Indurain

by Alasdair Fotheringham

  Inside Spain, Indurain’s Tour victory gained him automatic entry into the pantheon of the country’s cycling greats. However, his team-mates are adamant that Indurain’s elevated stature had no effect whatsoever on his personality. For all his innate conservatism, this was more surprising than it sounds, given the usual pernicious effects on young athletes of hitting the big time. Indurain, somehow, resisted all that – permanently.

  ‘I’ve worked in all kinds of sport, from cycling to basketball, and I’ve never come across anybody like him. Fame didn’t change him in the slightest,’ says Juan Carlos González Salvador, who after retiring from cycling became an agent for riders and athletes. ‘Unfortunately, just the opposite case is usually the truth. It’s very unusual for anybody who suddenly earns shedloads of money – for kids of twenty, twenty-two, twenty-four, or even if you’re forty or fifty – not to change. Suddenly you’ve got the obsession with photos, the fixation with constantly changing your hairstyle and getting it all gelled up or in a pointy quiff, the sudden snobbishness, the “I’ve got to be better-looking-than-anybody”, all that bloody garbage. Miguel was the opposite, he didn’t change, never has. [He thinks] “I’m not bothered what you think of me, I don’t have to project any particular kind of image, I know what I am … ” That, in my opinion, shows real self-confidence. But that’s not to say he was weird, either. He was ni monje ni marciano – as the Spanish put it when trying to describe somebody conventional, but in a good way – “neither a monk nor a Martian”.’

  ‘When he won the Tour in 1991, he was the same Miguel Indurain as he had been in 1986,’ comments Arnaud. ‘You could ask him about the same things, talk to him about the same things. He is the same even now: much more of a person, more of a man, than interested in playing the champion.’

  ‘He never saw himself as being the big star of the show,’ Delgado argues, and nor was he fussy or even obtrusive as a team-mate. ‘He’s so quiet, you don’t even hear him,’ Jean-François Bernard once said. ‘When he comes down to a team meal, you don’t even hear him pull his chair away from the table.’ There was a limited amount of ‘special treatment’: by the end of his career, Indurain had his own soigneur and for one season his own medic, after the team doctor, Sabino Padilla, decided to quit Banesto in 1995 and Indurain continued working with him. But for years he seems to have unintentionally made a point of not being different from his team-mates; he never insisted on priority for massages for example, nor made demands for special treatment for his bike from the mechanics or for special diets for himself. Indeed, he was so good at not standing out from the rest that Delgado recollects one occasion when Indurain could obviously have asked him to change something and instead it was Indurain who put himself out – quite considerably.

  ‘When Miguel became race leader in the 1991 Tour, I started sharing rooms with him. I got put in charge of handling the room phone, making sure he got left alone and so on. And then one day I got up to the hotel room, after four or five nights of sharing and I see there’s another team-mate sitting on what ought to be my bed. And I asked, “Hey, what’s up with Miguel?” and the team-mate answered, “he doesn’t want to be in the same room as you.” My first reaction was “Whaaat?” but then I went to find Miguel and asked him, straight out, what had happened. Indurain answered, “Ufff, Pedro, I’m sorry but I’m having a really rough time with you in the room.” Well, I always did read or go to bed a bit later than the others and I had said to him for the first few days we were sharing, if the light’s bothering you or whatever, let me know. But Miguel said no, it wasn’t that: “it’s because you make me feel really hungry”.’

  ‘Miguel really had to watch his weight … And imagine, you get to the room after the stage and there I am, stuffing myself on a sandwich, a beer, some cakes and maybe a big belch afterwards. And you’re nibbling on some muesli. And on top of that I’d say to him, as a joke, “God I’m hungry!” As Miguel put it, “I’ve suffered enough on the bike to put up with you stuffing your face as well.”’

  But as Delgado says, what was really surprising was that Indurain had not insisted that Delgado, not he, change rooms. Nor, as was another option, had he made Delgado go into their shared bathroom every night to eat his snack. Instead, Indurain – the Tour de France leader – packed up his suitcase and went down to the hotel reception to find another room himself. It was not a question of low self-esteem, Delgado argues, just that Indurain was incapable of viewing himself as different in any way from the other riders in the team – and therefore it was up to him to sort out the situation: ‘As a fan, you’d look at Miguel and you’d say, “He’s not a normal person walking down the street, he’s God.” But Miguel looks at himself and sees himself as normal, and he found that kind of hero worship or idolatry hard to understand.’

  Amongst the staff, Indurain’s lack of fussiness and failure to insist on special treatment even as he grew more famous made him appreciated, but they were also – privately – marvelling at how little he had changed. ‘I’m pretty sure I was the first person ever to give him a massage, and he didn’t care, ever, if he was the first or the last in the queue,’ says Manu Arrieta, a Reynolds and Banesto soigneur for more than twenty years. ‘It reached the point where if you forgot to give him a massage one day, he wouldn’t say anything. He never wanted anything different, not even after he had won the Tour or if he was really tired.’ Arrieta sums up Indurain’s personality perfectly, perhaps, when he says, ‘As a person, Miguel was exceptionally normal,’ meaning that for someone that special to be that normal at the same time was in itself bizarre, but surely worthy of admiration and respect, too.

  If there was one way that Indurain was unusual, Arrieta says, it was in his failure to talk at length – as most riders do – whilst on the massage table, as part of their way of de-stressing from the day. ‘If you asked him something, he’d answer, but he wouldn’t volunteer information.’ The one time Indurain showed any anger – or indeed any kind of intense emotion – came during a Giro d’Italia. ‘It’s engraved in my memory because it was so unusual. Chiappucci and [Marco] Saligari had gone on the attack and that was the only time on the massage table that he sounded pissed off. He said, “Fuck, I could have attacked them but then it’d have been tricky on the descent.” Hearing Miguel saying that word, “fuck”, and sounding angry, it was completely out of the ordinary, never happened before or since.’

  ‘He’d be satisfied after a time trial, but he didn’t let it show much. But it was the same with everything. I’ve known champions – and I’m not going to tell you who – whose wives would tell me how glad they were that their husband’s gone off to the race because they were so picky about their food, their spaghetti, their pasta. But Miguel, there was never any fuss like that when he was with us. In that he was exceptional, too.’

  Yet as Delgado says, Indurain was not only a humble champion, but one who could easily disconnect from his sport. ‘He’s not obsessed with cycling … He likes it, he enjoys it, he was very good at it, it is his hobby, but he was never totally absorbed in it. It’s still like that now … he’ll say, “If it’s less than eighteen degrees centigrade, I’m not going out,” “If the weather’s such-and-such, I’m not going out.” It was his job, and he really enjoyed doing it, and it wasn’t as if he had to beat himself up to do it, he was so good at it that it was easy for him. When you talk about Miguel you’re talking about somebody normal, but with incredible physical gifts and a capacity to read a race that was off the scale, too.’

  ‘As a racer, he was the most natural human being in the world, very straightforward, very careful,’ adds Juan Carlos González Salvador, who joined Banesto’s professional team in 1990, after racing with Indurain in the amateur squad. ‘He didn’t take unnecessary risks. For example, he’d always have a spare pair of shoes in the front car and in the second car too. And he was famous in the peloton for how he used to get rid of the air conditioning in hotels.’ At a time when hotel room temperature controls were unified unde
r the receptionist’s sole command and the clients just had to put up with it, Indurain would borrow a screwdriver from the mechanics to take out the ventilator completely. ‘He didn’t do it because he was fussy, it was just that he knew how important the Tour was, he didn’t want to catch cold and Miguel knew he wouldn’t really suffer because it was hot.’ This was one of the very few areas when Indurain risked being unpopular with his team-mates for the sake of the Tour. As Unzué recalls, ‘He’d be absolutely fine in a baking hot room and his poor room-mate would be frying.’

  Team insiders also noted Indurain’s exceptional powers of observation, both of his rivals and – even more unusually – his surroundings. It wasn’t just that like most farmers, Indurain was a real appreciator of countrysides and landscapes, taking a notebook and pencil along with him when away from Navarre, to make sure he wrote down the names of towns and regions he liked so he could re-visit them after retiring. Indurain was, Arnaud says, very methodical in other ways, too: ‘He’d always be sure to get that extra’s hour sleep. Back then, the Tours were three and a half weeks long. So that made for an extra day’s sleep.’

  In general, Indurain proved to be an unremarkable team-mate to room with. Delgado says, ‘He was neither very chaotic nor extra tidy, somewhere in the middle.’ As for his outside interests on the race, the joke going round Banesto was that Indurain had taken the same book with him to the Tour for years, but that he never got further than about page 60. In a kind of literary Groundhog Day, Indurain once admitted, ‘I’ll read the one chapter, fall asleep, and then have to read it again the next night.’ But he had no private superstitions of the kind so many riders end up half-believing in – such as putting on one sock before the other before races or pinning on the race number in a particular way – or at least none Delgado knew about. As he puts it, ‘Miguel never told that sort of personal stuff to anybody.’

  At the same time, his team-mates could appreciate that behind the amiable, unflappable and utterly unassuming exterior Indurain knew, very much, what he wanted and how to get it. ‘Miguel wasn’t one to say he’d studied a route, or to talk about his training, like some riders would do, talking. Miguel would just do it,’ Juan Carlos González Salvador says. ‘When a sponsor put out a kind of new teeth brake in the 1990s, Miguel refused to use them from the word go. Instead, he insisted on using a certain kind of disc brake, and it was that kind of disc brake or nothing.’ He recounts an occasion when Indurain made the Banesto mechanic, Carlos Vidales, change his bike gears completely fifteen minutes before a time trial. ‘But he did so quietly, never making a fuss. It was always a quiet battle. From the outside, everything seemed to be perfect for Miguel. But that wasn’t the case.’

  Equally, the claim that Indurain was not, actually, capable of experiencing pain – as some reporters would imply with all their talk that he was from another planet – is clearly rubbish. As Juan Carlos González Salvador insists, Indurain’s secret was that he was more used to living in tough conditions than others thanks to his rural childhood. That was a huge advantage in the Tour, particularly in the early 1990s, when hotels and transport were nowhere near as comfortable as in modern-day racing.

  ‘It would be totally wrong to say that Indurain didn’t suffer. It was more that he was used to it, he’d had a tough upbringing, working all weathers in the countryside. So who cares if it’s hot or cold? It’s not a big deal.’ Speaking as if he were Indurain, he continues, ‘Why should I care if I’m hot in bed? Another thing would be working in a coal mine.’

  For all Juan Carlos González Salvador insists that Miguel was ni monje ni marciano, Indurain’s unwillingness to create a fuss did create a certain unearthly charisma about him – one that was to be pointed out, time and again, as he racked up the Tour wins. His natural quietness, particularly amongst the garrulous Spanish, helped reinforce this slightly other-worldly quality, too: the sense of silent strength. Delgado believes his quietness, despite the fame, gave him more of a presence, made Indurain somebody people were keen to get to know, but were somehow aware that it was never going to happen completely. During much of his career, Indurain remained an amiable enigma, difficult to understand for his fellow-countrymen, and all but incomprehensible for those from outside Spain: possibly it has never been harder to tell what truly made a cycling champion tick.

  ‘In 1988, when I met him, he would barely talk,’ Delgado says. ‘He’d listen though. But that almost made people like him more, because as he didn’t talk, people would be more inclined to think of him as being a nice bloke, not like me – people see me talking a lot, and that gets them more annoyed.’

  Unadventurous as he was, ‘Miguel wouldn’t even come to the door of the hotel on an evening in the Tour. Well, we might have gone out for a moment, but as he was so quiet, you’d not notice he was there. There’d be flashes of humour, but only when he was in a really secure situation. Miguel is more one to finish off a phrase, to confirm what somebody else had said.’ As for riders’ almost universal habit of recounting race anecdotes of an evening, ‘Indurain was never one for doing that. It’s only now he does it, but more than an anecdote, it’s normally a small incident that forms part of an anecdote.’ But for all Indurain’s seriousness, that does not mean he is averse to being the subject of gentle rib-tickling: ‘I take the Mick out of him about it, saying, “Wow, Miguel, just listen to all those stories you know,”’ says Delgado with a grin. ‘He doesn’t mind.’

  This accessibility, quietness and innate humility made Indurain hugely appealing to work for as a team leader. Yet the flipside, as Arnaud recalls, of not having a demanding boss was that Indurain was often not demanding enough. It reached the point, in fact, where he was so inarticulate about his requirements inside a race that episodes like when he told Delgado he was suffering in the 1991 Tour were real rarities. Rather it became necessary for his team-mates to read his expressions, instead of waiting for words that never came.

  ‘It was difficult because Miguel didn’t talk. Above all, we’d guess what the orders were by working out how he felt from the way he was looking at us,’ Arnaud says. Indurain having been with Reynolds/Banesto all his career was a huge help. ‘Above all, he’d been my team-mate before he’d been my team leader. I knew from his face if he was in a bad way or a good way. Things like that helped, but you had to be a good judge.’

  Only the odd gentle Indurain-esque joke would render the process a little faster. ‘Sometimes I’d ask him “How’s it going?” And he’d answer “Mavic. Ma-vic.” In those days we had Mavic wheels, and if he wasn’t up to going so fast, he’d say, “Ma-vic.” In other words, if you could read the words on the wheel as it went round slowly, he wasn’t going so well.’ For a good day, ‘he wouldn’t say anything. You could just see it for yourself.’

  For his team-mates depending on Indurain to be in the mood for jokes even whilst he was suffering was, to say, the least, an unreliable method of knowing whether they should go flat out from the start of a stage or soft-pedal for the day. But there was not much to be done about it, and on the plus side, the image of a strong, silent, inexpressive type certainly had its benefits when it came to playing mindgames with his rivals. This was ironic, considering that Indurain was hardly scary as a person. He just looked scary, according to Arnaud.

  ‘It helped, definitely. He was more intimidating that way. But that wasn’t really intentional. It was part of his being a simple, straightforward sort of guy.’ Furthermore, although his pollen allergies and cold weather were definitely chinks in his armour, Indurain not only appeared impregnable, he also gave a good impression of being indestructible. In a sport where crashes are relatively commonplace, his major injuries during his career, both amateur and professional, could be counted on the fingers of one hand: a fractured wrist in the amateur Spanish Nationals in 1981 and again in the Vuelta in 1989 and a fractured collarbone in the Volta a Catalunya in 1990. In the Tour – nothing. For someone who rode nearly 70,000 kilometres’ worth of Grand Tours during his care
er – the equivalent of pedalling more than one and a half times round the planet, and without even counting probably the same distance again in lesser events – that is a remarkably low total. It also meant that virtually nobody in the peloton had actually seen Indurain fall off.

  Indurain’s unflappability, which Arnaud said was the thing that impressed him the most, never changed. Gerard Rue, Indurain’s team-mate from 1993 onwards, once recalled being in an ultra-light aircraft en route to a criterium alongside Indurain, when a storm broke and the aircraft began bouncing around in the turbulence. Whilst everybody else, from the pilot to the passengers, began to panic, Indurain was the only person on board who held his nerve, repeating the phrase tranquilo, tranquilo to try and calm everybody down. The plane, thankfully, landed undamaged.

  Given his mask-like lack of expressivity, refusal to panic and general air of invincibility, the only option for Indurain’s rivals was to go on the attack – and hope that Indurain would crack. However, it was a daunting process. ‘The only time you could really test out Miguel was if it was bad weather, but if it was good weather you had to test him 100,000 times to see if he was really having a bad day or not,’ says Abraham Olano, later tipped as Indurain’s successor but his rival during an earlier part of the 1990s. ‘Generally, you got the feeling he could ride his bike without having to turn the pedals. His position on the bike was very hard to read, he didn’t make any gestures to give anything away, ever. You could always tell when I was tired or suffering, ever since I’d broken one of my collarbones, it would slump a little. But with Miguel, the only time you knew he was in a bad way was when he got dropped.’

  The unremitting, expressionless superiority he seemed to exude apparently played on the minds of some of Indurain’s top rivals. ‘Tony [Rominger] was a bit obsessed with Indurain,’ claims Olano, ‘but Bugno was even more so. Even in a smaller race like Bicicleta Vasca, it got to the point where Miguel would beat him in something like a sprint’ – not an event that normally wins or loses you a race outright – ‘and you could tell Bugno was fed up with even that, always a bit angry, grumbling about him a lot.’ As for Rominger, according to Olano, his team-mate’s fixation with Indurain expressed itself indirectly: ‘he’d always want it to be raining’ – which was when Indurain, in theory, was more vulnerable. But until 1996, the weather in the Tour almost always seemed to be on Indurain’s side.