Indurain

by Alasdair Fotheringham

  At the other end of the political spectrum, during the 1993 Tour, a heavyweight political columnist in the conservative daily, ABC, wrote, ‘Once the Tour de France is over, we need Indurain to have a prime time television show to explain to the Spanish public the way he thinks, the way he acts, and the way he is … we can ill afford not to take the advice, experience, motivation and assistance of such an exceptional human being both on the sports field and off it.’ Indurain was not just, then, a sports hero; as the ABC writer put it, Spain itself needed to be – as the made-up verb expressed it – Indurainised.

  It was not only the broader public in Spain; the sporting glitterati also lined up to be associated with Indurain. As Unzué says, ‘Tomba, Schumacher, Prost, Maradona – when we went down to the Expo ’92, they all wanted to see Miguel, to be with him, and that association was something that shows you where cycling was and where Miguel had taken it. You could see how impressed these other top names were, you could see how much he was appreciated.’

  Yet Indurain’s broader appeal was partly because he remained very much the boy next door, whose idea of heaven, as he once said, was ‘to live and live well’, whose idea of hell was ‘the bad things one has to live through’, whose favourite music was ‘songs where you can understand the words’ and whose favourite food was ‘whatever there is going, so you can put that down [as your answer]’. His simple, direct, unpolished answers made him come across as accessible and familiar as well as glamorous, fashionable and able to demolish the Europeans at their own game.

  For much of the foreign press, what came across to the Spanish as irresistibly avant-garde in Indurain (and at the same time, bizarrely, very familiar), was just plain dull and about as charismatic as a brick. ‘Do still waters run deep with Indurain?’ the celebrated New York Times cycling writer Sam Abt argued before offering a classic punchline: ‘Do they run at all?’ Instead, the international press championed mountain challengers like Claudio Chiappucci. ‘Against the steady, stoic, unflashy Miguel Indurain, Chiappucci was everything the Spaniard was not: unpredictable, aggressive, exciting. He was El Diablo, who so fully embraced his nickname that he rode time trials with a cartoon devil on his helmet,’ Richard Moore wrote recently in his book on the Tour de France, Étape.

  But the Spanish did not care. They would point to the risibly small amount of time Indurain had lost thanks to Chiappucci’s breakaways, to Indurain crushing Chiappucci in the time trials. Panache might get the Italian a few good headlines, but it would be Indurain’s name at the top of the overall classification in Paris. Chiappucci, in fact, was precisely the kind of rider – impetuous, inconsistent – that the Spanish did not, briefly, want to know about at all. They had seen too many of them in the past. After Indurain won the Volta a Catalunya in 1991 for a second time, a win achieved according to El Mundo Deportivo without ‘a single lock of his hair falling out of place’, the newspaper went on to say that, ‘With [previous Tour winners] Ocaña, Delgado and Bahamontes we were dependent on their moods and risked the most absurd of defeats. Indurain is the most dependable rider in Spanish history.’

  ‘Modern cycling has moved on, before it was all decided in the mountains,’ Indurain argued when asked about how he felt about his new style of racing, ‘now it’s opened up to other options.’ Had he adapted himself to modern cycling or is it the other way round, the paper asked? ‘Let’s say it’s both, me changing towards a new type of racing and the racing adapting itself to a new generation, the era of Alcalá, Breukink, Bugno’ – the latter described by Indurain as ‘the new face of racing this year, along with me.’

  Having established himself as the dominating force in the Tour de France, the question of what Indurain sought to conquer in the years to come was critical. But rather than divide his targets, Indurain made it clear that July was what mattered the most, even if he said: ‘There’s Milano–Sanremo, there’s Liège–Bastogne–Liège, there’s the Worlds. None of them is the Tour but I’d like to be up there. What’s evident is you can’t be up there in the Classics and the Vuelta and the Tour. You have to make some decisions.’

  ‘I’ve tried to shape my body towards winning in any of the races there are. But you can’t try to win everything. I have to select.’ After the events of July 1991, it was clear which race Indurain had chosen to make his top priority. All that remained to be decided was the approach path.

  What helped establish Indurain in 1992 as a modern-day hero in the eyes of the Spanish was, curiously enough, not so much his decision to race the Tour, but to do the Giro d’Italia instead of the Vuelta. Never won before by a Spaniard, Indurain’s decision made it clear he was operating on a European racing programme, rather than sticking to more familiar home turf. Furthermore, in trying for a Giro–Tour double – the first Spaniard to do so seriously since Ocaña briefly toyed with the idea in 1974 – Indurain was raising the Euro-bar for the Spanish in style.

  Paradoxically, the Giro at the time was an event with far less of an international flavour than it has attained in the last decade. ‘In that era, the Giro was much more homely,’ Indurain recalled in an interview I did with him for ProCycling a few years back. ‘It was much more the Italians’ own Grand Tour where foreign riders didn’t have so much influence or, normally, have much effect on the racing. These days it’s far more similar to the Tour de France.’

  ‘From the start of each year it was clear that I’d be going for the double but the Giro wasn’t ever my main objective. It was all about the Tour. If I did a good Giro, well, that was a bonus. The Giro–Tour double is definitely doable but you’ve got to have the right mentality and you have to know how to spend your energy and when. You can’t just go rushing into the start of the season, for example; you have to take things a bit more slowly and get closer to your top level when you get closer to the start of the Giro itself.’

  There were other advantages to his heading for Italy. Already, when they had first taken part in the Giro d’Italia with Pedro Delgado in 1988, Banesto had discovered that the first halves of the flat stages would be far less manic affairs than their equivalents in the Vuelta or Tour. ‘It all fitted together a bit better than it would nowadays when the rivals come to the Giro in top form and the route in the first part of the Giro is much more complicated,’ says Unzué.

  ‘The easy Giro start was ideal, too, if you looked at it and the Tour as a whole. Plus there was the attraction for us of winning the Giro in any case.’ There was pressure, Unzué says, for Indurain to ride the Vuelta, but fortunately having Delgado – a double Vuelta winner and very much in contention in 1992 and 1993 – to head their line-up there made it less of an issue. ‘Banesto wanted Miguel to ride the Vuelta too, but fortunately they never questioned the calendar he had.’

  The other option, of course, would have been to head to the spring Classics. But as Arnaud explains, Banesto saw drawbacks at the time in placing too much emphasis on these events. ‘Miguel could have won Paris–Roubaix, physically he had it in his legs. But there were too many risks. Flèche and Liège were races for him. But we rarely went, year in, year out, to these races, so we didn’t get the experience we needed.’

  ‘We’d go to Milano–Sanremo, but more because of the prestige of the race than anything else. We didn’t have the riders for it, and if you don’t go to Paris–Roubaix to do something important, given how dangerous it is with crashes, there’s no point. We’d go to the races we needed to.’

  The strategy with Indurain in the Giro d’Italia was equally conservative. This was partly because he was only elevated to the role of sole leader because Jean-François Bernard, after a spectacularly successful spring winning Paris–Nice and the Critérium International, had had to pull out at the last minute with a bad back. But it was also because the Giro d’Italia was mainly raced by Indurain as a way of form-building for the Tour and so his race strategy was not to expend too much energy. As soon as he lost a Giro, in 1994, he never returned.

  Unintentionally, the 1992 Giro became th
e prototype Grand Tour for the classic Indurain strategy: take time in the time trials and hold off the opposition in the mountains as best you could. The 1991 Tour had been won as a combination of strong time trials and a mountain attack – downhill, but a mountain attack all the same. What the 1992 Giro d’Italia confirmed was that from here on in the Grand Tours, just as they had done in the week-long races like Paris–Nice and the Volta a Catalunya, Banesto and Indurain were going to play it safe.

  So there was no attacking for Indurain when he took Spain’s first maglia rosa since Francisco Galdós, one of the few top Spanish racers in the 1970s, held it for over a week in 1975. He began the race by finishing second in the opening prologue behind France’s short distance time trial specialist Thierry Marie: ‘My gears broke,’ he would tell Basque journalist Benito Urraburu in his typically laconic style a few months later, by way of explanation as to why he didn’t win. Without that gearing issue, Indurain would have quite possibly worn the maglia rosa from start to finish. Instead, in singularly unspectacular style, Indurain moved into the Giro lead on a hilly first-week stage. That was prior to claiming a victory on stage four in the 38-kilometre time trial between Arezzo and Sansepolcro, albeit by the comparatively small margin of 32 seconds over French team-mate Armand de las Cuevas, and strengthening his overall advantage.

  From thereon, as Indurain played a strictly defensive hand, on each mountain summit finish – the Terminillo on stage ten, the Bondone in the Dolomites on stage fourteen (where Indurain suffered a brief hunger knock halfway through the stage, brought on by the cold and rain of that day), the Monviso on stage eighteen and the Verbania on stage twenty – the gap between him and his rivals slowly but remorselessly yawned further open. Whether it was the 1991 Giro d’Italia winner – the ageing, hook-nosed Franco Chioccioli – or the fiery Chiappucci that took off up the road, Indurain shadowed them all, strangling whatever options they might have had. ‘I killed myself just trying to attack,’ Chiappucci said later. With such a level of domination, even one contemporary Spanish account, whilst rejoicing in Indurain’s success, admitted that ‘the race was almost boring’.

  On the final stage into Milan, on the race’s last time trial, Indurain finally turned the power back on in full. After coming down the start ramp three minutes behind Chiappucci, by the finish he had won by nearly the same margin on Guido Bontempi, his closest pursuer. Not only that, he had overtaken Chiappucci near the finish line, in what was to become the classic, trademark image of Indurain at the height of his time trial powers – an almost sinister-looking giant of a figure, unrecognisable and expressionless in his full-face helmet and skinsuit, sweeping past the opposition, en route to another victory against the clock, and another Grand Tour in the bag.

  Did Indurain ever object on a personal level to this kind of strait-laced, efficient racing? ‘I think the management made him much more conservative,’ argues Juan Carlos González Salvador, whilst Delgado suggests that the tactics suited both the management and their lead rider. ‘José Miguel was very cautious and he didn’t like taking risks. He’d say, “this is how it is, this is what we’ve got, we shouldn’t do more.”’ Although Delgado points out that ‘Back then, the figure of director wasn’t so relevant, anyway, as he is now. Often he was essentially a driver on a very good wage and decisions were taken by the riders. The director, therefore, tended to be very prudent.’

  ‘That caution fits in very well with Indurain’s approach, of taking as much time as he could in the time trials and then conserving his energy on the big mountain stages. When I left Reynolds for Orbea in 1985, Echavarri had already based his team around Julián Gorospe because he was a rider who rode very well in time trials and who could stay with the favourites in the mountains. He was absolutely in love with Miguel because he fitted the bill perfectly: Navarran, obedient, someone who listens. Me and Arroyo, we’d answer back, and argue. Miguel, he’d listen to what he’d say and get on with it.’ Rather than being obliged to attack in the mountains, as they were with Delgado, therefore, Indurain’s Giro d’Italia policy was a continuation of the previous strategy, and with a more adept pupil.

  ‘Echavarri was the perfect director for Indurain,’ claims Manolo Saiz. ‘He had that kind of phlegmatic, imperturbable attitude that I hadn’t got and which suited Indurain down to the ground. People talk about [Cyrille] Guimard, but in my opinion, Echavarri was cycling’s best director in the last half century.’

  Historically, Echavarri had had his reference points for this kind of strategy, too, dating from when he raced in BIC in 1969 as a first year pro, alongside Jacques Anquetil, the first rider ever to take five Tours de France. He was ‘the rider that José Miguel admired the most,’ claims Delgado. ‘But when he was directing Gorospe José Miguel was less experienced. When Miguel began to stand out, José Miguel was more practised at what he did’ – and able to see exactly how viable the Anquetil strategy was

  From a foreign point of view, having to handle Indurain’s obliteration of the opposition on the bike and painfully dull press conferences overloaded with bland clichés off it, it was easy to condemn the lack of panache in Indurain’s victories, the absence of any recklessness in Banesto’s strategy. But as Juan Carlos González Salvador observes, ‘The strategy was neither good nor bad. Who has done that, win five Tours in the way that they did? They were basically racing for the Tour, nothing more, and even in the Tour they were ultra-cautious, sharing out the stages, just in case.’ The same went for the Giro d’Italia, with José Miguel Echavarri telling Sam Abt that there were four riders, whom he refused to name, that knew that they owed their stage wins to Banesto. As for the next Giro–Tour double winner, Marco Pantani in 1998, his team-mate Mario Traversoni told me in The End of the Road, ‘I remember Indurain because he was the man of the moment when he turned pro, he was the last señor to ride a bike, I’ve never known anyone as respectful as him … and he was more than capable of gifting stages to other riders. Marco wasn’t like that, he was in a constant fight with himself and as part of that fight he had to be the first to reach the line.’ Inside Indurain’s head, there were no such mental conflicts.

  Banesto were, González Salvador argues, somewhat cold-blooded in refusing to take even the most minimal of risks. ‘They were prepared to base their whole game plan around the Tour. It was a political calculation: ‘We fulfil our electoral promise, let’s not get involved in other battles, we might do a little bit of mucking around on the side, but that’s it. But can we say they’re wrong? They could have found a different way of winning Tours with Miguel. But then Manolo [Saiz] tried doing that with his riders, and look what happened – he blew it.’

  The answer to the question of what Indurain’s palmares would have looked like had Banesto opted to use a different strategy is one which can only remain hypothetical. But the broader issue of what Indurain might have achieved with a different kind of director is one of the biggest question marks that remains over his career. As Juan Carlos González Salvador points out, ‘Their philosophy from the start had been one of total protection, total caution, don’t let anybody see what we’ve got. Pushing him a little harder, just a little, how many more races could they have won with him? With the tenth part of Merckx’s ambition what would Indurain have won?’

  According to 1970s pro Barry Hoban, for Eddy Merckx it was all about winning, no matter how small the race. ‘Whenever someone waved a flag then Merckx would sprint for it,’ Hoban said. For Unzué and Echavarri, when it came to guiding Indurain to Tour victory, the one key factor was arguably the much more mundane matter of Indurain’s weight, and the consequences of it. ‘There were ten to twelve kilos that made all the difference, you had to be really careful,’ Unzué reflects.

  Those ten to twelve kilos, the natural difference between a featherweight climber and a top time triallist like Indurain, were the key to their strategies – going right back to when, in late 1987, Indurain and Echavarri went to visit Francesco Conconi at Ferrara University in Italy. Altho
ugh he became well-known at a later date as a sports doctor of dubious reputation, at the time Echavarri and Indurain were looking for a consultation from Conconi on a simple question with complex solutions. ‘We were looking for the balance between weight and power output and how best to achieve it,’ Unzué says. ‘Indurain was a man with weight issues. Conconi was a bit of a guru at the time, and he gave us some advice on that. In time, we ended up seeing he was right.’

  The contact was, in any case, relatively brief. ‘We should have worked with him for two years,’ Indurain once said in 1990 to Josu Garai, ‘to know which training plans were the best for me, but finally we only went to see him for three months, from December 1987 to March 1988, just after Milano–Sanremo. We had to do a power threshold test and some lactic acid tests, in theory each month.’

  Indurain says that the training plans were overly strict and did not work well for him. On the plus side, he says he learned a lot about ‘taking responsibility for my training plans and my diet. But in general the training plans were too tough.’ (Interestingly, at least one later piece of research suggested that Conconi’s threshold test, once considered definitive, tended to over-estimate endurance athletes’ strength.) In any case, with the Italian option closed, Echavarri and Unzué once again acted as his main training consultants.

  ‘What we did was optimise his talents and help him not to lose what he’d gained in a time trial,’ Unzué says. ‘Maybe I was always excessively prudent with him, but that’s because I didn’t want to make too many mistakes. I work to win, not to put on a performance, because you never know what’ll happen the next day in a stage race.’