Indurain

by Alasdair Fotheringham

  Indurain’s difficulties in the 1994 Giro d’Italia, contrasting with Rominger’s third win in the Vuelta in as many years, led L’Équipe to give the Swiss rider five stars as their maximum favourite for the Tour de France, and Indurain four. After three years of unbroken domination in the Tour, it must have been tempting for a newspaper to predict that Indurain’s increasing difficulties in the Giro were a prelude for a battle royale in the Tour. Rominger’s medical entourage even went on record as predicting that Indurain would be dropped by the Swiss rider in the mountains. In fact, this turned out to be wishful thinking, even if losing the prologue in Lille to Chris Boardman by a whopping fifteen seconds acted as ample confirmation that the Briton’s much-derided ‘scientific’ racing approach had more than a few merits. Indurain’s strategy, designed by Unzué and Echavarri following the Giro d’Italia, was far simpler: a great deal of rest, with just one day’s racing, the Spanish Nationals in Sabiñánigo, which he abandoned.

  On the stage nine time trial to Bergerac, though, Indurain eliminated a considerable part of the doubts surrounding his condition, as he pulverised the opposition with what was his best performance against the clock since Luxembourg two years before. Only Rominger came off relatively lightly, losing a ‘mere’ two minutes on the 64-kilometre course along the rolling roads of the Dordogne. Beyond that, De Las Cuevas – one of those who had beaten Indurain in the Spaniard’s near-debacle in Follonica in the Giro – had the honour of being the ‘best of the rest’, more than four minutes and twenty seconds down, whilst the rest of the field was truly kicked into touch. Ugrumov, his 1993 Giro d’Italia challenger, was more than six minutes behind, and Marco Pantani, nearly eleven.

  The one potential fly in the ointment for Indurain’s latest reign in yellow was Rominger, still less than three minutes down overall. But seven kilometres from the summit of Hautacam, the race’s first major mountain-top finish, the Swiss rider was, as L’Équipe put it, ‘executed’ by the Spanish champion. Noticing Rominger was near the back of the steadily shortening line – ‘a position he would not normally be in,’ the ever-observant Indurain pointed out – the Tour leader first ordered team-mate Jean-François Bernard to step up the pace, then pulled away himself.

  Metre by metre, pedal stroke by pedal stroke, Indurain’s ferocious increase in pace was the first time since the Tourmalet in 1991 where he had really exploited his ability to keep a steady, relentlessly high rhythm on the climb in a Grand Tour. But this time the damage was far greater. The born climbers might well be able to accelerate at a higher speed. But after giving them time to waste their energy, Indurain’s relentless pace behind slowly but surely shredded the opposition who had tried to stay on his wheel and, like fish on a line, he wound back in the few, the very few, who had tried to outplay him by anticipating his move.

  With only Luc Leblanc for company, Indurain sailed past the last and most rebellious of his rivals, Pantani, 500 metres from the line. It seemingly mattered little that Lebanc then tore past for the stage win: once again Indurain had asked a rival for collaboration in the last two kilometres and this was his reward. ‘I didn’t care that he outsprinted me. All I want to retain from this day is the time I’ve taken on Rominger, De Las Cuevas and the rest,’ Indurain said. De Las Cuevas lost nearly a minute; Rominger, his closest rival but suffering from illness, lost over two, meaning the gap between Indurain and the rider who was, on paper, his major threat was nearly five minutes. With ten stages to go, the Tour was effectively over.

  ‘Hautacam was a surprise for me,’ Unzué recognises. ‘I had never seen him fighting mano a mano like that with the climbers. Then again, he was inside his “magic triangle”’ – an area in the Pyrenees that had seen Indurain do well time and again. ‘Miguel’s time trial victories in the Tour de l’Avenir [Tour de la CEE] were from [nearby] Lourdes to Tarbes. We’d go past the foot of Hautacam on the warm-ups for those time trials. And then he won his first stage in Cauterets, he went up Luz Ardiden with LeMond, and on the Tourmalet and then at Val Louron he got his first yellow. It’s very near the area where he trains and knows the best. Even if it was in the mountains, the area always inspired him.’

  There were two narrow escapes for Indurain after Hautacam, the first being when he came within a whisker of suffering one of his rare crashes, on the descent of the Ventoux. ‘I was in the first car behind Indurain as we came off the Ventoux and there was a left-hand bend. His brake blocked and he skidded further and further out,’ recalls Manolo Saiz, the ONCE director. ‘At the last possible moment, his brake unblocked and he could continue. But two more centimetres further out and he’d have come off and at that speed, goodness knows what could have happened.’ Watching in the pressroom in Carpentras, used as we were to Indurain’s apparent impregnability, I can still remember the collective gasp of disbelief that Indurain, the seemingly indestructible, could have come so close to disaster.

  ‘But how many times did he have punctures or wheel changes in the years when he was dominating the Tour?’ Saiz asked rhetorically. ‘None, or maybe once at most. Why do we all remember that skid on the Ventoux? Because it was so rare. He had the luck of champions, or even more than that. Hinault, Merckx, Anquetil, they all had strokes of good luck, like, say, when Ocaña crashed out in the Tour in 1971 and so Merckx could win. Not Miguel. He never needed that kind of luck. Who ends up puncturing? The rider who’s not strong enough to be up at the front and not riding on the edge of the road. Who doesn’t crash? The rider who’s most alert. That was always Miguel.’

  Yet as Unzué now reveals, behind closed doors and for the fourth year running, Indurain’s seemingly straightforward third week of the Tour was not as easy as it looked either. ‘He suffered more than most in the cold weather and wet. I can remember in 1994 we lost a heck of a lot of time on the stage nineteen time trial to Avoriaz because coming out of Cluses it started to hail and Miguel was losing time [on stage winner Piotr Ugrumov] really fast. It was only when the sun came out again that he began to act a lot better. We were almost on the point of … there was a margin, but it wasn’t that big.’

  In fact, Ugrumov’s time trial win in Cluses, combined with a lone stage victory the day before, had allowed the Lithuanian to reclaim five minutes overall on Indurain. Yet that still left him more than five minutes down on the Spaniard in second place, allowing Indurain to notch up what L’Équipe grudgingly conceded was his most ‘tranquille’ of Tour wins, and which put him just one rung below Hinault, Merckx and Anquetil, the all-time greatest of the race.

  The Spanish media highlighted that for the third year running, Indurain’s podium companions in Paris were once again different, but what had been, in fact, most unusual, was his strategy. Rather than seeing the mountains as an area where he would border purely on the defensive, he had now used his relentlessly steady pace on the climbs as a new method of gaining time as well.

  ‘It was a great strategy, really courageous,’ Boardman argues. ‘They’d just wait and wait and wait, you didn’t use your troops right up until the end of the climb, then he’d do the last few kilometres. It was a setpiece format, ride a devastating time trial then on the last three kilometres [of a mountain]: bang.’

  Was Hautacam possibly a sign of increasing insecurity about his time trialling ability? That theory might hold water if Indurain had, say, lost the Bergerac time trial to Rominger in the same way he had been defeated by Berzin in the Giro in Follonica. But if he had felt any need to prove a point to his rivals, he would surely have fought far harder against Luc Leblanc to take the stage win on Hautacam. Rather this was improvisation, a spontaneous reaction to observing that his toughest rival was in difficulties, and would, in fact, abandon ill a few days later. What Hautacam showed was that for the first time, Indurain was no longer simply adhering to the conservative Grand Tour script previously written for him by Unzué and Echavarri. It would not be the last.

  CHAPTER 9

  Le Tour du Record

  As plotlines go, it feels appropri
ate that of all his Tours, the one which saw Indurain take the record of victories won successively in cycling’s toughest stage race was the one he was at the greatest risk of losing. The 1995 Tour was also the one in which Indurain displayed a skill set far beyond that of ‘merely’ being the Tour’s (and perhaps cycling’s) greatest ever time triallist. ‘This was the Tour,’ says Eusebio Unzué, ‘where Miguel surprised me the most … where we saw the day he came closest to racing like Eddy Merckx.’ It was also, though, the Tour in which Unzue says Banesto experienced ‘the hardest day of all the five,’ where ‘for many hours, it seemed as though something [an Indurain defeat] could happen … the Tour was slipping through our fingers.’ All this in a Tour where Indurain struck the first blow – and the hardest – of all five of his victories.

  The opening salvo of Indurain’s assault on the 1995 Tour, on roads made famous by their repeated presence in the Ardennes Classics, could not have been more unexpected. As Indurain’s move unfurled, Eurosport commentator David Duffield reported that two of the Tour’s most famous pundits, Laurent Fignon and the recently retired Stephen Roche, had looked across at each other in the commentators’ boxes in frank disbelief at what they were seeing.

  What was so unprecedented was Indurain’s surging move on the Mont Theux climb, some 25 kilometres from the finish in Liège, passing through a little breakaway containing Lance Armstrong and Laurent Jalabert and across to attackers Éric Boyer and Johan Bruyneel. At a point where it was expected that the Spaniard would play his usual conservative game, waiting for the time trial the following day, Indurain tore up his own script with a vengeance.

  Over the Côte des Forges, out of the Ardennes foothills and along the banks of the River Meuse into Liège, Indurain pushed on and on remorselessly, heedless that Boyer had dropped back and Bruyneel was glued to his back wheel. Indurain was going so hard that Jalabert, in theory due to become race leader after picking up enough bonus points on the stage, gave up his frustrated counter-attack and allowed himself to be absorbed by the peloton. Bruyneel was only able to come past at the last minute, and take the yellow. But Indurain’s gestures of authority did not stop once he stopped pedalling. The Belgian later told colleagues that Indurain put one arm around him after the stage and told him ‘don’t worry, tomorrow, that [the yellow jersey] will be mine.’

  Indurain’s gaining fifty seconds at this point in the race was a devastating psychological blow. For years, the peloton had accepted that the Spaniard would automatically out-match them in the time trials. Then at Hautacam in 1994, he had added another string to his bow by burning the bunch off his back wheel on a very difficult mountain climb. Outpowering the field on a rolling stage, though, was another kind of demonstration of strength, but not necessarily because Indurain had wanted to intimidate the bunch: he simply did it because he could. Yet years later, it has emerged that Indurain’s attack at Liège was anything but spontaneous.

  ‘When we went to look at the time trial route, after the Spring Classics that April, we came and looked at this part of the road stage too,’ Manu Arrieta explains. ‘And Indurain told me, as I was doing his massage that evening, “You’ll see, people are going to wait for the mountains and more than one of them is going to get a surprise that day.” I never told anybody and then I wasn’t selected for that year’s Tour staff and once the Tour had started I thought, “Sod it, I’ll take my car and go see what the surprise is.” So I drove all the way from Spain up to Belgium and parked on the side of the road outside Liège, just to wait and see the stage go past and what would happen. He had planned it – but it certainly took quite a few people aback.’

  That did not just include Indurain’s rivals. ‘What surprised me the most about his winning the Tour in any year was the time when he attacked at the end of the Liège–Bastogne–Liège route,’ Unzué says. ‘It was a Miguel Indurain that I didn’t know, the day before a time trial, what did he need to do that for?’ Juan Carlos González Salvador adds, ‘Miguel was getting too predictable, and he switched strategies because he knew what his rivals were expecting from him. Apart from anything else, he did it because it was within his power to do so.’

  Indurain’s second major blow to the opposition came on more familiar terrain in the stage nine time trial, but he paid for the effort of the previous day, up to a point. Rival Bjarne Riis’ loss of twelve seconds on the rolling course was the closest Indurain had been run in a time trial victory since 1990. But the rest of his rivals, ranging from third-placed Rominger at 58 seconds through to Jalabert at 2–36, Breukink and Zülle at almost four minutes and Pantani at nearly eight, were all duly quelled. Indurain, needless to say, had kept his word to Bruyneel, and was in yellow.

  The third part of Indurain’s rise to power was arguably the most impressive of all. A long-distance attack by Zülle on the first Alpine stage saw the Swiss rider nearly five minutes ahead of Indurain and the much depleted field at the foot of the final ascent, to La Plagne. This not only converted Zülle into race leader on the road, but obliged Indurain to chase the Swiss rider all the way up the seventeen-kilometre climb.

  La Plagne may be one of the longer Alpine ascents, but it is one of the smoothest and steadiest. In theory therefore, riding the opposition off your wheel is all but impossible. Indurain, though, having received brief assistance from two team-mates, Rue and Vicente Aparicio, nonetheless blew the field apart in the space of half a kilometre before settling down to a lone pursuit of the Swiss.

  Zülle initially had few problems on the gradually rising gradients. But the higher up the climb, the more noticeable the difference in riding styles became. Indurain was impassive behind his sunglasses and cap, jersey zipped up in the warm weather, hands on the top of the bars, pounding out the steadiest of rhythms with barely the slightest rocking of his shoulders. Zülle rode with his jersey opened, upper body heaving from side to side, mouth open and bareheaded as he lunged backwards and forwards on the pedals. Only in the last kilometre, where the gradient briefly steepened, did Indurain’s mouth open in a grimace of suffering as he held onto the drops and accelerated hard. By then Zülle’s advantage was down to two minutes, and the rest of the field – climbers, time triallists and GC rivals alike – was scattered across the Alpine ascent. Six rivals, prior to La Plagne, had been at less than three minutes and the closest, Riis, had been at a mere 23 seconds. Afterwards, only Zülle, 2–23 down, was left at anything less than five minutes. ‘It was Hautacam all over again,’ observed Delgado and Indurain appeared, once more, to have the 1995 Tour completely resolved, ten days out.

  At this point in the game, it seemed Indurain’s first significant change of race programme in the first half of the season since 1991 had worked wonders. Opting to avoid the Giro d’Italia was seen as a way of reducing the risks of Indurain suffering a tough final week of the Tour de France as his peak form began to fade. The alternative option as a build-up for the Tour therefore lay in racing the Midi Libre and the Critérium du Dauphiné, week-long events where he would have more time to recover. Indurain also started his build-up later than usual, with his first victory of the year coming on 15 April, a short time trial in the lowly Vuelta a Aragón.

  The latter part of May and early June left no doubt that Indurain was as strong as, if not stronger than, when he had raced in Italy. Whilst top rival Tony Rominger finished the Giro d’Italia as he had started it, wearing the maglia rosa of leader, but physically drained to the point that the rest of his season looked to be at risk, Indurain scooped up win after win, first in Aragón and Asturias, and then – much more significantly – in races as tough as the Midi Libre and France’s key warm-up race to the Tour, the Dauphiné Libéré.

  ‘I haven’t chosen the Dauphiné for training, I’ve chosen it to suffer,’ Indurain told the eponymous organising newspaper’s reporters. But if so, for Indurain it was a form of cycling masochism that produced excellent results. In a miniature re-run of the 1994 Tour de France, he began by finishing slightly off the pace in the opening
prologue, won (as in the Tour) by Chris Boardman, then crushed the opposition, just like in the ’94 Tour in Bergerac, in the mid-week time trial to move into the lead. Where Indurain proved, conclusively, that Hautacam in the 1994 Tour had been no flash in the pan was on the Ventoux, destroying the field in an alliance with Richard Virenque that saw the Frenchman take the stage and Indurain become the overall winner in all but name. Carlos Arribas, a member of the Spanish press corps watching the race on the Ventoux, reported in El País that when Indurain passed him, having dropped all of the field bar Virenque and an exhausted Álvaro Mejía, he had the poise to wink at them as he passed. Clearly, not a man on the point of collapse. ‘Coming here was the right choice,’ Indurain, the first Spaniard to win the Dauphiné since Luis Ocaña twenty-two years earlier, said after his victory. ‘I am in better shape than I was this time last year.’

  The first ten days of the Tour represented a new phase in Indurain’s relentless domination. But where there had been cracks in Indurain’s armour, they were in terms of his team. This was clear as soon as the Tour hit the mountains, when Delgado, commentating for Spanish TV, observed at La Plagne that ‘Zülle has placed Banesto in serious trouble, leaving Miguel very isolated.’ After Julián Gorospe moved on to the fledgling Euskadi squad at the end of 1993, the 1994–5 off-season had once more seen a series of ultra-experienced racers such as Jean-François Bernard and Pedro Delgado retire or move on from Banesto. Marino Alonso, the only Banesto team-mate to take part in all of Indurain’s five Tour wins, was a strong force on the flatter and hillier stages, but the remainder of Indurain’s climbing back-up were too thin on the ground. One new marquee signing, Andy Hampsten, proved to be a complete flop and given the strong performance of riders like Aparicio and Ramón González Arrieta in the Dauphiné a month before – Aparicio placed third overall – there were concerns that they had peaked too early in the year. Ever since 1988 Banesto had remained amongst the top three teams in terms of firepower for Grand Tours. But by 1995, they were getting overly dependent on their star rider.