Indurain

by Alasdair Fotheringham

  ‘Cycling is an exam where the circumstances change, every single day. From your body through to the weather conditions, there are so many variables. It’s not at all similar to any other sport, it’s pure, unadulterated improvisation. It’s not a sport where there are eleven athletes against eleven or eight against eight. It’s one team against twenty-one, one rider against two hundred. Then the field of battle changes, the weather, the opposition …’

  In that running battle against variety and unpredictability, and with a team leader whose stage racing gifts could be exploited deeply but in a very limited number of ways, strategically, Echavarri and Unzué were faced with few options. What was clearly divided during the Indurain years were their roles. Unzué, it emerges, was more often the director who would be in the team car, closest to the action behind the peloton or guiding Indurain in the time trials, ‘because José Miguel was very respectful about that sort of thing and he said that as I’d known him for longer, right the way back to amateurs, it made more sense.’ Echavarri, whilst sometimes in the team car, would often head off ‘on scouting missions, to check out the terrain ahead.’

  ‘It made sense for José Miguel to be the talker and me the doer. It was never discussed, we just both felt comfortable with it, in particular me,’ Unzué says. Another of the team’s strengths, in Unzué’s eyes, was the way that Banesto and Indurain remained very much an all-Navarran project, ‘a sort of continuation of those golden days of SuperSer. In 2012, when we won the team time trial in the Vuelta in Pamplona with Movistar, I couldn’t help remembering being on the balcony of Pamplona town hall in 1991 and our reception there. So our roots have always been here and still are. It is a nice part of the story.’

  Unzué points to the fact, too, that Indurain never moved from Pamplona to a place with a more favourable tax regime like Monaco, even though, as Indurain once said, ‘one of my legs is owned by the Spanish Inland Revenue …’ ‘He stuck to his roots, he was very loyal.’ The one race Indurain said he was sure he would take part in every year was the GP Navarre, which would later be renamed – after he retired – the GP Miguel Indurain.

  After ten years with its headquarters in Pamplona and more than twenty in Navarre, the team’s structure and place in the local community was more than settled, it was all but set in stone. In an equally stolid fashion, when Unzué explains their yearly racing and training programme for Indurain, it sounds more like an insurance plan or pensions scheme than a master strategy to conquer the cycling world: ‘it was basically to race somewhere between 70 and 90 days, a bit more than you would do now, mainly French and Spanish races barring the Giro. You’d mix in some training camps at altitude, and after the Tour, with no Vuelta, a much longer period off the bike than you’d have these days.’

  It was an almost ridiculously simple, unadventurous strategy, but Unzué argues this is what Indurain needed to perform the best. ‘Cycling is very straightforward, you need to race, you need to train and you need to rest. And this was what suited Miguel. This wasn’t [a training and racing programme] for the Classics, in stage racing you’re either aiming to gain time or not to lose time. There are so many talented riders who can shine occasionally, but here it was gaining consistency that mattered.’ As a result, long rest periods outside racing (like after the Tour) and recovery – both during the race and after it – were central to the Banesto philosophy with Indurain. ‘It’s the key, the ability to handle one massive workload on one day, and again onto the next and the next. You don’t just have to handle it physically, there’s the media and psychological pressure which is vital too. In twenty-one days, so much can happen. Without that ability to recover, you’re a dead man.’

  Unzué and Echavarri’s approach was adopted wholeheartedly by Indurain, to the point where the Spaniard used to turn down almost all of the post-Tour criteriums. ‘He realised it was the worst way to try and recover for the following year. If you turned them down, then what did you lose? A couple of thousand euros for each one? You can’t prove, ultimately, what it did or didn’t achieve, but I always used to believe in getting a real rest after each Grand Tour. The criteriums just meant you would wring the last drops of energy out of your body when it’s already been hung out to dry. Get some rest. Miguel discovered that racing another criterium was like adding another rival to the list.’

  What Echavarri and Unzué realised was that using Indurain to win a Grand Tour was, in one sense, like using a man with a sledgehammer for a building demolition job. Whilst very effective at knocking down some extremely big walls, the only way to be certain you can fully exploit such a powerful and – in some ways – inappropriate tool without the man collapsing under the strain was to use it as sparingly as possible and when you were guaranteed maximum effect. The more rest between efforts, the better.

  In Indurain, Echavarri and Unzué had a more than willing pupil when it came to collaborating in this strategy, but not because of the modern, pro-European image that the Spanish general public had decided he should have. Rather Indurain’s typically rural caution and conservatism chimed perfectly with a strategy that minimised risks – as any farmer will try to do, given the degree of unpredictable and uncontrollable elements like the weather that have to be handled. Such is the strength of Indurain’s link to his agricultural roots that urban legend claims that he was pulled out of the Tours in 1985 and 1986 in order to go and help his father with the harvest. ‘That isn’t true,’ Unzué says with a smile, ‘although it sounds like the kind of joke that would have been made at the time.’

  Yet just as Indurain’s team-mates would have been delighted by his lack of airs and graces, but were reduced to interpreting his looks to understand him, there was a flip-side to this seemingly perfect cooperation between directors and riders. The question that lurked behind Indurain’s acceptance of his director’s wishes was whether Indurain was too compliant. ‘I think that more than once he should have put his foot down, because he accepted everything,’ argues Delgado ‘I would always tell him, “Miguel, you have to be more pro-active with your team-mates, you have to make your team, not José Miguel.” Yes, he trusted him, but I remember there were a couple of riders that I told Miguel that he should tell José Miguel not to sign.’

  ‘When they took [the notoriously individualistic] Armand de las Cuevas to the Tour, I warned Miguel that Armand was a rider who tended to ride in his own interests. It would have been better to have somebody not quite as sharp, but who you know will be loyal. Because if you don’t, you’re racing with one less rider. But instead Miguel gave José Miguel a free hand, even though he was the one who was out there suffering. Miguel’s problem was, although he had a very clear idea what he wanted, he preferred to avoid that kind of responsibility.’

  Whilst Indurain wholeheartedly swung behind Unzué and Echavarri’s master-plan, that is not to say that he or his team were given to wringing every last drop of potential benefit out of his time trialling potential. That Banesto mechanics would sleep with Indurain’s time trial bikes in their bedroom during a Grand Tour is indicative of how important the bikes were to the team’s strategy. But Unzué says that Indurain never, to his knowledge, kept a time trial bike for training at home – something that is now de rigueur for top Grand Tour specialists.

  ‘Time trialling was something of a little world of its own at the time, something that only a very few people were involved in. He would train on a time trial bike – and come round here [to team headquarters] to get one – but training on the TT bike wasn’t something top racers automatically did.’

  Equally (and something that once again debunks the robotic image he had abroad), Indurain was no techno-fiend in terms of his bike set-up or having the latest model. ‘He prefers to let his team make the decisions on that,’ Cycle Sport magazine observed in 1995 when comparing Indurain to Anquetil, Hinault and Merckx and their different approaches to the technical side of the sport. ‘He had no computer or power meter, he didn’t have special gearing for the mountains,’ adds
Unzué. ‘But he knew how to interpret his body perfectly, how to read his own engine, when he should decelerate or how to climb. He knew he could take advantage of the rest on descents, which was one of his big specialities. But as the favourite, normally he had to defend what he had rather than attack.’

  This is hardly an attitude to which Merckx or Hinault would give their approval – as favourites, they would argue that it was necessary to do exactly the opposite and sweep their rivals away at every opportunity. But as Andy Hampsten, the American climber who was briefly a Banesto team-mate, told Sam Abt, the point was that Unzué and Echavarri’s conservative approach worked. ‘It’s classic,’ Hampsten, who won the Giro d’Italia in 1988, told Abt. ‘But it isn’t easy. He [Indurain] makes it look easy.’

  It was obvious, Unzué says, that Indurain had immense respect for and dedication to ‘the daily work, the suffering, the training, all of those things you needed to get where he got to. But as for resting up, did he have the sense he was losing out by not going out with his friends or going on holiday or partying? No, he didn’t.’

  ‘When he married, of course he would go on holiday with his wife. But until he was twenty-eight, right back to when he was eighteen, and going into his living room to watch TV wearing his grandfather’s coat, he knew about needing the time to recover. He worked for those results, but his recovery time was so important too, he was so serious about that as well.’

  Indurain’s suitability for the task in hand also added to his shunning of stressful situations, like having to make decisions on the road, or delegate. ‘We consulted Miguel in all the important decisions, but he gave us carte blanche in that way. Miguel rarely would come in to say “bring me this rider”. I can’t actually remember him doing that even once.’ Nor would he come to Unzué and Echavarri, Unzué says, and tell them a particular rider needed to be removed. ‘We’re back to that familiar story of interpreting his silences. Sometimes it’s evident if a rider needs to go. You didn’t have to wait until he said it, you simply sorted it out. In that sense, helping Miguel not to make decisions, that kept him calm.’

  It got to the point where Echavarri and Unzué would always check with Indurain, prior to the team meeting on each stage, to be sure that whatever he wanted would then be carried out. Depending on him to tell the team during the meeting itself was not a reliable method: ‘He’s maybe been excessively hermetic but those characteristics contributed to his greatness. People still respect him now, and that’s without having ever said much. His language has been the language of gestures.’

  ‘More than his words, his palmares tell you more about his progression,’ Unzué argues, and they also act as an advance warning. ‘There was the way of saying, “Blokes, look what’s coming at you, here’s where I’ve beaten you. And here, and here.” On top of that, there was the way he’d race even when he didn’t win.’

  Yet Unzué, as a team manager over nearly half a century, confirms that Indurain had a level of maturity when it came to racing that few, if any, other riders possess. He rarely got angry at races, with only three reported occasions in a career of twelve years: once when the team allegedly obliged him to stay for an extra day in Paris after the 1991 Tour (which Unzué denies happened), once in 1995 (of which more later) and once during a Tour de France when Danish racer Jesper Skibby trod on Indurain’s foot. ‘I remember seeing him get cross occasionally, but part of his greatness was how he accepted everything. When he was beaten, he was beaten. You might even say he was insensitive to what had happened. He was very ambitious, but that anger, that “fuck” and hammering your fist on the table that we all do when we lose – he didn’t have that.’

  ‘I very rarely saw him pissed off or angry, and then only towards the end of his career when things weren’t working out as he wanted them to,’ Delgado adds. ‘He always wore that mask.’ Given his superiority in time trialling, Indurain exuded a huge sense of impregnability. ‘I never knew when Miguel was going to crack, never imagined it, I couldn’t tell. Almost every other rider has a gesture that gives it away, but Miguel was a robot.’

  ‘Behind that mask, he was suffering,’ Unzué adds, ‘but he was a good actor, and he was, and still is, a very good card player.’ There was even one point in the 1992 Tour where Indurain fully exploited his ability to hide his feelings to hide a major crisis. The night before the rest day in Dole, Indurain began suffering badly with an infected tooth. His team talked it over with their coureur regionale, Jean-François Bernard, who recommended a local dentist he knew. Unzué and Indurain sneaked out of the back door of their hotel for two visits to the dentist during the rest day and solved the problem, caused by an infected filling.

  It says a great deal about the team’s ability to keep a secret, as well as Indurain’s own hermetic nature, that this particular incident was never revealed to anyone outside Banesto until well after Indurain had retired, years later. As Chiappucci himself said, ‘I’ve never seen a single sign of suffering appear on his face.’ Combined with Indurain’s capacities as a racer, it only made beating the Spaniard seem even more improbable.

  The fates could hardly have chosen a better location for Indurain to produce what is widely considered the defining ride of his career – and in the process prove not only that he was a completely different class of racer compared to any other Spaniard, but also that he was the ideal sporting representative for modern Spain. Luxembourg was where Delgado had arrived more than three minutes late for the opening prologue in the 1989 Tour – and effectively lost it. This time round Luxembourg was where Indurain left no doubt as to who – barring accident or disaster – was heading to Paris in yellow. As Indurain’s arch-rival Gianni Bugno said after the time trial, ‘Miguel has won the Tour.’ He also added, ‘There were 180 riders in today’s race and one extra-terrestrial.’ ‘I’ve never seen anything like that in my time as a bike racer,’ added Stephen Roche.

  Roche and Bugno weren’t alone in their comments: after Indurain had obliterated his GC rivals in the Luxembourg time trial, there was a fair amount of comparing him with creatures from other planets. For the first time in his career, Indurain was labelled an ‘extra-terrestrial’. As Sam Abt wrote so memorably and without any of the double-entendres that were later to blur such comparisons with aliens in cycling, ‘anybody who wondered where Indurain had been hiding for the prior part of the Tour got the answer in Luxembourg. He was in a telephone booth changing into a bicycle racing jersey with a very big S on it.’ Similarly, Cycle Sport headlined their July 1996 edition ‘Is This Man a Robot?’, with a picture of an Indurain that was half-man, half-machine.

  That the second best rider in Luxembourg was Indurain’s team-mate, Armand de las Cuevas, only underlined the Spaniard’s superiority. And that Indurain’s margin on de las Cuevas was three minutes showed how far ahead of the rest of the field, team-mate or no team-mate, Indurain had been. Luxembourg 1992 was, in fact, the greatest ever margin recorded in a Tour time trial between the first and second rider, Indurain’s time of three minutes beating the record set twice by – appropriately enough – his spiritual ancestor in the race, Jacques Anquetil, in 1962 at Lyon and in 1961 at Périgueux, by just one second.

  Beyond that, the gaps were simply staggering. Bugno, himself a consummate time triallist, lost nearly four minutes. LeMond – who had won the 1989 Tour thanks to his time trialling skills – was over four minutes back. So too, was Stephen Roche, who had defeated Delgado in the final time trial in Dijon in the 1987 Tour, so clearly was no slouch in that speciality, either. Chiappucci, meanwhile, lost more than five minutes despite dumping the usual road bike – which arguably had cost him the 1990 Tour after he used it in the final time trial – and using an aerodynamic helmet, aerodynamic bars, a disc wheel and shift gears. Small wonder that the idea that Indurain was from another planet abounded. As Abt put it, ‘Very rarely does a rider crush his opponents so thoroughly in a long time trial … for all the good Chiappucci’s extra gadgets did, he should have added a motor.’


  In defence of those defeated so clearly by Indurain, you could argue that the Luxembourg course lent itself to displays of pure strength and clearly suited the Navarran down to the ground. In fact he had swept across the few technical parts of the course, like a stretch of cobbles mid-way through and a trickier, more exposed, section alongside the River Mossler, in such imperious style it was as though they barely registered. But either way, Indurain’s time trial performance could not have been more intimidating. As Nuestro Ciclismo points out, Unzué, who usually acted as driver behind Indurain in time trials, had a crick in his neck and had to act as co-pilot. ‘I had never seen him do anything like that before. Up until then, he’d always had at least one bad moment in each time trial where he had to ease off a bit. That day, he didn’t. Apart from giving him ten or twelve time checks, the only thing I had to ask him was to stay calm. I was worried he would crack at any moment.’ Indurain came up to Unzué afterwards to ask him why he had been so nervous, because he had been tranquilo all the way.

  It barely goes without saying that Indurain registered the fastest time at each intermediate checkpoint, touching 90 km/h at times on descents, despite the relatively flat course. But that Bugno could lose eight seconds on Indurain in just two kilometres, that LeMond could have lost nearly two minutes two thirds of the way through the course, or that after Chiappucci in the Giro, this time the symbolic time trial victim – for Indurain to perceive in the distance, bear down upon and then zoom past with seemingly no effort at all – was double Tour winner, Laurent Fignon: all that placed Indurain’s time trial in the realm of the exceptional.

  Chiappucci had started three minutes before Indurain in the Giro’s final time trial, this time Fignon had come down the starting ramp six minutes ahead. He was, in fact, the third rider that day to fall into Indurain’s clutches, after Giancarlo Perini (Carrera) and Eddy Bouwmans (Panasonic), but by far the best-known. So much for Fignon’s pre-Tour prediction that ‘Indurain won’t have it so easy this year,’ or Bugno’s claim that this year in the Tour, ‘the moment I’ve been waiting for for so long has finally arrived.’ As for LeMond, ‘I thought I was riding well, really strong, but I kept losing time to him in every kilometre. It was unreal and I can’t explain it. We will have to start thinking about who is going to finish second.’ Fignon said, ‘I was going at 53 kilometres an hour according to my speedometer. He must have gone past me at 60 kilometres an hour, and into a headwind. That was no plane, that was a missile.’