Indurain
Page 6
But behind the scenes, as Delgado says, Reynolds were still far from organised. ‘The team logistics?’ he says rhetorically, as if such a concept was inconceivable. ‘I knew what I was going to race, but there were riders who would get called up on the last day, and told to go and get their bike and suitcase to go to, I don’t know, somewhere like Murcia. There was even a theory, which I didn’t believe, that they [the management] operated like that so that nobody had any idea where or when they were going to race, they’d be kept on their toes and stay race-fit the whole time.’ It was only when Delgado raced for PDM in Holland that he discovered, to his surprise, that there were teams ‘where everybody, not just the leaders, knew at least a couple of weeks before what was happening.’
In Spain, team operations were far more hand-to-mouth – although in a way, that only makes their achievements all the more impressive. ‘José Miguel was more of the man for the logistics,’ Eduardo González Salvador confirms. ‘There was an accountant, probably. Either way, that was it.’ Possibly one of the few differences was that Reynolds had a French assistant, Francis Lafargue, who came on board in 1983, which reflected how seriously the team took the challenge of making it to the Tour de France. ‘José Miguel spoke French more or less, I spoke a bit, maybe one other rider spoke a couple of words,’ says Delgado ‘but you needed somebody French in case there was a problem or when you needed to delegate. If you’re a director you can’t be everywhere – dealing with team meetings, bikes, going to the supermarket to buy food, looking after riders. Francis was like our guide in France.’
Apart from Lafargue, whilst the team had the standard ‘two soigneurs, two mechanics, a director for the races,’ the signs that it was well-off, such as being one of just two Spanish squads at the time with a team bus, were there, too. The wages were also very good. ‘In 1984, I earned 90,000 pesetas a month,’ says Eduardo González Salvador, ‘which was quite a bit of money, and 150,000 pesetas in the second year, which was really big money, and almost more than what riders in that position would be earning now. They were, I think, the only team in Spain that would sign their amateurs up on two-year contracts. They had a really good reputation in the peloton.’
‘It was a very small-scale team, but despite that they were organised,’ Manu Arrieta, the team soigneur from 1982 to 2003, adds. ‘This is why they got better and better riders signing for them. As for the staff, we were treated very well.’ Reynolds was a hugely popular squad, too: ‘We’d get to the hotels in the Vuelta in 1984 and there would be so many people wanting to greet us, we couldn’t get through the doors,’ says Eduardo González Salvador. ‘They’d rip my race number off my back! Now you go to a hotel and there is barely anybody at all. The level of expectation was much higher. Things had a much greater impact in terms of the media.’ In Pamplona too, Reynolds was treated ‘as the home side’, a kind of national team for Navarre in everything but name. ‘But they were very popular in the Basque Country too, because they had so many Basque riders.’
‘Echavarri was the linchpin. At the time, it was all very like talking to a priest, very mystical,’ Delgado recalls. ‘Javier Mínguez was the big name director of the era in Spain, and he was always yelling and shouting at the riders, “Ride for your mother, for your country, for your cojones [balls!]” José Miguel was the opposite end of the spectrum. He’d be contemplative, gently admonishing, he’d say gently, “You’ve made a mistake there.” He’d never give you a bollocking.’ Not that Echavarri could be taken for a ride himself: ‘He wasn’t a director who let you get away with things, he was very intelligent. You could con him once, but never twice or three times. José Miguel knew everything that was going on. He was really on top of things.’
In an interview I did for Cycle Sport magazine in the 1990s, Josu Garai, then a top cycling journalist with the sports daily MARCA, told me ‘Echavarri is always two stages ahead of everybody. Always.’ Echavarri always made a point of getting up early to read all the sports press, he said, ‘so that by the time other people start dragging themselves out of bed, he’s already read the news and is planning his next move … he adores taking apart [team] rivals, not just their form but their psychology as well. It’s a kind of hobby for him to find out exactly what they’re like.’
At the same time, Echavarri’s dislike of bellowing orders at his riders and his treating them more like his equals helped create an unusually close-knit team. As José Luis Laguía pointed out in an interview with Diario de Navarra, ‘in its earliest format, Reynolds was barely professional. What was most important was our friendship with José Miguel Echavarri. We’d have our base for the professional squad in his hostal in Campanas and that was my second home. There were times when he’d give me the post-race massage himself because all the soigneurs had left already. [But] Miguel wasn’t there at the time when cycling had that kind of romantic edge to it, rather he came to the team when it was more modern. Riders like myself, Delgado, Arroyo and Gorospe kept the Reynolds name in the thick of the action whilst that wasn’t yet his responsibility.’
Reynolds, though, did not have an unlimited budget and were unable to stop Delgado and Arroyo quitting at the end of the 1984 season. With Gorospe seemingly so inconsistent he was labelled with the somewhat sarcastic term of an eterna promesa [always promising much but fulfilling little] by the Spanish press – Echavarri and Unzué had started to look for new riders with potential. Signing Indurain, given the brilliance of his one and a half years as an amateur, combined with his Navarran roots and his clear chances of progressing, made all the sense in the world – to the point where they did not even wait until the following season to bring him into the professional squad.
‘He was very young, but I was advised to let him turn pro,’ Unzué would later say. ‘He had won everything that could be won as an amateur.’ By September, Indurain had signed for what he later recollected ‘as probably a little less than one million pesetas a year. But the money wasn’t the most important factor for me, I value other things more.’
Whilst Arrieta’s first recollections of Indurain, from a staff point of view, are ‘somebody really quiet and serious, not the type to tell jokes,’ Laguía’s earliest memories of Indurain are of a gentle giant, as he told the Diario de Navarra, ‘A rider who physically was very striking and who was able to perform really well on the bike. I remember when he attacked, his rivals would claim they hadn’t seen him go past them because nobody wanted to have to chase him down.’
‘When I was one of the team’s veterans, his father asked me if Miguel would be good in the future. I told him Miguel was an outstanding apprentice, someone off the scale. I remember in the physiognomy tests he did in the laboratories of the Clínica Universitaria hospital in Navarre, he broke the machine because of his strength. I had to wait for another two days for it to be repaired before I could be tested on it.’
As a bike handler Indurain could not be faulted, either. His seeming invulnerability when it came to falls and crashes would later become legendary, although one team-mate from his early days, who requested anonymity, does recollect a race where – something unheard of in later years – Indurain actually crashed twice: ‘In a Vuelta a Murcia, he managed to come off twice in one day. The first time, he rode off the road and although he didn’t fall, he had to put his foot down on the ground. The second time he rode into the back of a commissaire’s car. And he was extremely unhappy with me, because he said it was my fault, for not letting him sleep because I was larking about in the hotel room!’
Laguía had one criticism of the early Indurain: a lack of the driving ambition that did not really begin to appear until the 1990 Tour. But as he points out, it was up to the Reynolds directors to foster that ambition – and up to the team to make Indurain aware of just how far he could go. Indurain’s qualities, for the team, were partly his excellent time trialling on flatter courses and his strong sprint in small breaks. Indeed, his talent for stage racing did not – as it would do later – overshadow his one-day raci
ng ability and Echavarri predicted him a great future in the Classics, not multi-day events. There was no doubt that Reynolds had a major gap to fill there: things even got so bad in 1986 that the team was not selected either for Milano–Sanremo, the opening Monument of the year, or for the key warm-up race run by the same organisers, Tirreno-Adriatico, or for any of the Ardennes Classics, because of their lack of one-day racers.
It was possible that Indurain might well just fill that gap. After all, aged just twenty, he had scored his first professional win in the Tour de l’Avenir/CEE, in a time trial against a future team-mate in four of his five Tour wins, France’s Jean-François Bernard. Indurain had also been a lynchpin in an utterly unexpected team time trial victory for Reynolds in the same event, which saw his team-mate Carlos Hernández take the overall lead. (Hernández later crashed out, with Charly Mottet taking the final win.) But where Unzué recalls he was most impressed was how a rider who was so heavily built had handled some of the biggest climbs in Europe. I realised, then and there, that with patience we had a great rider in our ranks.’
Much has been made of the wisdom of Unzué and Echavarri’s decision to give Indurain a chance to participate in a Grand Tour at the first possible moment – aged just twenty, in the Vuelta a España in April 1985. (The Vuelta changed to its current late-summer slot in 1996.) Indurain seized his opportunity with both hands, heading the overall classification of the Vuelta for four days in the first week, a feat that made him the youngest rider ever to lead the race. Yet giving Indurain a spot in the Vuelta was no calculated gamble on the management’s part. Rather, as Eduardo González Salvador recalls, Indurain was only able to take part because González Salvador had fallen sick with bronchitis at Tirreno-Adriatico and Reynolds needed a replacement.
Not everybody was convinced that Indurain would naturally rise to the occasion. According to Eduardo González Salvador, Vicente Belda, later to earn a reputation as a top director and ‘discoverer’ of riders with the Spanish team Kelme, ‘was still racing and he chewed my head off … saying “How is it possible that you are not going to the Vuelta when you can climb so much better than that great lump of a rider?” Miguel was very heavy at the time, and all we knew was that he was a brilliant time triallist. There was clearly a lot of polishing to do.’
The latest reminder of Indurain’s talent for time trialling had come in the opening stage race of the season, the 1985 Ruta del Sol. Second in the opening prologue, second in the final time trial, and third in a long breakaway through the sierras of Córdoba gave Indurain the runner-up spot overall behind Germany’s Rolf Golz, auguring well for such an inexperienced young racer. So, too, did his performance in the Tour du Midi-Pyrénées, where Indurain placed second in the opening prologue, just one second slower than double Tour de France champion Laurent Fignon.
That time trialling capacity was all Indurain needed to pole-vault himself into a top position overall in the Vuelta a España. In a short, flat prologue on broad, well-surfaced avenues in the northern city of Valladolid, Indurain punched well above his weight with a second place behind Holland’s Bert Oosterbosch, one of the top prologue specialists of the era. Indurain’s time on a technical course with two segments of pavé and many corners was also three seconds faster than Julián Gorospe, the Reynolds leader for the Vuelta a España. ‘It is a second place that tastes of victory, given that he is new to the category,’ observed El Mundo Deportivo.
(Indurain was not the only newcomer in the Vuelta a España that year, which was witness to the only time a Soviet amateur team somehow wangled its way into the line-up of a Grand Tour – and fulfilled all the clichés about dour, cagey East Europeans in the process. Interviewed before the race, the Soviets’ director refused to reveal who their best sprinters and climbers were, saying, ‘that’s a secret’.)
On stage two, at 266 kilometres the longest of the course, the peloton were witness to what, with hindsight, proved to be a historic moment: Indurain, despite being injured in a crash the previous day, moved to the top of the overall classification of a Grand Tour for the first time. On this occasion it was more a process of elimination than shining in his own right. Race leader Oosterbosch could not handle even the smallest climbs, in this case three third category ascents, and, as the Colombians upped the pace dramatically in a bid to shake up the overall classification, and then Reynolds took over, the Dutchman lost over twenty minutes by the finish in Ourense.
With Oosterbosch out of the running, Indurain, despite his injuries, moved into the lead. To make a good day for Reynolds an even better one, Gorospe moved up to second and José Luis Laguía took over in his talisman classification, the King of the Mountains. The only thing missing for Reynolds was a victory in the day’s bunch sprint, which went to Sean Kelly after Laguía was foiled in a late attack on a short climb into Ourense city centre.
Echavarri argued afterwards that Oosterbosch had opted to throw in the towel more quickly than others who knew they would have had a real chance of retaining the yellow. But Indurain was more upbeat. Apart from saying that his crash had caused him to suffer more than usual, particularly when combined with ‘far more kilometres than I am used to,’ Indurain described himself as deeply satisfied, if aware that he would not be able to hold the jersey into the mountains. He had suffered badly on the final climb into the Galician city and thought he, too, would be dropped. As it was, he made it into the lead.
Indurain held onto the jersey for three more days as the race wound its way through the mesetas of northern Spain and through Galicia towards the first real challenge of the Vuelta: stage six’s ascent to the dauntingly steep Lagos de Covadonga climb. As Indurain had predicted, he was unable to stay with the out-and-out climbers, but for a neo-pro, holding onto the lead for such a lengthy spell was already a considerable achievement.
What the 1985 Vuelta showed the cycling world and Indurain in the long term was both a clear sign that he had the talent to make it to the very top of the leader board, and also that his climbing was by no means strong enough to keep him there. After Covadonga, where he dropped to 56th overall, Indurain hoped to return to the top spots overall in a time trial in Alcalá de Henares the final week, even though he warned that as a young pro ‘the ideal distance for me is 30 kilometres and that one is 42 kilometres long.’ (Much later in his career, Indurain was at his strongest at more than double the distance). However, Indurain did not manage to make any impact in the Alcalá de Henares time trial, although he achieved a respectable eleventh place overall. As he had predicted, the distance was too great for him to handle.
Two trademark tendencies regarding both his race programme and the media were noticeable in Indurain’s first major brush with the limelight. First of all, when asked if he was going to take part in some top time trials such as the Trofeo Baracchi or the GP Nations, Indurain’s answer was that the team, not he, would decide his race programme: in other words, he was letting somebody else make the decisions. Secondly, there was Indurain’s use of the first person plural, rather than the singular, to answer questions, something much commented on by the Spanish press as unusual at the time. In a pre-PR era, what would now be taken as a way of deflecting responsibility and giving emphasis to the ‘team spirit’ was quite possibly simply Indurain’s strategy to avoid standing out too much.
Indurain completed the Vuelta a España, his first Grand Tour, albeit in 82nd place. Reynolds were impressed enough with a new facet of Indurain, his ability to handle three-week races well, to select him for the Tour when a gap arose in the initial line-up. As first reserve, Indurain was once more a late call-up, on this occasion because of Gorospe suffering from tendinitis. However, his experience there, racing just four days before abandoning, strongly suggested that throwing a neo-professional into a Grand Tour twice in the same year was once too often.
Whilst Echavarri and Unzué had planned for Indurain to quit on stage eight, illness left him out for the count from the word go. Finishing 100th in the prologue, 172nd on stage one
then second last, 177th and nine minutes down on stage two, after a dismal performance in the team time trial, an ill Indurain was forced to quit on stage four after barely an hour’s racing. ‘I’ve got a fever of 38.5 degrees and I’ve got some kind of bronchitis. It’s a pity because in the team time trial the course suited me perfectly and I couldn’t take a turn on the front in the early part, only at the end,’ Indurain reflected.
It would be a mistake to think that Indurain’s presence – or absence – went unnoticed. The pre-race edition of the influential French magazine Vélo had even argued that Indurain could win the opening prologue in Plumelec. ‘Reynolds loses Indurain on the eve of the Roubaix stage’ was how one Spanish newspaper opened its report of that day’s racing. Either way, after a major high in the Vuelta a España and the relative disappointment of the Tour de France Indurain finally regained some traction in the Tour de l’Avenir, where he repeated his previous year’s victory in the time trial, pushing Jean-François Bernard once again into second place, and then took his first road win, too, in a two-up break from Albi to Revel. Together with his lead in the Vuelta, his brace of stages in the race boded very well: ‘He’s shown we’ll have to keep him in mind,’ commented Echavarri.
There was another reason for Indurain to look at more distant frontiers for his career: Reynolds’ increasingly international line-up. The 1985–1986 off-season saw Reynolds lose another of their star riders, Eduardo Chozas, but sign a large number of non-Spanish pros, most of them French. Milano–Sanremo winner Marc Gomez was one and won two stages of the 1986 Vuelta – which Reynolds almost did not race after falling out with organisers Unipublic over payments for hotels – as well as leading the race for four days. Another was Stéphane Guay, who rewarded Reynolds’ faith in him with victory in the first stage of his first ever professional race, the Vuelta a Andalucía, whilst Franck Pineau, now a director with the Française des Jeux team, was signed as a stagiaire in August. Most importantly for Indurain, one of his key future domestiques, Dominique Arnaud, returned to Reynolds as road captain after a five-year absence with French teams.