Indurain

by Alasdair Fotheringham

  Nor will Saiz criticise Indurain and Banesto for doing what they had to: ‘Indurain saved the day … by being professional and pacting with others. As he should have.’ By the time the breakaway sped across the River Lot in Mende’s valley before the final climb to its airfield, the gap had shrunk to 6–50 and Stephens, having ridden himself into the ground, finally cracked. Mauri and Jalabert continued to battle, as they had done with Stephens, to keep the gap the highest, with the trio of Italians, as was logical, waiting for the Frenchman and Spaniard to crack.

  Instead, as Mauri finally peeled off at the foot of the three-kilometre ascent, his job done, Jalabert launched a searing attack on a straightaway that only Bottaro could briefly attempt to follow. After two early zig-zags, Mende’s steep, straight ascent – ‘like riding up the side of a house,’ as the Guardian once described it – clearly suited Jalabert to perfection. Still ahead of Bottaro and Peron by the false flat at the summit, all that remained was a long, hard final kilometre on the flat runway to the line. Even though Indurain had ripped ahead of the chasing group at the foot of Mende, Jalabert was still nearly six minutes ahead of the Spanish champion. The Banesto leader had saved the day, but for many kilometres, it looked as if he would have been forced to cede the maillot jaune at the very least.

  ‘At first I doubted whether it would work, with a gap of just thirty seconds for nearly twenty kilometres,’ Jalabert told Spanish TV channel TVE. ‘First Melcior got across, then Neil, and that changed things a lot.’ Jalabert recognised elsewhere that ‘Logically, Indurain has to be the favourite to win the Tour … but that’s no reason to give him presents.’ He added wryly to TVE that he thought, though, it would be ‘impossible for me to get [into a] breakaway again.’

  Overall, his advantage was such that he and Zülle were now both on the provisional podium, Mauri had moved into fifth and the only downside for ONCE was that the Swiss rider had lost a little time on the Mende ascent after being squeezed out of the chase group. It mattered little. Coming on Bastille Day, Jalabert’s success was the first for the French on their National Holiday since Vincent Barteau in Marseilles five years before: a triumph which, after a decade of foreign domination in the Tour, felt like a massive breath of fresh air for the host nation.

  It wasn’t just the French who were overjoyed. The sense that Indurain could be pulled far closer to the precipice than had ever been imagined possible gripped the pressroom and the Tour. It proved that even the most consistently strong racer that the Tour had ever known could be virtually toppled from his throne. Yet although El Diario Vasco argues that ‘Indurain never had such a tough day as the one at Mende,’ Indurain himself did not come in for criticism as much as his squad. L’Équipe described Mende as ‘the one occasion in five years where Indurain was up against the ropes because … Banesto’s Tour-winning strategy had become too predictable.’ Nor was it only Banesto under fire: ONCE found themselves blasted by the pro-Indurain media in Spain, amidst claims – which Saiz denies – that ONCE’s main telephone switchboard in Madrid was bombarded with so many hostile callers, accusing the team of ‘betraying Spain’, that the lines went down completely. ‘The fans that didn’t understand what ONCE were doing took it as an affront,’ Delgado argues. ‘They were saying “this guy [Saiz] doesn’t want a Spaniard to win.”’

  ‘We were slaughtered over Mende by the sectarian elements of the Spanish press and that sectarian press still exists, even now, but they don’t pay any attention to cycling,’ Saiz says. He even goes so far as to argue that the calls to the ONCE head offices were exaggerated ‘because that’s what the media wanted people to believe. The important thing in sport is not who wins, the important thing is to have a sporting spectacle.’

  ‘We were that much better as racers because we were battling against Miguel and possibly he was a bit better because he was battling against us,’ Saiz said. ‘We have much more to be grateful for to him, than vice versa. But we were necessary.’ Indurain, however, was still viewed by much of Spanish society as being greater than any mere sports event. Any hostility towards ONCE would surely have stemmed from that – and whatever the more jingoistic elements of the Spanish press could whip up.

  Could ONCE have actually won the Tour? Saiz is convinced that it would have been possible, had not the fates intervened in the most terrible of ways with the death of Tour rider Fabio Casartelli on stage fifteen. The young Italian’s fatal crash on the descent of Portet d’Aspet did not just leave the Tour numbed in collective pain. It also ensured that the following day’s racing, the last in the Pyrenees and where Indurain could have been vulnerable, was suspended as the peloton paid homage to the young Italian and slow-pedalled for the whole stage.

  ‘If it hadn’t been for the death of Casartelli, either we’d have won the Tour or we’d have messed it up completely,’ Saiz argues. ‘Riis was getting stronger, too.’ Whilst ONCE kept quiet at the time, Riis was one of the very few voices who argued that the whole stage after Casartelli’s death should not have been suspended. ‘But I don’t think he’d have ever beaten Zülle,’ Saiz says. ‘The only way he could have was if Indurain and ONCE had had a battle of egos and he could have taken advantage of that.’

  ‘To my way of thinking that day, we didn’t care if we were second or fifth, that day after Casartelli’s death we were due to attack and maybe we’d have blown ourselves out, and not taken second, fourth or sixth as we did in Paris that year. But I didn’t care. We’d have attacked to win the Tour de France. I can’t conceive of cycling without attacking to win.’

  Indurain’s road to his fifth Tour might well have been more complicated than intended, but it ended with another time trial stage win for Indurain, outpowering the field at Lac de Vassivière by forty-eight seconds on Riis, with Jalabert at nearly two minutes. For many, rounding off his fifth Tour with a time trial victory summed up Indurain’s path to a niche of his own in the history of the Tour. Yet not everybody felt it fully reflected the ‘new’ Indurain. ‘I think he’s lost a bit in his time trialling, but he’s better on the climbs,’ Tony Rominger told El País. ‘He’s definitely improved,’ added Chiappucci, ‘Now he’s really gone out of everybody’s reach.’

  In one sense Indurain was clearly in a league of his own: taking five Tours in a row was a new record, inaccessible to any of the previous Tour greats. There were no more points of comparison in the 1990s: Tony Rominger’s run of three consecutive Vueltas was a record, but all he would be asked at the end of the Spanish race was how he would fare in the Tour de France against Indurain. Tour routes that had lengthy time trials – distances of fifty or sixty kilometres that would seem enormous now, but which were in fact shorter than some in the 1980s – were criticised or praised depending on your preferences. On a UK front, specialist magazines like Cycle Sport would publish special features on ‘The Death of the Climber’, or ‘Is This Man A Robot?’ in reference to Indurain’s exceptional physique. Indurain in Spain was, as we have seen, a phenomenon that went way beyond sport. No matter what the topic, if it was related to Tour de France success, only one rider could be the absolute reference point from now on – and that remains the case today.

  The biggest difference in Indurain’s path to the pantheon of the Tour’s most successful champions was how long it had taken him. All three of the previous five-Tour winners – Anquetil in 1957, Merckx in 1969 and Hinault in 1978 – had taken yellow on their first try. Indurain, 31 by the time he won his fifth, had raced six Tours before even wearing the maillot jaune for the first time and his first top ten place – in tenth – came in 1990, a year before the first triumph. This measured approach led to a much more stable domination of the Tour when Indurain reached there, but it also meant the pressure on Indurain and Banesto to continue to win was much more wearing. No rider has won so many Tours so quickly, either – Anquetil’s run of Tours was from 1957 to 1963, Merckx from 1969 until 1974 and Hinault from 1978 to 1985 – but none, as it was to emerge in 1996, would face defeat in the battle for yell
ow so abruptly, either.

  It wasn’t just Indurain who was paying the price of taking a seemingly unbreakable run of victories in cycling’s hardest race. ‘The first two or three Tours that Miguel won were fantastic, but the last three he raced we suffered a lot because nothing that wasn’t winning made any sense,’ observes Unzué. ‘In the last few Tours, there was a huge amount of tension, knowing that if you didn’t make any mistakes, if you got it totally right inside the team, then he wouldn’t let you down. He was almost perfect.’

  ‘So you had to check everything time and again, make sure it was all going to work perfectly. And what was the first thing you did when you got to Paris? Breathe easy again. When did you start to enjoy the Tours? When you got here in Pamplona or anywhere in Spain, and saw what all of that had meant to the people. That was when you could appreciate the real dimension of what Miguel had done.’

  It was also striking that Indurain’s consistency was such that no other contender finished second more than once, either, from 1991 through to 1995, behind him. As Tour de France win followed Tour de France win, what kind of limits such a lengthy run of success must have increasingly laid on the shoulders of one rider and one rider alone. Even before the race had started each year, the Tour was Indurain’s to lose.

  CHAPTER 10

  1995–96: The House of Cards

  At first sight, the only thing about the Hotel El Capitán that makes the Spanish out-of-town hotel remarkable is its location – although if you simply walked across the forecourt towards the line of traffic roaring past on the main A-road in front, that might not be so obvious.

  A single glance upwards, in any direction, though, suddenly helps explain why El Capitán is such a popular destination, and its forecourt almost always full. On all sides, the mountains of Asturias tower over the sturdy-looking two-storey building with its large, wooden timbered windows, making the area a dream location for any nature lover. The most famous mountains are the Picos de Europa, which surround the Lagos de Covadonga climb, the most emblematic of all the Vuelta a España ascents.

  If not the lap of modern luxury, behind the hotel’s large main door, the lobby furnishings are comfortable, clean-looking and unpretentious. On the right, there is a receptionist’s cubbyhole with rows of wood-lined pigeonholes for room-keys behind, on the left a long bar-room containing a huge number of chairs and tables. Not the most avant-garde of places, then, but solid and homely. It’s only on entering the bar-room that you notice something a little out of place, perched on a large, metallic extractor fan that runs half the length of the bar itself. It is a paper plaque, complete with an advertising campaign photo showing a retired Miguel Indurain holding an anti-cholesterol yoghurt. After listing Indurain’s achievements, the text goes on to say that ‘on the afternoon of September 21st, 1996, this is where he ended his sporting life.’

  Nothing much, staff say, has changed in the Hotel El Capitán since one early autumn afternoon of 1996, when Miguel Indurain peeled off that year’s Vuelta a España route along the A-road, pedalled past the Banesto team vehicles assembled in the front courtyard, dismounted and walked through El Capitán’s main door. TV cameras followed him as far as the door, but when it swung shut, that was it. Game over.

  In fact, Indurain’s abandon from the Vuelta and disappearance behind El Capitán’s doors proved – as the plaque says and, barring a couple of criteriums, the last near Valencia that autumn – to be his exit from professional cycling. In the process, a year after standing on the Champs Elysées in yellow for the fifth straight July, Indurain’s relationship with Banesto, Echavarri and Unzué, one of the most stable and longstanding between any professional team and rider in modern cycling, collapsed completely. The Hotel El Capitán gained itself a footnote in the annals of modern cycling, as the place where Banesto’s house of cards – a relationship with Indurain so strong-looking on the outside but with its foundations eaten away – finally disintegrated for good.

  According to Unzué, the first clear sign that Indurain was thinking of retiring came on the evening of the 1995 Clásica San Sebastián, held in early August. Traditionally that was the point in the year when he and Indurain would renew his contract with the team, but this time round, there was a surprise.

  ‘It was a fortnight after winning the Tour, we were there with [Vicente] Iza [team soigneur], talking about the future, and normally his contract would be for two years. But Miguel said, “No, just for one.” He was only 31, it’s not like he was 35 or 36, and I said, “Dammit Miguel, only one season?” And he said, “I don’t want to endure the effort and sacrifice it takes to train and race properly if I am not convinced I can go on winning the Tour. I’d quit. So from now on, we’ll do it year by year.” He was able to go on. He did 1996 and then that was it. But I think he intuited that his decline was close and that’s why he chose only to sign for one season. He didn’t want to take a risk if he wasn’t in a position to win the Tour.’

  Indurain’s next objective, and the point where his relationship with Unzué and Echavarri began to hit turbulent water for the first time, was not, in any case, the Tour, or even a stage race. The 1995 Road World Championships, held in Colombia that October in the mountainous city of Duitama, 2,500 metres above sea level, were designed to be the toughest in history as a combined result of the altitude and an exceptionally hilly road-race circuit. It is a sign of how seriously Indurain took the Worlds that he and three Banesto team-mates, José María Jiménez, Santi Blanco and Andy Hampsten – the latter acting partly as a guide to the area – travelled to Colorado to train for a month in order to be prepared to race at such a high altitude. Furthermore, Echavarri felt that Colombia’s altitude offered the perfect opportunity for Indurain to try to recapture the Hour Record, held by Tony Rominger since November of the year before.

  The idea that Indurain could suddenly switch from being a top stage racer to one-day racing was in no way as ridiculous as it sounds. ‘He can win Paris–Roubaix, he can win Liège–Bastogne–Liège, he can win every race there is, I’m 200 per cent certain of that,’ Eddy Merckx said after Indurain took his fifth Tour – and he was already discussing going for the sixth as his principal objective.

  For all of the final part of his career, Indurain was far and away the best and most consistent Spanish one-day rider of the era. It is true there was much less competition for that unofficial title at the time, with only Fede Echave, winner of the now-defunct GP Americas, and Marino Lejarreta, close to retirement, coming anywhere close. But Indurain’s Tour triumphs had focussed the spotlight on his stage racing so strongly they eclipsed not only his victory in the Clásica San Sebastián in 1990, Spain’s biggest one-day race, and in the National Championships in 1992: Indurain’s consistently good performances in the World Championships were too often overlooked as well.

  In more than one way, Indurain’s Worlds’ participations reflected his Tour success given that, like Delgado at Banesto, rather than being plunged into the deep end, Indurain had a long, steady initiation into the event with Spanish cycling’s top Worlds’ racer of the time. Indurain’s senior Worlds’ experience began in 1987 as a team-mate and room-mate for Juan Fernández, later a top sports director, but at the time a repeat bronze medallist (on no fewer than three occasions) in the Worlds for Spain. Indurain repeated his role of team worker for the early Worlds circuits in 1988, with Fernández still the leader of the squad. But in 1989 and 1990, when Fernández had retired, neither Indurain nor Spain impacted greatly on the Worlds. ‘We weren’t too convinced of our chances,’ he recounted in Historias del Arco Iris.

  Stuttgart, in 1991, was another story altogether as Indurain, now in the role of team leader, stepped up to the breach. ‘I saw Indurain just before I abandoned’ – on the seventh lap – ‘and he looked so good, he wasn’t even sweating,’ Juan Carlos González Salvador recollected. Sharp enough to respond to an attack by Gianni Bugno in the last lap, only Steven Rooks of Holland and Indurain managed to bridge across, followed shortly by
Colombia’s Álvaro Mejía. Bugno’s obsession with Indurain saw him close down the Spaniard on the right-hand side of the route, which allowed Rooks to overtake Indurain and gain the silver. But Indurain’s bronze medal, in the same year as he won the Tour, made him one of just two Spaniards, alongside Luis Ocaña in 1973, with a top three World Championships result and a Tour de France in his palmares. Indurain, speaking to the few Spanish media who had managed to make it to the press conference after a series of misdirections, was his usual laconic self. ‘Better this [the bronze] than fourth,’ he said, before making a point of thanking Pedro Delgado for his hard work in the closing laps. Summing up his year, Indurain was equally low-key about his most successful season to date: ‘It’s not been too bad. I’ve got to keep progressing.’

  The 1992 Worlds, held on home terrain in Benidorm and close to where Miguel Indurain and his wife had a summer second home, was a disappointment, although Indurain’s sixth place behind Gianni Bugno at least showed that after the previous year’s bronze the Tour champion continued to raise his – and Spain’s – game. A searing attack by Indurain prior to the finish had created a select breakaway of Jalabert, Rominger, Chiappucci and Indurain himself over the Finiestrat, the decisive climb. But the group was brought back. Then, as neither the heat was as extreme nor the climb as tough as expected, and to cap it all, the roads had been resurfaced and made easier to race over, the 1992 Worlds was all but doomed to come down to a mass dash of a few dozen riders for the line. ‘The guys who could sprint had an easy day,’ Indurain ruefully reflected.