ Along with his bocadillos Indurain’s height also meant he stood out physically – his school nickname was ‘Torpedo’. But academically, as Indurain always said later, he never shone.

  Part of the problem was the school. Indurain failed to adapt well to the Pamplona college he was sent to for his secondary education, and he began failing four or five subjects, out of ten, each year. ‘My parents wanted me to study and go on to do a degree, and I didn’t want to at all,’ he later commented. Aged fourteen, Indurain was switched to a secondary school-cum-technical college in Beriain, just south of Pamplona, where he did four years of vocational studies in mechanical engineering and tool design – the latter with the long-term aim of helping his father out on the farm. The idea of university was quietly dropped.

  Indurain stuck at the school in Beriain for four years, but then, having just turned nineteen, he quit studying for good. Whether or not the decision was to do with cycling, Indurain’s studies had already cost him participation in one major event – the Vuelta a Navarra in 1983, his home race and one of the most important in Spain – because Unzué felt he had not done enough basic training due to his swotting too hard. On top of that, Unzué observed, the Vuelta a Navarra coincided with his exams. The next year, by the time Indurain had quit studying for good, he already had a contract with the professional team.

  When Indurain signed with the Reynolds amateur squad in the spring of 1983, the team had come a long way from its starting point in 1970 as a threadbare, tiny junior team from the little-known town of Irurzun in north-western Navarre. Since 1980, Reynolds had had both an amateur and professional squad, the latter soon to contain figures as well known as Ángel Arroyo and Pedro Delgado. Reynolds themselves would go on, first with Arroyo, then with Julián Gorospe, another promising Basque rider, Delgado and Indurain, to become Spain’s most successful team of all time, and – with the team still running – it has now become cycling’s longest-running squad in the post-War era. Movistar, Reynolds’ latest mutation, has now been ranked the world’s number one team for the last three years.