Indurain

by Alasdair Fotheringham

  In races, Unzué was greatly helped in this area by Banesto’s press officer, Francis Lafargue. At the time a real rarity amongst teams, Lafargue was initially signed to help Echavarri and Unzué with the logistical side of things. Amongst his media ‘skills’ was occasionally stonewalling journalists for requests for interviews with Indurain or other riders. With time, most Spanish-speaking journalists, including myself, that needed interviews with Indurain would learn to go to races where Lafargue was guaranteed not to be present and talk directly to Indurain for some time. He would invariably co-operate, with my annual twenty-minute interview with Indurain at the Vuelta a Valencia only needing a ‘see you tomorrow then’ and a double check at the next morning’s start for his tall, tracksuited figure to come out of a hotel lobby lift that evening, ready to talk.

  ‘Surviving as a person when you’ve hit fame is the hardest part of it all,’ reflects Unzué, ‘no matter who it is. It’s outside racing that it all can go wrong, because “real life” gives you the chances to make real mistakes. There are some lads who self-destruct at that moment, others who change, and others, a very few, like Miguel. I’d known Miguel for fifteen years and in all those he would say goodbye in exactly the same way, from the first time to the last time our paths crossed. Nothing changed, despite all that could have happened. There was never a PR department telling him what he should or shouldn’t do. Miguel is Miguel.’

  ‘If you take cycling’s top fifteen figures, all of them have their own characteristics, their own personality, their own survival tactics. None of them are the same. But Miguel is unique. It’s not that I haven’t come across other people like him, I just don’t think they exist.’ Or as the Spanish would say, Miguel es Miguel. Although in 1992, as their standard-bearer in Europe, their most emblematic of modern-day figures, for a while Indurain became much more than Indurain.

  CHAPTER 8

  1993–94: A Strip of Sandpaper

  A few years ago, former 1990s British professional Chris Boardman went to pay the Pinarello bike manufacturers a visit. The Italian company had all of their previous top bike models on display, including the time trial bike that Indurain used in his assault on the Hour Record, the Espada. What caught Boardman’s attention, though, was not so much the machine per se as the strip of sandpaper someone had stuck down the leading edge of the frame’s front tubes.

  ‘It was very old tech, but somebody in there must have known what they were doing. You create roughness there, and by manipulating the air flow on the drag, you can gain quite a bit of time,’ Boardman, a time trial specialist and Hour Record breaker, amongst multiple achievements, recounts. ‘They’d done it crudely, but they did something. It was something we did with the Team GB track team clothing during the Olympics when I was working for them – not with sandpaper, but the principle was the same.’ However, he was probably as much surprised as he was impressed.

  Boardman, himself a triple prologue winner in the Tour, readily describes Indurain as ‘one of the greatest time triallists in history.’ However, when it came to technological advances, ‘[Indurain would] use new kit and a few bits and pieces, but he was very much of the Old Guard. I don’t wish to sound disrespectful, but he carried on doing his own thing. He was the last of an era.’

  Indurain’s successful Hour Record bid in 1994 came at the tail end of a time when as Boardman sees it, ‘generally in the sport there was little to no understanding of aerodynamics, at best it was scrappy. Indurain was fortunate to be in a period when everybody was as ignorant as each other.’ As the newcomer, taking his own first Hour Record in 1993, winning the Tour prologue in 1994 at a record average speed and very much at the cutting edge of what Unzué describes as the ‘underworld’ of time trial specialists, Boardman says, ‘for me it was brilliant. I’d done the wind tunnel with Lotus [a fundamental element in Boardman’s Individual Pursuit victory in the 1992 Olympics] and I knew what mattered.’

  Boardman describes himself as an unwitting catalyst for change, ‘because I was the newbie, I battered everybody; they actually took a closer look at what I was doing: a compact body position, very low gears, prologues at 120 rpm, dress rehearsals for absolutely everything. It was all just done in a completely different way. But they’ – the opposition including Indurain – ‘didn’t understand the dynamics of the event, for them it was all about having a big engine and that was it. He was a big guy with his elbows out, grinding along. They didn’t know that moving your body as little as three millimetres can change your whole aerodynamic silhouette. Back then it was all about power production. I’m not sure if Indurain even went to a wind tunnel. But I’m not sure if he was that bothered, either. He got his name in the history books – and ultimately all records will get beaten.’

  Boardman is at pains to emphasise that Indurain was far from being the only one who relied more on strength than aerodynamics to make a difference. He cites the case of Luc Leblanc, the Frenchman whom he memorably overtook in the short opening prologue of the Tour in 1994, and says, ‘He was going on a bike you could genuinely go into a Decathlon shop and buy, with his 44-centimetre bars so he could breathe better. It was a very inefficient system, for him and for Miguel. Put these people in the same races now with the same methodology and even with the same power and they wouldn’t feature.’

  What impressed Boardman about Indurain the most, in the eyes of one top specialist observing another, was Indurain’s ‘consistency. It’s almost on a Team Sky level, because it’s one thing to get to the top, it’s a wholly different thing to stay there. It’s different circumstances for you, it’s different in your team, there are no “oh, you’ve done a good ride there”. From then on, you win or you lose. So to be that good, for that long, that’s special.’

  Notwithstanding speculation very early in his career that he might one day make a bid for it himself, Indurain’s first brief appreciation of cycling’s most famous Record and the aura of prestige surrounding it probably came when a pale-faced British athlete was allowed onto the winner’s podium at the end of a Tour de France stage into Bordeaux in 1993. The athlete in question was Boardman and his presence in the Tour ceremony was a homage from ASO to his having taken the Hour Record a few hours before in the nearby Bordeaux velodrome.

  However, Boardman’s impromptu appearance in red-and-yellow Kodak sponsored kit on the Tour leader’s podium made it clear he was not a Tour rider. And that in turn summed up the yawning gap between Indurain, by that point well en route to his third Tour win, and the track specialists like Graeme Obree, who were currently reviving interest in the Hour Record with their repeated bids. Obree, in particular, had captured the media’s imagination with reports of his Record bike being partly built out of bits of his old washing machine, and his oh-so-British diet of marmalade sandwiches and cornflakes prior to going out and hammering the Record to bits.

  Indurain’s unexpected interest began to filter through to the media in early 1994, courtesy of Echavarri and Unzué. ‘It will be the cherry on the cake of his palmares,’ argued Echavarri. That year’s World Road Championships was skipped in favour of a post-Tour Record bid in Bordeaux, conveniently close to Indurain’s home region of Navarre and as early as the end of 1993, Echavarri had already began sounding out Pinarello to produce a specific, ultra-light Hour Record bike for Indurain.

  After four years of Tour de France wins and a strong focus on the Grand Tours, Indurain’s Hour Record bid had a hugely exotic appeal to the Spanish media, and sumptuous TV contracts were reportedly offered to broadcast it. MARCA’s lead cycling reporter, Josu Garai, spent the entire month of August in Pamplona, doorstepping Indurain each morning as he headed out for training. Yet the Record bid was also handicapped by Indurain’s almost complete lack of track racing experience – since 1986, he had raced fewer than half a dozen times in the velodrome – and by his focus on road-racing, in particular the Tour. Team doctor Sabino Padilla estimated that Indurain’s peak of Tour form would begin to fade by 9 September by the latest, which c
alled for a rapid period of adaptation from road to track. On top of that, Indurain finished the 1994 Tour under the weather, and needed to recover.

  Arguably the biggest issue of all, though, should have been Indurain’s physique. Given his height, 1 metre 88 and weighing 75–80 kilos when in form, ensuring he adopted as aerodynamic a position as possible was critical. Yet with such a tight time frame for Indurain to operate in – and with limited real knowledge of aerodynamics – endless testing of different positions was hardly an option.

  The time schedule and his closest velodrome being 100 kilometres away meant Indurain, initially lacking the Espada [Sword] time trial bike that had been specially built by Pinarello until August, had to improvise his Hour Record assault in the most unsuspected of ways. As the Diario de Navarra’s longstanding cycling journalist Luis Guinea recounts, using a standard Pinarello TT frame, Banesto mechanic Luis Sanz built Indurain a to-spec replica of the Sword. Until he received his real ‘weapon’, Indurain used this replica on a 22-kilometre stretch of ultra-flat highway running from outside his house to the town of Aioaz, riding time and again each day in the same gear and always following the white line in the centre.

  Despite the somewhat homespun preparation, there was no reason to be overly pessimistic about his chances. Indurain began testing his track form on 19 August in Anoeta stadium in San Sebastián, clocking an average of 52.715 km/h over 5,000 metres. That was a fraction ahead of the time needed for the current Hour Record distance of 52.713 kilometres, clocked by Obree that April in Bordeaux. Indurain’s performance, however, was for over less than a tenth of that distance, in a discipline where one of the biggest challenges was maintaining a rigidly aerodynamic position for a full sixty minutes. On 21 August, Indurain therefore began intensive work in Bordeaux to try to adapt as quickly as possible, with two hours track riding in the morning and another two in the afternoon. Four days later, he produced record-winning times over a half-hour period, but reports were filtering through, too, that muscles on his right side, due to the centrifugal pressures of cornering on the track, were beginning to suffer badly. Indeed, after the record, Unzué would recall how Indurain’s fingers were so stiff, the masseurs had to unclaw them from the handlebars one by one. ‘The last ten minutes of the Record are going to last a lifetime,’ Indurain warned.

  Matters were further complicated when late in the evening of 28 August, a news agency dropped a bombshell: Indurain, the report claimed, had tested positive in an anti-doping test in France. The positive had been recorded on 15 May, during the Tour de L’Oise, a minor stage race in France that Indurain had won. The substance was Salbutamol, a substance used to treat asthma and other breathing difficulties under the commercial name of Ventolin.

  The Spanish media instantly cried foul, starting with the timing of the announcement, less than a week before Indurain’s Hour Record attempt, and coming the day after the Record attempt was definitively confirmed as taking place. They pointed to the recent history of Delgado in the 1988 Tour and his positive-test-that-wasn’t, and highlighted Indurain’s long medical history as an asthmatic and hay fever sufferer. Furthermore, Banesto had in fact notified the race doctor at the Tour de L’Oise that Indurain was using Salbutamol and had the medical certificate from the UCI that authorised his use of Ventolin. Indurain also received the backing of the IOC, with Alexandre de Merode, president of the Olympic Medical Commission, arguing that ‘there is no reason whatsoever for Indurain to receive any kind of sanction. UCI rules permit the use of Salbutamol under medical supervision and authorisation.’

  According to the magazine Jotdown, Banesto already knew about the pending positive result shortly before the Tour. Echavarri mentioned, perhaps predictably, the idea that the French were simply bad losers. ‘They want to damage Miguel’s image. I don’t want to think badly of them and start criticising. But it seems like the French are upset that we’ve won five Tours in seven years,’ Echavarri said. Indurain put it down to the rules being misinterpreted and called it ‘a pretty strange incident’.

  Although the incident soured the good atmosphere surrounding the Hour Record attempt in Bordeaux – there were rumours the location would be changed at the last minute to Mexico – Echavarri warned of a boomerang effect. Indurain, he said, ‘had been pretty upset when we told him about this before the Tour and that was perhaps why he raced so much harder in certain stages. Maybe the same thing will happen now.’ Indurain also enjoyed support in some unlikely quarters, such as Bernard Hinault, traditionally critical of the Spaniard for his lack of attacking spirit. ‘Why is he being judged?’ Hinault asked. ‘The law should be the same in all quarters. If he had been racing abroad this substance wouldn’t even have been detected. Why doesn’t France use the same list [of banned products] as the rest?’

  In the event, Indurain was completely exonerated by the disciplinary committee of the French Professional Cycling League. The committee said there was ‘no proof to show the substance in question had been used inappropriately’, observed that a second medical dossier later provided by Banesto had further clarified Indurain’s use and even criticised discrepancies between French anti-doping regulations and those of the UCI. The case was dropped. Indurain, on a motorbike holiday with his wife in the Pyrenees at the time he was cleared, was his usual silent self about it all. (By the time the news of the ‘positive’ had broken on the evening of the 28th, he said, he had been in bed, asleep.)

  The 1994 positive-that-wasn’t story was by far the most serious brush with suspicions of doping that Indurain had during his career. What speculation there has been afterwards has centred on the likelihood that drug use, particularly of EPO, was increasingly intense in that era in cycling rather than on any specific evidence linked to Indurain.

  The most damaging accusation was made in 2000 by one of Indurain’s French team-mates Thomas Davy, that during his time there in 1995 and 1996 Banesto as a team had used EPO. This claim was never substantiated and was categorically denied by Unzué. Equally, Indurain worked at certain points in his career with Francesco Conconi to use his anaerobic threshold test and, in the 1980s, for recommendations on his diet to reduce his weight. Conconi’s reputation is mixed, to say the least: he is a sports doctor who was investigated for allegedly giving EPO to professional athletes for research purposes, but is also considered a founding father of modern sports physiology, in part thanks to his ground-breaking anaerobic threshold test. Sandro Donati, a respected anti-doping expert, once claimed that there had been large quantities of money paid by Banesto to Conconi and that ‘I don’t think Banesto paid that much to get the riders tested.’ But this claim was never backed up. According to the website Cyclingnews, Erwin Nijboer, a Dutch rider with Banesto, confirmed the contact with the doctor, but said that it ‘was only to do the Conconi test’.

  After less than three weeks of specific preparation – far shorter than for either Boardman or Obree – the Hour Record attempt itself on the afternoon of Friday 2 September was a resounding success, pushing the limit beyond 53 kilometres, albeit by just 40 metres, for the first time in history. ‘Magical Miguel,’ was Echavarri’s summary of Indurain’s success at adding 327 metres to Obree’s record, viewed in the Spanish sporting media as a way of wrenching the Record away from the ‘laboratory cyclists’, as El Mundo Deportivo put it. ‘He has followed in Merckx’s wheeltracks,’ the newspaper solemnly pronounced. Possibly one key was Indurain’s rapid acceleration on his 59 x 14 gearing to the required speed: 25 seconds in the first lap, 16 seconds in the second. By the 20th kilometre, despite Padilla’s urging him to ease back and a painful ruck in his shorts, Indurain was already ahead of schedule and ahead of Obree. He continued to gain time steadily, at the rate of a second per kilometre, and by the 40th kilometre, barring disaster the Record was in the bag. By the time he passed Obree’s mark, and still ignoring his mentor’s pleas to slow down, he still had a further 22 seconds to push the distance as far as he could, in what finally totalled 5,949 pedal strokes in one hour.<
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  ‘It went better than I expected,’ Indurain said in his typically understated style, adding that barring the pain of having to maintain the same posture for such a long period of time, ‘it almost felt like doing a time trial in the Tour.’ El Mundo Deportivo’s editor proclaimed it ‘A triumph of man over machine,’ as if the aerodynamics somehow detracted from the spectacle. ‘Pretty boring until the last part and we didn’t know if Miguel was used enough to track riding to do it,’ Indurain’s father, refreshingly unprepared, as ever, to toe the party line, said afterwards. ‘I thought that he couldn’t surprise me, but he managed to do it,’ added Unzué. Even Francesco Moser, who had indirectly fuelled Unzué and Echavarri’s earliest discussions that Indurain might go for the Hour ten years before, had a cameo role in the celebrations when a journalist managed to get him on the phone after Indurain’s triumph. (Moser was, interestingly, one of the few insiders who had been convinced that Indurain had no chance of taking the Record.) Although physical power obviously played a crucial role, Delgado attributed a fair part of the triumph to Indurain’s mental strength: ‘When Miguel gets an idea of what he wants inside his head, it’s very hard to stop him from doing it.’