The problem for Indurain was that fielding a weaker team could not have come at a worse moment for Banesto, given that rather than take on firebrand individuals like Chiappucci or Pantani, in the 1995 Tour Indurain was to find himself facing a very new kind of threat, a mass attack by a single squad. And to quell that challenge, even Indurain needed a team in top condition – particularly given who his rivals were this time round.
When Manolo Saiz and ONCE started out in the late 1980s, the team commanded so little respect that as Saiz puts it, ‘there would be directors in other squads that wouldn’t even bother to say good morning to me.’ This was partly due to Saiz’s rookie status, but partly, too, there was increasing awareness that – rather like Boardman in time trialling – Saiz was blazing a trail in his approach to professional racing that threatened to upset the established order.
It wasn’t just that Saiz’s background as a team manager was not, highly unusually in those days, as a former pro. Or even that rather than being backed by a business, his ONCE team was sponsored by Spain’s Association for the Visually Impaired, a kind of public charity that is Spain’s equivalent to the RNIB. What made Saiz so unconventional in a sport where tradition and conservatism has always tended to dominate was his relentless interest in both the latest technological developments and in developing a team spirit above and beyond any individual success. ‘This team is different,’ he told Cycle Sport magazine in the mid-1990s, ‘because this team has got a soul.’
‘We weren’t the most powerful team, we were the best structured,’ Saiz now claims, and this despite ONCE’s home terrain being Spain, he adds, ‘where we’re addicted to personality cults.’ Saiz defined his own situation in the peloton as a voice in the wilderness in other ways. ‘Myself, I have probably got more in common with Boardman than with other teams.’
Where Indurain’s overriding focus of each season was the Tour de France, ONCE made a point of winning across the board, in as many different races as possible. Team time trialling was one of Saiz’s obsessions, too, and from the early 1990s, ONCE became by far cycling’s most consistently successful squad in that speciality. It’s no coincidence that they were one of the few Spanish teams ever to show any real interest in one-day Classics. Thanks to one of their top racers, France’s Laurent Jalabert, they were the first squad from Spain ever to win the Giro di Lombardia Monument, the second to win Milano–Sanremo. Banesto were unmatchable with Indurain in the Tour. But ONCE were as ambitious in the smallest events in Spain as they were in cycling’s top international events, crushing the opposition from the tiny Challenge of Mallorca race in February and the Ruta del Sol in March through to the Subida a Montjuic, for many years the event that brought down the curtain on Spanish racing, in October.
This radically different approach to racing created fertile ground for the creation of an ONCE–Banesto conflict, further fuelled by Saiz and Echavarri’s fondness for launching verbal missiles at one another. But the one area where ONCE proved consistently less successful than Banesto was the overall classification of Grand Tours. ONCE had triumphed in 1991 against Indurain in the Vuelta and won it again in 1995, 1996 and 1997. ‘The Vuelta was the one Grand Tour where collectives like ONCE had the edge on individuals, because the mountains in the Vuelta at that time were not so tough as in the Giro and Tour,’ Saiz observes. ‘Now, it’s a very different story.’ But whilst they were indomitable on home soil, both the Giro and the Tour proved always to be beyond his squad’s reach.
‘Our philosophy was that as we were the National Association for the Blind, we could not ignore any of our national races,’ Saiz explains. ‘The Banesto–ONCE war was simply something in the press. We had a huge amount of respect for each other as teams and there was a bit of sniping, but if there’s a sector of the Spanish press that attacks me for finishing sixth and fourth in the Tour, then I have to respond because that’s just misunderstanding sport.’
With the exception of Rominger in 1993, when he was racing for an all-out Spanish squad, Clas-Cajastur, ONCE were the only Spanish team to continually challenge Indurain. ‘The rest were on a level below us,’ Saiz argues. ‘Before us, there were man-to-man combats with Indurain – Chiappucci, Rominger and so on. We were the only one to fight him as a collective.’ As a manager, rather than a rider, Saiz had one advantage – his riders might be defeated, but not Saiz himself. ‘There were days when I’d go to bed saying to myself that Indurain was unbeatable,’ he recollects, ‘but that didn’t stop me from waking up the next morning and trying to work out how to do it all over again.’
However, on Mont Theux on the road to Liège, Saiz’s master-plan singularly failed to work out. ‘Had it done so, we’d have surrounded Indurain with a host of ONCE riders, we could have won the Tour that day. But Mauri made a tactical mistake; he let a gap open on the climb and Indurain was able to get across to Bruyneel. The idea had been to keep lots of riders with Miguel. Bruyneel sat on his wheel because behind, we were the ones driving to try and catch him.’
After a disastrous time trial for ONCE’s riders, Saiz returned to the attack with Zülle on the road to La Plagne. ‘That was planned. We’d had a rest day and a bad day and I said to myself, let’s give it another whirl. So we went for it from the start and when Zülle moved away, I told him to go for it. I also told him not to go past more than such-and-such a percentage of his full effort and that all but cleared out the peloton. But not Indurain, although up to the moment Miguel attacked, Zülle maintained that time gap. Then there was a great battle between the two champions. Zülle could take out time on Indurain’s domestiques but when Indurain moved he was faster than Zülle.’
Saiz does not agree with the idea that Indurain eclipsed ONCE’s triumphs, like Zülle’s stage victory at La Plagne that day, with his overall wins in the Tour. ‘I never felt that, more that it magnified our success, because if Indurain represented individual success, ONCE represented success as a collective. Indurain was never seen as a team success [but] ONCE won the team time trial in the Tour de France, and then we went to Ruta del Sol [in February] and won, and then in Montjuic [in October] we won, which meant we were up there fighting for the win with different riders across a greater period of time. During the months of June and July, the passion [Spanish] people felt for Indurain was blind to anything else. But the Indurain–ONCE situation was one where we complemented each other, which was brilliant for Spain.’ Nowhere, though, was the conflict between cycling’s most powerful team and cycling’s top stage racer set to become more dramatic than on stage twelve of the 1995 Tour de France.
Dominique Arnaud, retired from Banesto at the end of 1991, was driving guest cars for the 1995 and was a ringside witness to what was Banesto’s greatest ever debacle in the Tour de France. Mistake number one, he says, came even before the Mende stage had got underway. ‘Any team that is defending the maillot jaune can’t possibly, ever, have its riders leave the start right at the back of the bunch. Right from the start. It’s a black mark in any serious professional’s copybook. Only Miguel went ahead in the bunch in the zone fictif [the neutralised pre-racing section of the stage prior to the départ réel]. The rest of the team, they were all over the place.’
‘It’s the same as if you go into the feed zone, above all where the roads are narrow, without the whole team surrounding the team leader in case of surprise attacks.’ This also, he claimed, had happened to Banesto in that year’s Tour, but had fortunately passed off without any incident: the 222-kilometre stage 12 from Saint Étienne to Mende, though, was another story.
Like a large feline waiting outside a mousehole, sitting behind the steering wheel of his ONCE team car, Manolo Saiz was poised, as he had been ever since the start of the Tour, to pounce. Saiz was, more than his riders, the brainwave behind ONCE’s attack. ‘The reason we chose that stage was simple,’ he recounts, ‘it had a climb early on. A little like in La Plagne, in fact, but this was the only stage with one right at the start.’ That Banesto were caught napping tipped the ba
lance even further in ONCE’s favour.
Interestingly for those who argue that race radio has killed off innovative racing, the fuse to the greatest rebellion against Indurain’s domination was lit thanks to ONCE’s riders being equipped with them. Saiz says that ‘Mende is proof of how important it can be in these situations, it would have been impossible without them, because it was me who knew Miguel’s team wasn’t working well and that he could be isolated.’ Saiz’s proof can be seen in the results: apart from Indurain, the first Banesto team-mate to appear on the classification is in 60th place, more than fourteen minutes down.
‘Everybody was saying at the start that it was going to be a day for the backmarkers, but in the first twenty kilometres there were bodies everywhere,’ Stephen Roche commented on Eurosport. Yet interestingly enough, even if Banesto were in disarray – early footage shows no fewer than five Banesto riders driving along desperately hard in a second group – Jalabert, the hero of the day, was not amongst the most aggressive riders right from the start. Instead, the first big attack came from Sergui Outschakov, a talented Russian breakaway specialist. And Jalabert? ‘I wasn’t feeling so motivated,’ he told French TV later although interestingly, he had had one brief dig the day before going into St. Étienne, with the idea of testing the waters for the following day and seeing if Indurain would react – which he did.
As for the Mende move, ‘The initial attack itself was purely by chance. Instead, early on I was chatting at the team car, then I stopped for a pee. It was only when I came back through the bunch and went after the breaks that I decided to go on the attack.’ Even then, the key move of the day over the summit of the second climb was not initially engineered by Jalabert himself. Rather the tête de la course at kilometre 27 was Dario Bottaro, an Italian domestique and Classics specialist with Gewiss although Jalabert, having chased down one counter-attack containing his longstanding enemy Lance Armstrong, then promptly stormed across.
Where Saiz was crucial was firing riders up the road to join Jalabert. ‘Alex Zülle had a knee problem that day so we had to have Herminio Díaz Zabala [one of ONCE’s best domestiques for ultra-hilly stages like the Mende route] and Johan Bruyneel stay with him,’ Saiz explained in an interview with El Diario Vasco. ‘I told them to talk to Alex as much as possible about anything and everything – except his knee. Finally Alex got a bit better and he even went on the attack on the final ascent to Mende. It just goes to show you could never tell what would happen with him.’
Saiz radioed through for 1991 Vuelta winner Melcior Mauri to bridge across to Jalabert, which the Catalan duly did. As two more Italians, Massimo Podenzana and Andrea Peron, joined Botaro, Saiz ordered another top ONCE domestique, Neil Stephens, to bridge over to Mauri and the Frenchman. With a well-forged reputation as one of the toughest racers in the peloton, Stephens also brought a gritty Australian black humour with him to a breakaway that, with nearly 200 kilometres left to race, seemed doomed to failure. At one point, Jalabert complained that he could do with another tooth on his chainring in order to pedal a little harder: Stephens instantly shot back to his French leader – who had hurt his mouth and jaw badly in an appalling accident the year before in the Tour – ‘I think you need more than one tooth, eh, Laurent?’
Jalabert, at 9–16 behind Indurain on GC, hardly constituted one of his major threats. But with only three team-mates initially left to support Indurain in the first chase group behind and three ONCE riders, two of them well placed on GC, ahead on twisting, narrow roads with barely a metre of flat, suddenly he was hugely vulnerable. ‘We’ve got a rider in sixth overall, and another in eighth, I think it’s normal we try and attack the leader,’ Saiz said in one live French TV interview during the stage.
‘I knew it was a sort of suicide to attack 200 kilometres from the end,’ Cyclingnews reported Jalabert as saying afterwards, ‘but in ten days the Tour will be over and if you let others break away there go the stage victories. I had lost nine minutes since the start of the Tour so I told myself to go for it. I thought that if I cracked then it was just too bad. I started the Tour thinking that I had already had a wonderful season and that anything I got out of it would be a bonus.’
‘When I attacked, Indurain came after me,’ Stephens told me in an interview for Cycle Sport during the Tour. ‘Then Bruyneel attacked and Miguel went after him too. Echavarri came up and yelled, “Miguel, don’t panic, don’t panic. The guys behind are full on to get back.” He had to calm Indurain down, so they thought they’d let the group go up the road, then bring it back later on.’
‘A lot of the Banesto riders were failing to react and Miguel was absolutely determined to be ahead,’ Saiz argues. ‘But the more determined he was to be ahead, the more and more of his team-mates he was wiping out. Miguel was all but alone in a peloton of twenty or thirty riders whilst we were attacking and that’s when I got them to go for it even more. Miguel wasn’t able to find a calm enough moment so he could ease back and stop, and that way we could open a gap.’
Saiz himself knew that Jalabert was not, in himself, a born Tour winner like Indurain. But as a team, he believed ONCE had the wherewithal to pull off the seemingly impossible task. ‘That day, Bruyneel could have got into the break, but I was lucky to have Jalabert there, because he was the bravest of them all.’ It sounds like a contradiction, but as Saiz sees it, ‘Jalabert was clever enough to know that he could never beat Indurain in a Tour. But even so, he said, give me a battle to fight, and I’ll have a try. Just like we could have won the Tour that day in Liège, as a collective, we could have won the Tour in Mende. This was the ideal strategy to beat Indurain: isolate him and then attack.’
As Banesto attempted to limit the damage, the road reared and fell across miles and miles of wild, Massif Central moorland and broad valleys, and the gap rose remorselessly. Despite a puncture for Jalabert, the six riders’ advantage rose to a maximum of ten minutes and eighteen seconds, at which point Jalabert was race leader on the road. On the region’s constantly twisting, narrow roads, with tarmac so heavy and sticky from the hot weather that as Roche graphically put it, ‘you feel like you’re slowing down even when you’re going downhill’, Indurain’s chase must have been atrociously difficult. Yet he refused to give in.
From the Banesto point of view, Unzué recognises the race could well have been lost that day. ‘Time went past, the kilometres went past, and there were some very complicated moments, very tense moments. We saw the Tour was slipping through our fingers. It was certainly one of the most historic days of the race, where it seemed for many hours as if it [defeat] could happen, and which fortunately for us, it did not. It was a spectacular stage, our rivals played their hand very well and then a moment arrived when we could only count on half the team. The Tour had broken apart.’
For that, Unzué said, ‘there was no remedy, the only solution being to pick up the pieces and see what you can resolve.’ One way out, simply accepting that time would be lost, was not possible. ONCE and Jalabert had played their hand too well: ‘Sometimes you can be patient, but this was not a stage to stay calm and say, “OK, let’s let them get two or three minutes.” There were too many good quality riders up the road and we had to go after them and see who could face them down.’
Indurain himself was in no way prepared to allow the Tour to go under. With his tenacity tested to the core, he responded brilliantly and with exactly the kind of stubborn, never-say-die resistance such circumstances require. TV images showed him already driving from the earliest moments onwards, shadowed by Stephens – before the Australian bridged across to the breakaway and further compounded Indurain’s problems. By the last twenty kilometres, when team-mates Rue and Ramon González Arrieta were finally able, together with Novell, to give some more support, Indurain was constantly zipping to the front, urging the shattered peloton onwards. On the last part of the climb, having shaken off the bulk of the chasing peloton when Indurain overhauled a mountain specialist of the calibre of Pantani, only Riis could follow
the Spaniard.
Indurain had another hugely important factor on his side: his popularity. Seeing Indurain was isolated and taking a battering, a number of allies came, requested and unrequested, to his aid. What proportion of assistance had been preceded by direct negotiations and what proportion was provided with no prior conversation at all cannot really be resolved. Yet if the breadth of teams willing to help Indurain save the day seems surprising – in decreasing order of apparent logic: Gewiss, Carrera, MG-Technogym and even Novell, a team fighting mostly for sprints and with virtually nothing to gain – seems surprising, was that really the case? Indurain was so widely appreciated, Manolo Saiz recalls, there was at least one stage of the Tour when ONCE, despite being the supposed arch-enemy of Banesto, was willing to help early on, ‘although we did that,’ he says, ‘because it was Miguel, not for the team.’ Indurain’s team-mates and the ONCE riders got on well, too. As Delgado argues, ‘The rivalry was more between Echavarri, Unzué and Manolo than it was between the teams’ riders. We weren’t so involved.’ As Boardman says, ‘Miguel was one of the few people at the time with no enemies at all, he wouldn’t piss anybody off.’ That factor, too, may well have helped at Mende, or at the very least would have done him no harm.
There will be those who argue that Indurain’s willingness to let the opposition take their share of the glory in the shape of stage wins had its effect. But that was a straightforward, unspoken agreement that has always had its place in the peloton, even if Indurain was more likely to reach such agreements than Merckx or Hinault. A wholly different fact is that Indurain was genuinely liked by his colleagues, rivals or not: ‘There were moments where Miguel found the support and collaboration of various riders who backed us [Banesto] up,’ Unzué recognised. ‘There was collaboration ahead [in the break] and collaboration behind. It’s true, though, that for us in the car that day was possibly the hardest stage of all of the five Tours.’
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