Indurain
Page 4
Whilst Indurain’s best-known director in his professional career was José Miguel Echavarri, Echavarri’s key partner in Reynolds was Unzué, Indurain’s director in the amateur squad. Inside or outside Spain, it would be hard to find two directors of a cycling team who have had such an enduring, united or productive relationship as the two Navarrans. Their partnership lasted through to 2007 when Echavarri retired and Unzué, a few years younger, has continued at the head of the Movistar squad. As Unzué once put it, he and Echavarri were ‘the accelerator and the brake pedals in the same team car.’
‘Right from the start, what enabled Unzué and Echavarri to work so well together was how seriously they both took bike racing,’ David García, the author of the official history of the squad, Nuestro Ciclismo, por un Equipo [Our Cycling, Thanks to a team], told me in an interview for the British magazine ProCycling. ‘Spain at the time was crawling with squads that either never paid their riders, or paid them badly, and which were simply interested in riders winning and burning them out in the process. Reynolds was never like that. Unzué and Echavarri always believed that the image of a team, its stability, was as important as the results it obtained. And that was one of the secrets of their longevity.’
‘They had a classic relationship of good cop, bad cop with their riders,’ recalls Eduardo González Salvador, who was an amateur alongside Indurain in Reynolds in 1983, having joined the squad the year before. ‘Echavarri had a gift for talking to people that captivated them. He was like a father figure, but …’ he grins, ‘dealing with Eusebio was like dealing with your mother-in-law! Maybe in private they were equally good or bad as people, but José Miguel, to talk to, was delightful. It was like he’d just dropped out of heaven – in fact the other teams’ nickname for the two was “the little priests” … You felt like you’d been shown the grace of God.’ As directors, they complemented each other well, ‘because Eusebio was much more aggressive and José Miguel much more conservative. They were good at forming alliances, particularly with [Spanish director] Javier Mínguez.’ Much later, Mínguez was to fuse his professional team, Amaya, with Echavarri’s and Unzué’s.
Partly thanks to their hugely successful track record with riders like Delgado and Indurain, partly thanks to their longevity and partly because of their team’s immense influence, Unzué and Echavarri have long been senior figures in the Spanish cycling establishment. Since the inception of Reynolds, few top Spanish riders of recent times failed to come under their sphere of influence at some point. Joseba Beloki, three times a Tour podium finisher, is one, and double Tour winner Alberto Contador is another, but even 2008 Tour champion Carlos Sastre, who never raced for Banesto’s professional team and who signed for arch-rivals ONCE was part of Banesto’s amateur team.
Unzué and Echavarri’s unbroken association with Reynolds makes it unusually easy to trace back the team’s fragile, low-budget roots in Irurzun. The squad began in 1970, as a team of fewer than a dozen riders in their early teens backed by two local restaurant owners and brothers, José and Jesús Legarra. José was initially the only director, and Unzué, after two years of racing in the squad in 1972 and 1973, quickly opted to move into the team’s management, aged eighteen.
In 1974, making what was a clear break with his own past, Unzué sold his racing bike, used the money to buy a car (a second-hand Seat 124), and started directing his former team-mates in what was then called the ‘Irurzungo-Alay’ squad. From then on, as Unzué would later say, ‘For many, many years, the team was more like an adventure than aiming at a particular goal.’ His idols of the time, ‘Merckx, Ocaña and Fuente, were the ones I followed. What impressed me the most was the spirit of self-sacrifice they had, the amount they would push themselves to triumph in the sport.’
The creation of SuperSer, Navarre’s first major professional team, in the mid-1970s, spurred Unzué on to expand the team as quickly as possible. ‘Navarre has always had very strong links to cycling, and Miguel was the crowning moment of that,’ Unzué observes, ‘but the links go a long way back. Two of the brothers who created SuperSer, electrical appliance chainstores, for example, were themselves riders, as well having Ocaña in their line-up, even if he was in decline by then. Their team was part of that culture.’ And so too was – and is – Unzué’s.
At the same time Navarre’s cycling links with the Basque Country are stronger than with the rest of Spain – which partly explains why so many foreign journalists would later write that Indurain was himself Basque. Navarre and the Basque Country, although considered by some local nationalist political parties to be part of a greater whole, are separate entities. But with Basque and Navarran races forming part of the same league, there comes a point in the past where their cycling roots, at least, are one and the same.
After Reynolds, a multinational aluminium manufacturer with a plant in Irurzun, stepped in as main sponsor, Unzué’s eight charges learned that the team’s budget had tripled to 100,000 pesetas [€600] for 1975 and they would soon be wearing newly designed team-kit – inspired by a near-mythical pro team Brooklyn. With a lot more money and Unzué and José Legarra at the helm, the team flourished. As its riders grew older and worked their way into the higher categories of non-professional racing, the team also moved its operating field upwards alongside them, from junior to amateur at the end of 1975. All the way, Reynolds matched their progression with increased financial backing.
By spring 1976, Reynolds was a middle-ranking amateur club made up almost exclusively of Navarran-born riders, and at management level the team retained an equally strong local flavour. When José Legarra quit to do his military service, his brother Jesús took over again. Unzué, meanwhile, had added another string to his bow, as the trainer for the Navarran regional amateur team.
Another major step forward came early in 1978, when José Miguel Echavarri joined the team’s management: the partnership with Unzué that was to last through Indurain’s entire career was forged. A former pro with Jacques Anquetil’s BIC squad, Echavarri had been working after his 1971 retirement in his parents’ hotel-cum-restaurant, whilst retaining his contacts with the cycling world. As a result, he took a small Spanish national squad to Uruguay as his first ever directing job, and when he returned, he brought a top local rider, Hector Rondán, for the Reynolds squad. Rondán paid for the flight over from Latin America and Echavarri put him up in his parents’ hotel. ‘I was just a youngster at the time, I was 24 or so and me and José Miguel started to have discussions,’ Unzué says about how Echavarri began to form a greater part of the team. ‘It was the typical situation where you start to want to see if you can make a dream turn into something more real.’
‘He wasn’t a friend at the time but José Miguel was always very passionate about the project and could see how we’d been growing as a team. And with the support of the people from the club from Irurzun, we started to see how he could work with it, and direct, too. At the same time, the director of the INASA company [Juan García Barberena], the factory which produced the Reynolds aluminium in Irurzun, was very enthusiastic about it all.’
Rondán’s performances instantly placed the Reynolds squad on another level. The South American won races of the calibre of the top-ranked Vuelta a Valladolid, seeing off another top squad, Moliner, containing no less a figure than Pedro Delgado and run by one of Spain’s best known sports directors, Javier Mínguez. In total Rondán took 21 races in two years, hugely boosting the amateur team’s status. He later earned a footnote in cycling’s history books when he became the first ever rider from Uruguay to take part in the Vuelta a España.
Echavarri’s arrival all but coincided with both Unzué’s return to the squad after his spell as Navarran team coach, and with the announcement that Reynolds, having got as high as they could in the world of amateurs, would start a professional squad in 1980. The bulk of the pro team, in keeping with the duo’s liking for building on foundations they had created themselves, was to be taken from the amateur ranks. A deal with Pinare
llo, signed in 1979 after Echavarri and his wife had driven over to Italy in search of top-range bikes – ‘although you’ll have to pay 50 per cent of the sale price,’ he warned his riders – was shelved for two seasons, but then reinstated in 1982 until 2013, in what proved to be one of the longest-standing agreements between bike manufacturers and teams in the history of the sport.
Echavarri had sealed the deal with Reynolds thanks in part to his acquaintance with Barberena, previously the town hall clerk in Abarzuza, where Echavarri’s family lived. The squad’s initial budget was small, just 15 million pesetas. ‘If I gave them any less,’ Barberena once joked, ‘they’d end up hitchhiking to races.’ For all that, much was made in the local press of how Reynolds were the successors, chronologically speaking if not in size, to Navarra’s biggest ever pro team, SuperSer, which had folded in dramatic style in 1976.
To begin with, Reynolds were a long way off from SuperSer’s star-studded line-up, massive team bus and top-of-the-range equipment. However, they had equally strong local roots and quickly showed they were no fly-by-night operation. Reynolds was the first ever team in Spain to ensure their riders were registered employees with the Spanish social security system – even if their application was initially turned down and it took three years of court battles for Unzué and Echavarri to get their riders recognised as workers. Starting their first training camp on 25 December – ‘we’ll let them have New Year with the family’ – was another sign of the project’s seriousness, as was contracting a team trainer, José Luis Pascua Piqueras and a team doctor, the first in a Spanish team, a couple of years later. Echavarri’s decision to exploit the side of the team’s maillots and put extra publicity on them, making them the first team in cycling history to do so, was another sign of their willingness to break a few moulds. From 1982, they got the SuperSer bus back, with none other than Jesús Legarra – the former amateur director – at the wheel.
In 1980, though, all that was to come. ‘Reynolds was a tiny team,’ recollects Dominique Arnaud, one of the Reynolds riders that year and again from 1986. ‘Just twelve riders, ten neos and two pros, Ángel López del Alamo and Anastacio Graciano, who didn’t have that big a motor but he was a veteran, very good at his job and who really helped shape my career. We were the smallest team in Spain, but Echavarri got us into some of the biggest races right from the start. We began with a training camp in Mallorca and from there on we went to the Vuelta a Valencia, Tirreno-Adriatico, Milano–Sanremo.’
‘It was small but it was never bordelique [chaotic]. They did as well as they could with very limited means. But they were scared of doing the Tour, they had too much respect for it. Finally when they went in 1983, they had a huge inferiority complex. But little by little, they improved. At the end of the day, like everybody else, they had two legs and a bike.’
‘It was something that happened a lot in that era,’ Pedro Delgado, who joined the team in 1983, observes. ‘If you look at the number of Spanish professional teams, it goes from two or three in 1980 up to seven, eight, or nine by 1983 or 1984. Most of them were amateur squads with a long history in that sector, like Reynolds, who suddenly got given a bit of extra money and hit the big time, in that they found themselves in a position to race the Vuelta a España. The problem was that with this sudden proliferation of teams cycling got a lot more expensive too, and some of these new professional teams found that they couldn’t afford their riders’ wages so had to fold and disappear.’
What made Reynolds stand out from the rest of the multiple professional rookies’ squads, though, was not just that economically Unzué and Echavarri made the team as secure as possible. In addition, rather than fold when the professional Reynolds team began, the amateur team was maintained and even improved as a result. ‘When the professional team began, we were all part of the same overall structure, we had the same equipment,’ Jaimerena, who raced with Indurain for one year in the Reynolds amateur squad in 1984 before taking over from Unzué as director in 1986, recalls. ‘Only the jersey was slightly different.’
‘In terms of infrastructure, the two squads, professional and amateur, were very united,’ Eduardo González Salvador adds. ‘I can remember going to the professional training camp in Font Romeu [in the Pyrenees] that January, for example, and spending a week there with them. Training camps weren’t that normal at that time, and we’d mix skiing on some days with training on our bikes on others.’ His brother Juan Carlos, also in the same team for three years, puts it very simply. ‘We felt like we were professionals, racing in the amateur leagues.’
Staff also alternated between the two squads, and the amateurs usually went to races with a support level which was close to that of the professionals – two soigneurs, two mechanics and a director. Riders were, unusually, paid a wage. Indurain received 10,000 pesetas (60 euros) a month, which he used to do up his room in his parents’ home, already plastered with posters of Bernard Hinault, whilst Eduardo González Salvador remembers earning roughly 15,000 pesetas a month (‘Eusebio was always a tough negotiator, and he only paid me half of what I’d earned in Baqué, my previous team, because I was no longer national champion.’)
It reached the point, at times, when the entire Spanish amateur national line-up for a major race would be made up of Reynolds riders. Eduardo González Salvador has one photo of the ‘baby Giro’, as the amateur version of the Giro d’Italia is called, where the whole Spanish squad, management included, was from Reynolds. The only thing indicating they were racing for Spain was the red-and-yellow national kit. ‘It was a boom time in general for the sport. We’d race in Italy, in France on the other side of the border close to Navarre. Basically we were able to fight for the win in almost any part of the country,’ adds Jaimerena.
‘The Reynolds amateur squad was really well organised,’ adds Eduardo González Salvador. ‘Eusebio always made sure everybody knew which job they had to do, too, and the team was well disciplined. Eusebio could read races extremely well, even if he did put his foot in it from time to time.’ Indeed, José Legarra, the first amateur team director in the early 1970s, recalls Unzué, then a seventeen-year-old amateur, taking the almost unheard-of step of dropping back to the support car during a race to give his boss his reading of how he thought it would play out.
The consequence for Indurain of signing for such a well-structured, solidly organised team with such strong roots in his home region was that his progression into the world of amateur racing was both painless and almost instantly beneficial. That he needed far bigger targets than he could find in junior racing was obvious. But at the same time there were none of the external issues that could well have arisen had Indurain been forced to leave home in order to pursue his career. With Reynolds he had the best of both worlds.
Indurain was, says Eduardo González Salvador, ‘a little bit spoiled in comparison to the rest of us. It was logical: he was from Navarre, the team was from Navarre and Unzué had “discovered” him. Unzué has always had a soft spot for local riders, too, whether it’s Indurain or somebody else.’ This regional favouritism was hardly surprising – it was said at the time that in a top Basque team, Baqué, Julián Gorospe, as the local star, was given an easier time than the rest. But Indurain himself was no prima donna. Eduardo González Salvador does not recollect him ever demanding special treatment: ‘He had a few kilos he needed to lose and when you were an amateur, they’d always tell you you could lose some weight. Indurain was another one who got told that. He was one more face in the crowd.’ Echavarri told Cycle Sport in 1995 that he was ‘impressed by his stature and build. I knew he’d been winning a lot of races in the area – everybody in Navarre did – but I was really taken by the fact that here was a Spaniard who was more like a Belgian or Dutch rouleur’ – a solidly built racer whose strengths are best exploited on flatter stages and short, punchy climbs – ‘than your classic climber.’
Whilst Reynolds’ professional team were finding their feet in the early 1980s, the amateur squad was already one
of Spain’s top four outfits of the time together with Orbea, which also had a professional team, and CajaMadrid. There was also a fast-growing Basque team, Baqué, who had forced their way into the hierarchy of better established amateur teams in 1981 when, headed by Julián Gorospe, its riders took all three top spots in Spain’s biggest one-day race, the Memorial Valenciaga.
Reynolds, though, had one key advantage when it came to the squad’s longer-term development. Whilst various teams were fighting for different riders in the better-established Basque Country cycling world, Reynolds, as the only top-level home side could benefit the most from Navarre’s rapidly growing new racing scene. Unsurprisingly, the strength of the squad and its crop of top local riders netted Reynolds the highest number of victories in Spain for any amateur team in 1983. Yet Unzué is insistent that Indurain stood out, even amongst a very talented squad, as exceptional. He even says, ‘What impressed me the most about Indurain was not so much what he did later, but as an amateur.’
‘He was a great observer, always almost in silence, because he’s never been a great communicator, but no matter how obscure the corner of the world we might be in, he’d remember what it was like. That hugely intelligent approach to things – that’s how he grew up, that’s how he was and that’s how he is now … Everybody could see how good he was from the day he won his first Tour, but in fact he was doing brilliantly from the moment he turned amateur. In that era, that a rider who was 1.86 metres tall and who weighed in at nearly 90 kilos could become what he became was all but inconceivable.’ One of the more scurrilous rumours about Indurain as an amateur is that whenever the race hit a hill, the cry would go up in the peloton: ‘Here comes Miguel’. But not because he was on the attack; rather it would be a warning that a hefty lump of Navarre-born bike rider was struggling on the ascent.