Indurain

by Alasdair Fotheringham

  What must have made it more upsetting for LeMond was that up until that point, Indurain had been on the defensive in the Tour. True, Indurain had won the opening short prologue in San Sebastián, in front of tens of thousands of delighted Spanish fans – the first to be won by a Spaniard since Paco Errandonea, twenty-five years previously, unexpectedly outpowered Raymond Poulidor. But after the race skirted the Pyrenees for the first time since 1910, Banesto had only taken a relatively disappointing seventh in the stage four team time trial, albeit only losing around 30 seconds on Bugno’s Gatorade squad. ‘I’d have taken anything up to 90 seconds,’ Echavarri commented, ‘so it’s not a tragedy.’ Worse was to come en route to Brussels, when an ambush by LeMond and Chiappucci across the pavés had left Indurain trailing by over a minute. ‘These roads should only be used in the Tour of Flanders,’ Echavarri snapped at the finish.

  But the stage nine Luxembourg time trial placed Indurain and Banesto in another galaxy. Banesto’s pre-time trial estimate had been that Indurain would gain roughly a second per kilometre on his rivals. Averaging more than 49 kilometres an hour – and just a fraction short of 57 km/h in the first 22 kilometres – Indurain more than tripled that prediction. The sledgehammer effect had worked even without Indurain using exceptionally tough gearing – 54 x 46 on the rings, 12 x 19 on the sprocket. But it left the Spaniard more than three minutes ahead overall of all his main rivals, albeit still out of yellow on early race leader Pascal Lino, not considered, even in Lino’s own estimation, as capable of winning the Tour. ‘Now it’s up to my rivals to start getting worried,’ was Indurain’s wry comment afterwards. Echavarri’s analysis made it clear that from here on, the Tour’s time trials were going to be where ‘Indurain has to attack, not on the descents, or in the rain or on the pavé. This [time trialling] is his terrain.’

  ‘He’s made for time trialling,’ Echavarri said, recalling that in 1984 he and Unzué had already thought that Indurain should focus on a future bid on the Hour Record, recently beaten by Francesco Moser. Echoing Unzué’s comments that Indurain never had a time trial bike in his home, he added, ‘There have been no aerodynamic studies … his position on the time trial bike is what it should be naturally. When the athlete’s tribars started to be used, he was one of the first. Apart from his exceptional cardiovascular qualities’ – his resting heart rate was a very low 42 bpm – ‘he also has exceptionally long femurs, just like many of the champions before him.’ Echavarri also mentioned Indurain’s height as something that made him stand out, from the Spanish crowd at least. ‘At 1.88 m, that’s the complete opposite to what we’ve always had in Spanish cycling.’

  The bike that Indurain used was his standard time trial machine, with the cranks of 180 millimetres one of the few areas that stood out as radically different – a consequence of those long femurs – as well as a smaller front wheel (a type now banned by the UCI) to give a more aerodynamic position. Indurain tended to use a normal saddle in time trials, not liking those with extra padding. But the tri-spoke front wheel and rear discwheel, the aerobars, the slightly more oval-shaped, aerodynamic frame – all of these were standard fare. It was only the athlete that was truly different.

  Such a colossal contrast between Indurain and the rest of the field not only set him up for Spain’s first Giro–Tour double, it also felt like the start of an era, of not one but many Tours. ‘To describe what Indurain did is a question of getting the Spanish Royal Academy Dictionary [Spain’s equivalent to the OED] and finding every possible adjective that is equivalent to spectacular,’ said El Mundo Deportivo. ‘Only Eddy Merckx or Jacques Anquetil are on a similar level. It’s not just that Indurain has won every time trial in the last three Grand Tours he has raced, as well as the prologue in the Tour and the time trial in the Tour de Romandie, it’s the how.’

  If the Giro had acted as the testing ground for the prototype of Indurain’s time trial strategy for Grand Tours, then the 1992 Tour was the first time that strategy was launched in full. What is curious is that Luxembourg marked the high point of its effectiveness. Never again would Indurain produce such a dominating time trial ride in the Tour de France and never again would his rivals be crushed so completely. The return of the Pyrenees in their fullest format, rather than a couple of brief incursions, gave the climbers more opportunities to test Indurain’s strength. But the inroads the opposition made in the years to come were, at first, so comparatively minimal, it barely mattered. Indurain, Luxembourg made clear, was here to stay.

  The creation in Spain of the image of Indurain as the modern European racer who had left behind his country’s former limitations and who symbolised a new, Euro-centric España reached fever pitch. El Mundo Deportivo and just about every other Spanish newspaper highlighted that Indurain was not just in a league of his own in the Tour, he was also in a league of his own when it came to Spanish cycling. ‘Our champions have always been mercurial types, capable of one great gesture one day and three days of childish errors. Not Indurain. He is our most secure winner ever,’ the paper said. ‘He is totally different.’

  Whenever Indurain was asked who his most dangerous rival was, up until the middle of 1994, he would invariably answer ‘Chiappucci’. The reason was simple: Chiappucci’s breakaway to Sestriere, soloing across the Alps for 125 kilometres, in a move that, as Richard Moore observed, contained everything Indurain’s time trialling approach seemed to lack. Above all, it had a sense of spontaneity and foolhardiness, a death-or-glory approach that had no place in Indurain or Banesto’s race manual of the time. It was the kind of move that Delgado would have been more than proud to make, had he not been Indurain’s team-mate. Because if Indurain had wound back the clock to the greatest days of Anquetil or Merckx in his time trial at Luxembourg, Chiappucci had arguably done even more than that. His lone flight over the Iseran, the highest point of the Tour, then the MontCenix and finally up to Sestriere had more than an air of mountain geniuses like Charly Gaul, something from cycling’s golden era, about it.

  Chiappucci’s place in the history books was even more clearly guaranteed given that the last rider to soar to victory in Sestriere in the Tour had been Fausto Coppi, forty years earlier, with a margin of more than seven minutes on closest pursuer Bernardo Ruiz of Spain. This time, Chiappucci’s gap on the closest Spaniard behind him, Indurain, was just one minute and forty seconds, but to the tens of thousands of tifosi who egged the Italian up on the final twelve-kilometre climb, it didn’t matter. Chiappucci’s effort, as La Gazzetta dello Sport, Italy’s leading sports daily, put it so eloquently the next day, ‘had made us go crazy’.

  After breaking away from the tiny peloton of chasers, Indurain’s relentless pursuit of Chiappucci on the ascent to Sestriere had initially brought, as I recall it, chanting of the theme music from Jaws from parts of the foreign media in the Tour’s press rooms. Yet that image of Indurain the cold-eyed reptile began to blur a little when, with three kilometres to go, he visibly began to crack. Rather than having a gigantic ‘S’ on his back like in Luxembourg, Indurain started weaving long, stuttering ‘S’-bends in the middle in the road as his strength began to reach its limit. When he came to the line, for all this was the moment when Indurain finally took the overall lead from France’s Pascal Lino, press officer Francis Lafargue refused to let Indurain speak to the media after the winner’s ceremonies, convinced the Spanish star – ‘cross-eyed and only able to repeat the words “I’m hungry”’ – was on the edge of total collapse. ‘It was the one night of the Tour I saw him in difficulty going up the stairs,’ recalls Jean-François Bernard. It also happened to be the one night that Indurain was due to talk to Cycling Weekly, the magazine I was writing for at the time. But when we reached the team hotel – given what had happened, we knew our chances of getting an interview were slim – nobody was about and it was enveloped in a ghostly silence.

  Chiappucci’s move had clearly caused some damage, but the huge poster at the start next day borne by two tifosi – ‘Today – do it like yes
terday’ – showed no sign of coming true. Instead, as Indurain shadowed Chiappucci all the way up the Alpe d’Huez, there was no sign of any more moments of weakness. Even with a week of racing left to go, Indurain’s second outright Tour victory was in the bag. From then on, it would be only slightly exaggerating to say that the only moment Indurain seemed to be in any sort of difficulty – although his dental problems, later revealed, proved otherwise – was on the Paris podium, when he tried to hold the cub-sized Credit Lyonnais cuddly toy lion the race leader received each day with one hand, and almost dropped it.

  ‘Two exploits will remain in people’s memories from this year’s Tour,’ Echavarri observed on the eve of the final 64-kilometre time trial in Blois. ‘Miguel in Luxembourg and Chiappucci in the Alps.’ That last time trial was also won by Indurain, this time by a ‘mere’ 40 seconds over Bugno, although his average speed of 52.349 km/h set an as yet unbeaten record average speed for a Tour time trial of over 60 kilometres. Hinting strongly at the idea that Indurain would not be keen on winning at all costs – and thereby creating enemies on all sides, rather than adopt a strategy of letting his rivals take their share of the glory – Echavarri added, ‘But Indurain needs Chiappucci and Chiappucci needs Indurain. It never makes sense to humiliate people with whom you share something.’

  However, Echavarri was clear, too, about what he wanted to achieve with Indurain. ‘When they talk about Indurain’s lack of panache, that makes me laugh. Miguel races with his head, to win, Chiappucci is operating on another level, which we admire. But he doesn’t win.’

  That was perhaps the key lesson from Chiappucci’s lone breakaway: it looked good, but it failed to do more than cause a ripple in Indurain’s smooth, steady progress towards his second Tour de France victory. Indurain had set out his stall at Luxembourg for the years to come and in the Tour raced at a new record average speed of 39.5 km/h; Chiappucci’s response had fallen far short of doing more than shake him. If this was the best the peloton’s most rebellious individual could achieve, what was the point of trying?

  After the Tour de France, the Indurain show went on. In 1990, the flurry of questions around his potential Tour win had overshadowed his superb lone victory in the Clásica San Sebastián. Two years on, Indurain’s back-to-back Grand Tour wins – the first in the Giro and Tour since Stephen Roche in 1987 – saw two other impressive triumphs all but completely eclipsed. The first had come in June, in the one day’s racing he took part in between the Giro and Tour, when he outgunned Iñaki Gastón by less than half a wheel for his first (and only) National Championships Road Title. The second was in September when, for the third time in five years, Indurain triumphed in the Volta a Catalunya, after losing a time trial against Alex Zülle – the first since the Vuelta a Aragón that spring – but then applying a ferociously steady pace on the race’s toughest ascent, to Valter. Zülle, still in his rookie year as a pro, was unable to handle the pace and Indurain rounded off his season with another overall victory that confirmed his leadership, for the first time in his career, in the UCI’s Individual World Ranking.

  In many ways, Indurain’s 1993 Tour de France victory felt like an extension of his triumph in 1992. Not just because, with Indurain at the height of his powers, barring accidents it was so widely seen as a foregone conclusion, but also because the format used was a carbon copy of the previous July. A prediction by one of French cycling’s leading figures, former director and racer Raphaël Géminiani, that ‘only a mass attack in the first week can prevent Indurain from winning this year’s Tour’ proved to be uncannily correct.

  Victory in the opening prologue of Le Puy de Fou theme park, despite its hillier format, instantly gave Indurain the upper hand. After ceding the yellow to a series of sprinters, Chiappucci’s Carrera squad gained thirty-five seconds on Indurain in the time trial, but Banesto proved superior to Bugno’s Gatorade team by twelve seconds and – above all, given subsequent developments in the Alps – the Spaniards gained nearly two minutes on a newly emerging rival, Tony Rominger and his Clas-Cajastur team. There was no sign, though, of Geminiani’s mass attack on Indurain.

  The stage nine time trial at Lac de Madine was not as much of a knock-out blow as Luxembourg, partly because Indurain punctured, but it was a gamechanger nonetheless. Indurain’s closest rival Bugno finished at over two minutes down, Rominger at nearly three and Chiappucci more than five minutes off the pace. ‘It is a pity that I have coincided with Indurain, it may end up being the same as [Italy’s 1960s Grand Tour hero Felice] Gimondi with Merckx,’ Chiappucci concluded. ‘When I attack, maybe the rest of my rivals won’t be able to regain contact. But Miguel always will.’ Possibly the greatest point of interest at Lac de Madine was that Indurain’s puncture and subsequent minor delay meant that his brother Prudencio, last on the stage, was saved from being eliminated on the time cut. With the first and last names on the results sheet, this curious occurrence was dubbed an Indurain bocata (sandwich) by his team-mates. But that such incidents were given major media coverage is an indication of how predictable the result itself had been.

  The following two weeks proved to be anything but nailbitingly dramatic as Chiappucci, Bugno and the rivals of 1992 and earlier fell by the wayside on the first Alpine stage, to be replaced by a new host of secondary actors to Indurain’s lead part in proceedings: Rominger, Poland’s Zenon Jaskula and Colombia’s Álvaro Mejía. The greatest threat, Rominger, made much of the running in the Alps, taking two back-to-back stages, but there was a yellow-clad Spaniard shadowing his every move. Rather than dispute the first victory, Indurain reportedly allowed Rominger to claim his slice of glory, which defused, at least at this point in the game, any potential rebellion. On the second stage, Indurain fought harder for the win, but Rominger still managed to outstrip him. Given that with each Rominger victory, Indurain’s own position on general classification had become increasingly secure, this was simply a wall-to-wall application of a standard practice between the two strongest riders in a race. At no point did Rominger even hint that he could win the Tour that year, saying his main enemies were Mejía and Jaskula in the fight for the podium. Good news for Indurain, perhaps, but for anybody barring the Spanish media, tedious to watch.

  The final week of the Tour saw a few, insignificant chinks appear in Indurain’s armour. Briefly dropped by Jaskula and Rominger at the race’s final summit finish, in the Pyrenean ski resort of Saint Lary Soulon, Indurain then had considerably more difficulty in following Rominger on the Tourmalet the next day. Rominger had opened up a 50-second gap on Indurain by the summit, but sterling work by Julián Gorospe on the opening part of the climb to limit the damage and a breakneck descent by Indurain rapidly quashed that particular rebellion. Combined with Tony Rominger’s victory in the final time trial of the race, beating Indurain by 42 seconds, these minor difficulties were the original snowball in the avalanche of speculation by the following June that Indurain might, at last, have met his match. But Indurain’s defenders pointed to his falling ill with a high fever the night before the time trial and racing it when he was off-form. If Indurain – who kept his condition secret until after the Tour – only lost so little time when he was sick, how much more unlikely was it that Rominger would beat him when he was at the top of his game?

  Indurain later revealed that the 1993 Tour had been a little more of a touch and go affair than he would have liked, with a severe chill threatening to wreck his race from the second rest day at Andorra onwards. He had, he told Nuestro Ciclismo, only let team doctor Sabino Padilla and his room-mate and brother Prudencio in on his illness: ‘We treated the Tourmalet stage as if it was the last one in the race, and by the final time trial, everything was under control.’ Like his secret trip to the dentist in 1992 at Dole, nobody outside the team had got wind of Indurain’s vulnerability: yet again, he appeared impregnable, and given his ability to chase down Rominger and defend himself in the time trials even when ill, ultimately that was all that counted.

  In the record books, In
durain’s third Tour de France lifted him into a select circle of seven riders that had taken a hat-trick or more of wins in cycling’s showcase event. He also became the first rider in history to do a ‘double-double’ of two Giros and two Tours in as many years, and the first to win five Grand Tours in five straight participations. By this point, Eddy Merckx’s grumblings that Indurain was ‘too limited in what he does to satisfy me totally’ no longer seemed to matter.

  Yet for all his superstar status, Indurain refused, as he always had, to be overly captivated by the trappings of success, preferring to stay loyal to his roots and keep his private life as much out of the public eye as possible. In 1992, he turned down an offer to be flown from Paris to the start of the Olympic Games in Barcelona to be Spain’s final torchbearer of the Olympic flame. Instead he went back to Pamplona and Villava, where he held up a yellow jersey, in triumph, from the two town hall balconies to the thousands of fans below who had gathered to celebrate his victory. Equally, when he got married that November, whilst the wedding was not held in secret, there was no question of any exclusives of the ceremony being sold to any of Spain’s gossip magazines, despite numerous offers.

  It helped that Indurain’s wife, Marisa López de Goicoechea, was equally determined to keep their private life private: she has never, for example, given an interview to the press and was only occasionally seen at races. Born in the Basque Country in 1964, she and Indurain met at the celebrations after what used to be the area’s traditional end-of-season bike race, the Txitxarro hill-climb, in 1988. The two got to know each other better when she began working in the offices of the University Clinic in Pamplona, where Indurain would drop in for the team’s medical check-ups, and, after a visit to the Pope to receive his blessing in Rome (Indurain gifted the Pope a mountain bike after the mass), they were married in November 1992. Echavarri and Unzué were witnesses, along with Indurain’s sister, at the wedding ceremony held at a church in Pamplona – another indication of how deeply Indurain’s personal life and work loyalties remained intertwined at the time. Yet as Unzué says, ‘We never wanted him to be media material, because it wouldn’t have helped. When that happens to athletes, somewhere along the line you end up breaking apart.’