Indurain’s record sparked, briefly, reports of an Obree–Boardman-like rivalry with Tony Rominger for the Hour, given that Rominger also went for the Record that autumn – twice. This was far more media hype than real, and unlike the Tour, it was ‘won’ by the Swiss rider, again on power rather than expertise or aerodynamics. Rominger was less experienced in track racing than Indurain, and the photos of his first venture onto the Bordeaux track that October, when he wobbled his way to a halt after half a lap and all but fell off, were widely published. Yet despite his lack of trackcraft, by the time he wheeled to a halt on his second Record attempt that November, Rominger had taken the maximum distance to 55,291 kilometres. That in turn was smashed by Boardman, in 1996, with a distance of 56.375 kilometres, before an absurd series of rule changes by the UCI in 2000 concerning the legality of different positions rendered all of these achievements, in the history books, all but null and void.
Although Rominger’s new records overshadowed Indurain’s effort internationally, at least initially, what concern in Banesto there was in regaining the Record seemed to have exhausted itself in 1994 at least with a one-off effort by Indurain. Amongst the broader Spanish public, that much of their interest in cycling began and ended with Indurain was once again evident. With no access in my flat to the pay-per-view TV channel that was featuring it, I went to watch the Record in a local bar in Granada heaving with Indurain fans cheering their hero on. A few weeks later, when Rominger beat Indurain’s Record for the first time, there was so little interest in the same place I had to ask the barman – who had no idea it was happening – to change the channel so I could watch it.
It would be tempting to see the Hour Record as the culmination of the central period of Indurain’s domination of Grand Tour racing – the ‘cherry on the cake’ as Echavarri had put it – but this would not be at all accurate.
Certainly Indurain continued to flatten the opposition in the Tour de France, with L’Équipe concluding that his fourth straight victory that July ‘was probably the easiest of them all so far … his rivals might have been new, but they seemed less dangerous than his previous rivals.’ But in the Giro d’Italia, Indurain’s near-perfect domination of the 1992 race represented a high point to which he would never return, and after finishing third in the 1994 edition, the race was quietly dropped from his programme and in 1996, it disappeared from Banesto’s as well.
After 1992’s double success, though, it only made sense that Indurain return to the Giro d’Italia in 1993, but on this occasion things were not so straightforward even before the race had started. A hurricane in the Alps when Indurain was reconnoitring a potentially decisive Giro time trial in Sestriere left him stranded without air transport. He finally got a ride in the Banesto team truck, arriving at the start on Elba by ferry, just one day before the race began.
It wasn’t just the weather that no longer appeared to be on Indurain’s side. The 1993 route featured far less time trialling and what little there was of it was much hillier: the tough mountain stage after that last – uphill – mountain time trial in Sestriere added to its ‘anti-Indurain’ nature. There were minor irritations, too, such as the clown hired by an unknown media outlet in the first week to let down the Spaniard’s tyres at every start and then beat a hasty retreat amongst the spectators after his prank. In Spain, Indurain’s conversion from cycling hero to folk hero was confirmed when Tele 5, the most gaudily commercial station of the time, bought the Giro’s broadcasting rights. In what seemed to be an attempt to treat the Giro as a chat show rather than a race, Tele 5’s coverage shocked longstanding cycling fans by sometimes including a mini commercial break one kilometre from the finishing line.
Indurain’s bid to end the first day in the leader’s jersey failed, too, after Classics specialist Moreno Argentin broke away and opened up such a considerable time gap on the first stage’s opening mass start sector that it was impossible for the Spaniard to pull back enough time in the afternoon’s first, short, time trial. In the event, Indurain finished second behind Maurizio Fondriest and then only moved into pink briefly in the mid-race time trial in Senigallia before ceding it to Italy’s Bruno Leali.
However, in what all but turned into a re-run of the 1991 Tour, right down to his breakaway companion in the decisive move, having accelerated hard on the race’s toughest pass, the Marmolada, Indurain moved away with Chiappucci in a break of five that saw Chiappucci claim a rain-soaked stage win and Indurain the maglia rosa. Victory for Indurain in the Sestriere time trial further strengthened his lead, but the Spaniard then, uncharacteristically, stumbled at the last fence. On the ascent to Oropa on stage twenty, the last major climb of the entire Giro d’Italia, Argentin – who Echavarri nicknamed The Devil for his strategic skills – shredded the field, then his team-mate, Lithuania’s Piotr Ugrumov, launched a series of devastating attacks. As Chiappucci and his Carrera team-mate Stephen Roche made their own brief challenges, rather than overstretching himself, Indurain sat up and continued at his own pace. All he could do was hope that would prove enough to keep Ugrumov from gaining more than the 1–34 he had on the Lithuanian, a previously little-known rider who most observers thought would have settled for an unprecedented second place overall behind Indurain.
Echavarri lost the plot completely, shooting past the rest of the race convoy in spectacularly illegal style to bellow at Indurain, ‘Relax, you can lose 30 seconds.’ In the event Indurain lost 36 seconds but the final overall difference between himself and Ugrumov of 58 seconds, compared to over five minutes on Chiappucci twelve months earlier in Milan, made it clear how close the final gap had been. Echavarri was fined a sizeable 24,500 pesetas (€147 in today’s money) for his reckless driving, but he said later that, with Oropa the last obstacle prior to celebrating the win in Milan, ‘it was not important. I’m about to spend more on champagne.’
Multiple concerns had arisen for Echavarri in the Giro d’Italia, and not just Indurain being somewhat on the back foot in one stage: Banesto as a team had delivered a poor collective performance, accentuated when Fabrice Philipot and Stéphane Heulot both quit with sunstroke in the first week. Armand de las Cuevas, a talented but eccentric Frenchman, was expected to step into the breach, but instead opted to race in his own interests, not Indurain’s. Banesto seemed to rely on theoretical rivals Festina to do much of their spadework in the early part of the stages – an alleged favour that was later to cost the Festina team manager, Jan Giesbers, his job – and it had an unexpected knock-on effect that winter, as Banesto underwent a major overhaul.
Echavarri’s first attempt to reinforce Banesto by signing the bulk of the Ariostea squad alongside Gianni Bugno and Zenon Jaskula, two of Indurain’s top rivals in the Tour, failed to work out. So did a bizarre proposal from, of all people, Italian tycoon Silvio Berlusconi for one of his companies to take over as main sponsor from Banesto at the end of 1994, with a possible fusion with an Italian squad part of the deal. Instead in November, Banesto and one of the country’s most powerful middle-ranking teams, Seguros Amaya, announced that the two squads were fusing. Banesto very much remained the senior partner, but gained some strong support riders, including 1991 Vuelta a España winner Melcior Mauri and 1992 Vuelta runner-up Jesús Montoya. On top of that, two of the most promising young riders of the Spanish peloton, Mikel Zarrabeitia and Antonio Martín, also joined the Banesto line-up, as did two of the top directors of the time: Javier Mínguez, later to direct the Spanish national team; and José Luis López Cerrón, later president of the Spanish Cycling Federation.
‘The fusion was more a shock for the team staff than for anybody else,’ Delgado reflects. ‘What had been a very quiet team suddenly became a place with people yelling their heads off at each other. Miguel didn’t participate so much in the running of the team, so I think it didn’t affect him much, and if it did, he’d never say anything about it anyway.’
‘There was a bit more of a dynamic feel in the team,’ Delgado reflects. ‘Some things were better. For e
xample, Cerrón was very well-organised, he sent you the list of the races you’d be doing in advance. Before I’d only come across that in PDM.’ However, Delgado insists that the squad had not changed excessively, and that Unzué and Echavarri were still very much the senior partners.
What seemed more likely to cause major turbulence in the team came when Banesto, at the time Spain’s third largest bank with seven million clients, teetered on the edge of collapse in December 1993 following the exposure of a multi-billion pound deficit. Head director Mario Conde was fired for gross negligence as allegations spread that he had created companies to buy and sell assets within the Banesto group. At this point the Bank of Spain took over Banesto’s management and Conde’s dramatic exit, along with that of Arturo Romani, created a huge ripple effect. Trading in its shares, which had plummeted, was suspended, and inevitably questions about the viability of Banesto’s considerable investments in newspapers and television stations, not to mention the long-term future of a certain bike team, began to spread.
The bank was subsequently salvaged by Banco Santander in one of the biggest bank rescue operations ever mounted in Spain, and Alfredo Saenz, the new director, took great care to ensure messages reached the team in mid-January that Banesto’s cycling team – just weeks after the Amaya fusion had seen it expand its budget for 1994 – had a secure future. Conde was later imprisoned amidst counter-allegations that he had been the victim of an undercover political campaign, and the team pushed on regardless. The scandals, though, did no good to Banesto’s public image. ‘For many months,’ Josu Garai wrote, ‘the only good thing, at least in the public’s eyes, that Banesto had going for it was the bike team, although, like everything in this life, there was a “before” and “after” with Pedro Delgado, and, above all, with Miguel Indurain.’
As Indurain’s sporting achievements became more and more identified with Spain rather than the team, it became increasingly complicated for Banesto to justify his repeated absence from the Vuelta, which after all was (and is) Spain’s biggest bike race. By early 1994 Unipublic, after two years of victories for Rominger, one of Indurain’s top rivals, announced that from henceforth teams would have to provide a line-up worth 60 per cent of their FICP points. Banesto refused point-blank to comply and the stand-off reached a point where the question of Indurain’s participation was briefly the subject of debate in the Spanish parliament and the Spanish Sports Council – the country’s equivalent to a Ministry of Sport – was brought in as a mediator. Finally it was agreed that barring exceptional circumstances Indurain would race the Vuelta in 1995. But in 1994, for the third year running, Spain’s greatest Grand Tour specialist and the sport’s top rider did not take part in the Vuelta.
Indurain’s track record in the Giro d’Italia (two wins out of two starts) and in the Vuelta (one second place overall, no stage wins and three abandons from seven starts) made the Italian race the logical choice. However, after five Grand Tour wins, the 1994 Giro d’Italia turned out to the first where Indurain’s strategy of dominating the time trials then defending that lead in the mountains went seriously awry.
The first issue was that Indurain’s approach of using the early part of the Giro d’Italia as a build-up to ride himself into form was already out of kilter before he started. Pollen allergies and colds had hit him harder than usual in a cold, wet Spanish spring, with decidedly mixed messages coming from the Vuelta al País Vasco. In his most important head-to-head duel against Tony Rominger, looking set to be his top challenger in the Tour, Indurain launched a dramatic attack on one stage, scattering the peloton, prior to abandoning the next. Rominger, meanwhile, not only won País Vasco, but took the Vuelta a España for a third time, where neither Banesto’s Mikel Zarrabeitia nor Pedro Delgado, second and third overall, placed the Swiss rider under any serious pressure.
Third in the 1994 Giro’s opening prologue for Indurain, five seconds off the pace behind his former team-mate Armand de las Cuevas, looked promising enough, although the Spanish were under a collective cloud following the suicide of one of their cycling icons, 1973 Tour winner Luis Ocaña, a few days before at his home in France. Then when young Russian Evgeni Berzin won at the first week summit finish of Campitello Matese by nearly a minute, given the second-year pro’s 90th place in the previous Giro, it was hardly going to set off any alarm bells.
What did set the cat amongst the pigeons was Indurain’s seriously poor time trial on stage eight, where he was beaten not only by Berzin by two and a half minutes, but where even Gianni Bugno managed to gain time on the Spaniard. Padilla attributed Indurain’s poor showing to pollen allergies, whilst Indurain said he was unable to find an explanation but that ‘if the Russian goes on racing like this, he’ll be unbeatable.’ L’Équipe called it ‘the worst day of Indurain’s career on a stage that he should have dominated.’ A 3–39 minute time gap on GC and the lack of any flat time trials in the remainder of the Giro left Indurain with no choice but to attack in the terrain where he had previously raced most conservatively: the mountains. ‘I don’t like to attack there for a very simple reason,’ Indurain argued, ‘I’m heavier than the rest.’ However, he concluded that ‘three minutes in a Giro like this one is no difference at all.’ Echavarri, fond as ever of his religious reference points, said that ‘two masses have been heard in the Giro so far – referring to the first two Sundays of the race with their respective time trials – ‘and there are two more masses to come.’ Here, he meant at Aprica on stage 15, over the notoriously difficult Stelvio and Mortirolo passes and the final ceremonial stage into Milan. In other words, there was still time to turn the Giro round for Indurain.
Indurain had rightly predicted that were the climbers to begin the process of fragmenting the race, he might well be able to take advantage of that, by following wheels when the roads steepened and wearing out the younger, less resilient racers, like Berzin, in the process. What he could not have expected was that instead, the critical weekend of the Giro d’Italia would see a new, more explosive kind of climber, emerge – for the first time during Indurain’s Grand Tour domination.
Marco Pantani’s devastating attack over the Jaufenpass on stage 14, the longest climb of the Giro d’Italia, and then on the long descent in an ultradynamic position, with ‘his backside off the back of the saddle [and] within millimetres of the tyre’ as Matt Rendell writes in The Death of Marco Pantani, had ‘attracted huge public attention in Italy and abroad.’ But whilst reminiscent of Claudio Chiappucci in Sestriere in the 1992 Tour, Pantani was far more consistent than his Carrera team-mate and one-time mentor, and that made him much more dangerous. When Pantani charged away on the lower slopes of the Mortirolo for a record-setting ascent of the climb, Berzin’s panic and attempt to follow the Italian at all cost was comprehensible. Indurain, meanwhile, opted to let both riders go, and his steadier pace initially paid dividends: whilst Pantani shot over the summit 50 seconds ahead, by then Indurain was 47 seconds in front of Berzin. When he and the Italian, who waited for Indurain on the descent, then tore through the finish town of Aprica for the first time, at one point their advantage over Berzin had doubled to two minutes. At the least expected moment and in the least expected fashion, Indurain had turned the tables on his younger rival. A third Giro d’Italia victory seemed to be beckoning.
However, on the final, seemingly inoffensive Valico di Santa Cristina, a much shorter second category climb, Indurain ended up paying a high price for his colossal effort over the Mortirolo. He initially attacked but was first caught, then dropped, by Pantani. Suffering terribly on a theoretically less difficult climb, by the finish Indurain had lost three and a half minutes on the young Italian, and his advantage over Berzin shrank to a mere thirty-six seconds. It had been, without a shadow of a doubt, the most dramatic of Indurain’s performances in any of his Grand Tours, yet it was one of the least beneficial. The double Giro d’Italia winner was now third overall, but Berzin had effectively raced like Indurain – panning his rivals in the time trial, then d
efending in the mountains as best he could – and was now en route to victory in Milan.
‘I gave it everything, but that last part of the race was one of the worst moments of my career,’ Indurain said at the finish line. He blamed his last minute collapse on, possibly, wearing too much protective gear on the rain- and snow-soaked Stelvio, the first mountain pass, and overheating. ‘Miguel lost the Giro that year because he felt too sure of himself,’ Unzué now says. ‘He didn’t need to go so hard. Miguel was great at calculating the times he needed to be sure of winning, and he had to do that on the Mortirolo. But [on the final climb] he should have gone steadier, and the Giro would have been won. He went from losing the Giro to winning it to losing it again. Imagine how mixed up your emotions would be then. But at times, to be almost perfect like Miguel, you have to make mistakes.’
There was also the question of the team’s weakness in the Giro, with Indurain lacking support in the high mountains. ‘It’s like a third-division Italian side,’ Chiappucci said scornfully. Indurain did not comment on the question but his brother Prudencio confirmed that they had expected stronger performances in the climbs from Montoya and Gerard Rue.
Indurain’s last, faint, hope was that he could recoup his losses in the final, very hilly time trial on stage eighteen. But by that point in the game, Berzin was able to open up the throttle again, winning the stage and setting the seal on his victory. Indurain’s second place, twenty seconds behind, both enabled him to consolidate his third place overall and strongly suggested he was closing the gap on the Russian intruder. However, his rising form came too late: after five consecutive Grand Tour wins, he was forced to settle for third in Milan. Indurain had, in effect, been out-Indurained.
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