Indurain

by Alasdair Fotheringham

  At the same time, as Juan Carlos González Salvador recollects, when he was racing against Banesto, as a rival Indurain’s combination of general niceness with such inner and outer strength made matters worse, not better: ‘I can remember in the Vuelta a Valencia, which would be the first race of the year that he’d do, Miguel would be there, ten kilos overweight from the winter. I’d have done Murcia and Andalucía and so on and when we’d get to a climb that I needed to get over to go for a bunch sprint, Miguel would start pushing me up it! And I was in another team! Can you imagine the class he had to have: six or ten kilos overweight and at the start of his season, being able to do that? Basically, he was playing in another league.’

  The arrival of Bernard represented a considerable consolidation for Banesto in their Grand Tour line-up in the 1990s. But up until the 1991 Tour, in the stage races that were Banesto’s top targets, another Frenchman in the team already had multiple roles as race captain, domestique de luxe and general wheeler-dealer: Dominique Arnaud.

  ‘Dominique was one of the most important riders Reynolds ever had in their entire history as a teacher for the rest of the squad,’ observes Manolo Saiz. ‘As well as Indurain, he passed on his knowledge to Echavarri and Delgado, who in turn passed that on to Miguel. Echavarri learned a huge amount from him.’

  ‘He was such a key part of the squad because he knew cycling through and through, right down to its bare roots,’ Juan Carlos González Salvador adds. ‘He was a veteran, was widely respected, was a professional racer from head to toe and he was a real teacher for Miguel. Miguel had him both as a reference point and at the same time if we needed allies, Dominique was a great negotiator. If there weren’t any allies available, he would warn the rest of the team that they needed to be on their toes. [Tour team-mates] Marino Alonso was a shieldbearer, [José Ramón] Uriarte as well, good, noble guys, but they just did their job.’

  ‘Perico was very sharp at seeing what kind of strategies were going to be needed, although personally I was a bit surprised he didn’t rebel more against Miguel taking over. Bernard, too, was hugely important. Apart from being a great winner of races in his own right, he was more than capable of saving Miguel if he needed help in the middle of hilly stages. Arnaud wasn’t quite as classy, but he knew the races inside out and he knew what to do.’

  Arnaud’s insight was such that he quickly realised, he says, that Indurain being simpático also gave Banesto a major advantage on the field of battle. ‘He didn’t get mixed up in problems. He was widely liked. And that really, really helped, on occasions when there were echelons or when the racing got tough.’ Assistance from rival teams would sometimes be provided, unasked for, or as Arnaud puts it in a very short-hand form, ‘when it came down to the moments of elbow-shoving in the peloton, if it was Miguel, then it was Miguel. You’d open the door [slang for providing a gap in the line of riders chasing down an attack] for him. Not always, but often. People felt intimidated by him, but not in the same way as they did with Hinault, which was a very different kind of feeling.’ The degree of appreciation for Indurain was such that personal enmity was never an issue. As Arnaud put it, ‘Miguel couldn’t have enemies.’

  As early as Paris–Nice 1989, Indurain had begun to use the strategy of letting his rivals take as great a share of the glory as they could, provided it did not interfere with his main task of winning the race outright. The divide-and-rule tactic was nothing new in itself in cycling, but what is striking is the way Banesto turned it into a near-systematic practice during the five years of Indurain’s Tour success. During that period, excluding time trials, Indurain’s team did not take a single stage win in any of the Grand Tours he took part in. Sharing the glory was therefore a way of lowering the pressure on the team. Up to and including the 1991 Tour, Arnaud as team captain was responsible for overseeing which rivals would be able to go for the stage win – as in deciding which breaks Banesto would not try to close down.

  As Arnaud says, ‘The most important thing to remember was if a team had a rider in a break, that was one team less in your favour if it came to pulling back the move later on. So you didn’t think about this rider or that rider, when it came to letting him go up the road, you looked at what his team could do if you needed them in an emergency.’ Such an emergency, in Arnaud’s time, never arose: ‘It was my job to avoid that. Knowing how to do your job well on a bike,’ he points out with a chuckle, ‘is knowing how to make the other guys, the opposition, work.’ For Indurain, whose entire strategy was based around racing conservatively, it was vital – and Arnaud was instrumental in letting him do that.

  As for the day-to-day mechanics for Indurain’s team-mates of ensuring they got him to Paris in yellow, a lot of the time was spent on patrol at the front of the bunch, not necessarily setting a pace, but observing the pack for potential signs of rebellion. Again this is anything but new in cycling, but it was much harder then than now: back then there was far less technological assistance and as Arnaud says, that made the ‘look-out’ work more important. ‘You could never have less than two team-mates there, particularly as you didn’t have radios in that era. There was no race director telling you through your ear-piece that there was a dangerous corner coming up in three kilometres. It was all done on talking, looks, and making damn sure you read the route book in the hotel room the night before. Jesús Rodríguez Magro was the other key “look-out” for the team and he was really good at it, very experienced. If he wasn’t up there on the front, then it was me.’

  With Bernard, Arnaud, Delgado, Rodríguez Magro and Alonso amongst the line-up, Arnaud says that Indurain’s first Tour bid enjoyed considerable support. ‘It was a hugely experienced, solid team, the only rider who was a little weaker was [Javier] Luquin.’ Nor were Unzué and Echavarri in any sense, as Arnaud sees it and Delgado has already observed, overly prone to micro-managing. ‘Generally, we were allowed to get on with it’, with the only guaranteed point of contact ‘a briefing at the start of the stage.’ But the process of putting the team’s objectives for the day was up to the riders, 100 per cent. ‘They trusted us,’ Arnaud says simply. Unlike many other directors, ‘They might come up a couple of times during the stage in the team car, but it wasn’t systematic.’ This again, he agrees, was an approach that suited Miguel, who could be ‘más tranquilo’ – calmer, left to his own devices – without his bosses breathing down his neck.

  After Arnaud left, the position of road captain in Banesto, and its multiple roles, were firmly established. Arnaud’s successor was ‘Jean-François Bernard, and to a much lesser degree, Gerard Rue and Armand de las Cuevas, although Armand proved difficult to handle. Jean-François, though, was very good at it.’ But by this point, it was taken for granted – and a part of the Banesto organigram – that Indurain was content to defer the reins of responsibility to another rider further down in the hierarchy. ‘It was very easy to work with Miguel, and also he was not a fan of giving orders. If somebody else could do that, then he felt more comfortable about it,’ Unzué observes.

  Yet Indurain’s lack of communication could have become more frustrating to his team-mates than accepted. The insistence on remaining ‘one of the crowd’ could have provoked contempt rather than producing respect, and the delegation of responsibilities could have caused annoyance rather than simply reallocating respective workloads had it not been for one crucial factor: Indurain was not only widely liked as a person, he actively knew how to inspire loyalty, too.

  It was, and is, standard practice for leaders to work for their domestiques in the early races that were of little importance long-term, but Indurain would take that tactic to levels that were almost unprecedented. ONCE director Manolo Saiz cites the time when his squad had tried to put Indurain and Banesto up against the wall on a hard early climb in the last stage of the Vuelta a Andalucía in 1991, when it was led by one of Indurain’s team-mates, Robert Lezaun. But instead of simply sitting up and easing back, ‘like any other leader I’ve known would have done, instead Miguel w
orked his finger to the bone for Lezaun, suffering what it took to get up the first hard climb to the finish, to then guide him through to Granada. All the way.’

  ‘It was the classic situation of a collective [ONCE] versus an individual [Lezaun] who’d never have won that race in his fucking life without a rider with the humanity of Miguel to work all the way through for him. That wasn’t a Giro or a Tour, that was some small race. Any other leader I’d have known would have sat up and said “fuck them all.”’

  Indurain’s hard work for Lezaun en route to Granada came immediately prior to his first Tour de France victory. But as team-mates like Julián Gorospe would discover in two other spring-time races, the 1993 Vuelta a Andalucía and Vuelta a Valencia, when Indurain did a similar amount of spadework to help his team-mate win, this attitude was something that did not change over the years. In this, as in all other facets of Indurain when a Tour champion, it seemed impossible for him to alter. What changed far more, in fact, was how the Spanish public perceived Indurain – and moulded his image into something that to a farm boy from Navarre must have seemed almost unrecognisable.

  CHAPTER 7

  1992: Indurain Is Spain

  Some time during the mid-1990s, I was studying French at Granada University when I was asked by my teacher, a Spaniard – having found out what job I had – who I considered to be the greatest ever cyclist of all time.

  ‘Eddy Merckx,’ I answered, which drew some instant murmurs of disapproval from my classmates and a few mutters of ‘Indurain, no?’ So what, the French teacher asked me in a voice that brooked little opposition, did I consider Indurain to be? My mumbled answer about the sporting value of numbers of Tours won versus other ‘minor’ events like World Championships, Giros, Vueltas and Classics was simply ignored. Nobody cared.

  The wider point this anecdote illustrated – as would countless other discussions I had across Spain at the time with friends and journalists from all walks of life – was simple. For the Spanish, Indurain was not only cycling’s greatest ever racer but also, as one early Spanish biography of him put it, ‘the athlete who has gone the furthest and highest in the history of our country.’ And in 1992 Indurain became representative of Spain per se, the ultimate symbol of how successful the country’s drive towards a modern, pro-European state was proving to be.

  Everything Indurain did mattered hugely in Spain – and at times it seemed anybody who rode a bike who wasn’t called Miguel and who hadn’t worn a maillot jaune on the Champs Elysées at some point or another was written off as an irrelevance. It could have been predicted that on home soil, after winning a second Tour, Villava would name one of their plazas after Indurain or that in Pamplona during its famous ‘Running of the Bulls’ festival, his name would be chorused by chanting crowds between spells of dodging toros and downing Rioja. But the Indu-mania extended across Spain to the point where for a brief spell in the early 1990s, cycling became second only to football in terms of popularity.

  Long-term, it was arguably the sponsors of the time, not cycling, who reaped the benefits, given that most of the broader public’s interest started and ended with Indurain and, at a stretch, Delgado. In 1992, Cycle Sport reported that thanks to their cycling team, public awareness of Banesto had increased seven-fold amongst the Spanish. And that was even before Indurain had won the Giro (which generated five million pounds worth of positive publicity for the bank in terms of television viewing hours alone) and the Tour that season.

  Indurain’s conversion into a living symbol of Spain in Europe wasn’t only because he had won a Tour de France in 1992 that was deliberately designed to take in as many EEC countries as possible and simultaneously celebrate the creation of the EU single market and euro in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. There was also what Indurain looked like – tall and lean, closer to the clichéd image of the northern European than the typical stockier, swarthier Spanish macho. But it was above all how he won: it might be a dull strategy, it might look unspectacular, but it was coolly calculated, business-like and above all efficiently captured. Put simply, Delgado might be far more charismatic and his victories far more dramatic, but he also turned up three minutes late for prologues, thereby fulfilling every Euro-cliché about the Spanish predilection for chaotic organisation, unpunctuality and mañana, mañana. Indurain, on the other hand, not only won the time trials, but also crushed the opposition in every contrareloj there was going: hence his representing a modern, forward-looking, new kind of Spain that, amongst other things, kept its emotions firmly under control.

  ‘For the Spanish,’ says Juan Carlos González Salvador, ‘he invented a new style of cycling. When or where had we seen a rider like him get through the Pyrenees and Alps and win a Tour de France?’ This kind of racing, and winning, felt like breaking a huge glass ceiling, one that had stood for decades between themselves and the rest of Europe. ‘Historically, we – my parents and my grandparents, have always have had a sense of inferiority,’ recounts Delgado. ‘We always undervalue ourselves with regards to what comes from abroad. We’re the poor ones, the ugly ducklings of Europe. With Miguel there’s a change of mentality, a point when we realise that in the rest of Europe, they don’t actually eat Spaniards for breakfast.’

  The difference was, as Delgado says, that whilst Spain had won one Tour on three previous occasions, Indurain was the first to win two or more, and to prove – therefore – that this was no fluke. ‘He showed us that Europe is Spain and Spain is Europe,’ Delgado argues.

  ‘We still had that sense of inferiority sometimes, but it was way weaker than before. Miguel broke the mould.’ The year was already a boom one for Spain’s international self-esteem with a hugely successful Olympic Games in Barcelona and a Universal Expo in Seville. But on an individual level, Indurain winning the Tour was proof positive that Spain had as much a right to a place in the gleaming new EU-format of Europe as everybody else.

  In terms of the media, the foundations for Indurain’s metamorphosis had been laid down by cycling’s boom in popularity in the 1980s. The vast amount of coverage cycling garnered in the print media, live prime time mid-afternoon TV broadcasting – just when half of Spain was slumped on the sofa for a siesta – on state channels TVE1 and TVE2 and above all, unprecedented levels of reporting by most of the top radio stations had been established in the previous decade. All that was needed to maintain and justify that virtuous circle of public interest in cycling was high-level success, and Indurain certainly provided that.

  Indurain and Reynolds’ connections to Navarre were almost automatically deep-rooted, given the links on so many different levels – financial, sporting, historical, personal – between rider, team and area. But if we look at one event near the end of the Indurain era – the 1995 team presentation in Madrid – this shows how much Banesto the cycling team had woven its way into everyday Spain’s social fabric, too. Traditionally an event for journalists and sponsors, on this occasion Banesto filled Madrid’s main sports hall with nearly 10,000 fans for an evening’s entertainment that simply re-introduced a team that by then needed very little introduction. The cost was estimated at around twenty million pesetas (€120,000). If Banesto were able to draw such a massive crowd on a week-day in early February in Madrid, the scale of nationwide support by the time July and the Tour rolled around beggared belief.

  One of the most memorable events where I saw that for myself was in Granada in 1995, when Indurain, his brother Prudencio, Tony Rominger and 1994 Giro winner Evgeni Berzin participated in a Mountain-Biking exhibition. None of them were in any way experts on using MTBs, and the racing was anything but spirited. But once again tickets – which were not cheap – in a vast sports palace that could hardly be further away geographically in Spain from Pamplona sold out instantly. Indurain’s presence alone guaranteed that.

  Nor was this the first time that a Spanish cyclist in winning the Tour de France became a figurehead for ‘modern Spain’. In 1959, when Federico Martín Bahamontes won the Tour for the first time in Spa
in’s history, he was seen as representative of the country breaking away from its economic, social and political isolation under Franco and moving into a new era. In 1992, Indurain had a similar role. ‘He was a great hero in a Spain that was moving forward and where democracy was finally taking a firm hold,’ says Manolo Saiz. ‘He’s the figure that shows us what Spain has become in the modern world.’

  But as Delgado points out, this was curious in that Indurain himself was ‘not a mould-breaker.’ Nor, he agrees, was he privately the kind of ‘modern city man’ of Spain’s 1990s, which in theory would be the country’s closest relative to Euro-hombre. ‘He’s very rural, very traditional, nothing at all like the image that was projected of him.’

  ‘He never gave a single headline to the press, but his rivals said so much about him, Indurain’s personality was created by them,’ his sports director Eusebio Unzué argues. And inside Spain, amongst his own people and friends? Indurain’s sparsity of comments in public meant that no matter how much country and folk wisdom there was in him, no matter how little of the streetwise intellectual you could see in him, for the broader Spanish public it didn’t matter. As the sporting conquerer of Europe, he was Miguel el moderno, the vanguard of forward-thinking Spain. As Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, one of Spain’s most brilliant contemporary authors, journalists and political commentators wrote in El País, ‘If, some day, Indurain no longer feels representative of Spain but only of Navarre or Villaba [sic], I think the Spaniards will live the longest dark night of the soul, when it comes to questioning their proper essence. Spain is Indurain, and whatever the Financial Times says we are, too.’