Indurain might have failed in 1992 to follow Stephen Roche’s wheeltracks in 1987 and take Giro, Tour and World’s, the so-called Triple Crown, in the same year. But in 1993 at the Oslo World Championships he could not have come closer, with silver behind the then almost completely unknown Lance Armstrong – who had attacked late on and stayed ahead of the bunch. Surprisingly, Indurain’s silver medal was netted in a sprint, theoretically his weakest suit, against Classics specialists and fastmen of the calibre of Olaf Ludwig and Johan Museeuw. To make the result even more impressive for Indurain, it had been raining heavily, and on a crash-ridden course with a dangerous descent, ‘which decided the race more than the climb,’ Indurain observed, four riders ended up in hospital. He himself had come close to abandoning mid-way through, it later emerged. Instead, Indurain netted Spain’s best result in a Worlds in fifty-eight years and the country’s second silver ever in the category.
Indurain later admitted that the Spanish, like the rest of the field, had underestimated Armstrong’s strength on the Oslo course. But he also argued that the Swedish road circuit, which Delgado blasted as being ‘horrible and not worthy of the Worlds’, had been too flat to favour him. However, the 1995 World Championships, with 5,115 metres of vertical climbing, more than in all but the most difficult Alpine stages of the Tour de France and at an altitude of 2,500 metres above sea level, was a different proposition. Given the Duitama course’s fearsome reputation, it was perhaps just as well the UCI turned down the original route, which tackled the Cogollo, the single hardest climb of the 17-kilometre circuit with gradients of up to 20 per cent, in the opposite direction on its tougher side. As it was there were still only 20 finishers.
Expectations as to how Indurain might fare rose dramatically thanks to his performance in the World Time Trial Championships four days earlier, which he won easily ahead of Abraham Olano. Only in its second year of existence, in 1995 the World Time Trial title was widely considered a form guide for the much more keenly anticipated road race, and clinching both gold and silver suggested Spain had a winning hand for the following Sunday.
On a hilly but not exceptionally difficult time trial course and churning a hefty 54 x 12 gear, Indurain clocked all of the best provisional times, and there were only two briefest of reminders that his superiority against the clock could not be taken for granted. The first came mid-course when he overtook Maurizio Fondriest and struggled a little as he did so, and the second occurred at the very end, where Indurain eased back slightly and his advantage on Olano only flicked up a bare second in the closing few kilometres, to a final margin of 49 seconds.
However, the time gaps – beginning at four seconds ahead of Olano after five kilometres of racing and a staggering 20 seconds over his closest non-Spanish rival, Uwe Peschel of Germany – intensified the pressure on Indurain for Sunday’s road race, a title that, as he saw it, ‘has much greater prestige than this one.’ Far from celebrating the silver in the World’s Time Trial, for example, 90 minutes after the podium ceremony Olano was back out on his bike doing a 50-kilometre training ride, in preparation for the road race. He received a call from his wife Karmele, suggesting that having taken a silver medal he should come home and not wait to take part in Sunday’s road race. Fortunately for the Spanish, he opted to stay.
The time trial victory made it clear that if Indurain was top favourite for the road race, he was also in great shape for the Hour Record. ‘He’ll beat it,’ Eddy Merckx said categorically. However, oddly enough, when Indurain discussed his upcoming projects in Colombia he tended to focus purely on the World Championships. There was little to no mention of the Hour Record and when the subject was brought up during the Worlds, he would seem to diplomatically avoid the question and say he was looking specifically at Sunday’s road race, ‘for which I’ve spent the last month preparing.’ Not for the Hour.
Tactically, it was a masterstroke. On a personal level, for Miguel Indurain it represented a huge act of generosity. Yet when Abraham Olano darted out of the shattered remnants of the pack to solo to victory in the 1995 Road World Championships, whilst Indurain kept control of the peloton behind, it generated no small amount of controversy. It barely mattered that the Spanish media, by and large, attempted to present Olano’s attack on the second last lap for what it was: a textbook breakaway by a second-ranking rider in a team whilst the top contender – in this case Indurain – crushed any counter-move. Much of the public saw it completely differently.
As Pedro Delgado points out, ‘We fans remember it as a historic, enthralling moment, but the man in the street has forgotten: he just thinks of Olano as the “man who wanted Indurain to lose”.’ Josu Garai commented that, ‘Half of Spain accused Olano of being a traitor,’ although he himself, ‘trying to be objective,’ wrote a column in MARCA supporting Olano’s attack. But he also suggested that Banesto were unhappy at the result. If so, it was the first time since 1991 there had been such leaks of a disagreement between the sponsor and top rider over their objectives and results, and not in one of cycling’s lowest-profile events, either.
Had Indurain had an off-day and finished, say seventeenth, Olano would surely have been forgiven more quickly for his ‘treachery’ and Banesto would not have been, as Echavarri said later, ‘disappointed at the result’. But expectations had been sky-high that Indurain would take the win and his time trial result had already proved he was the strongest rider individually in the Spanish squad. Finishing second made it look as if the only thing standing between Spain’s greatest athlete and gold was … another Spaniard. On top of that, the ‘treacherous’ Spaniard in question was widely tipped as Indurain’s successor and had taken silver a few days earlier behind Indurain in the time trial. As a result, it was easy for the Spanish public, particularly in view of their severely limited knowledge of one-day racing as opposed to stage racing, to interpret Olano’s attack as jumping the gun for his own benefit.
Yet Unzué has repeatedly said that the best way to understand Indurain and what Olano’s victory meant to him is to look at his gestures, rather than expect Indurain to articulate his feelings in words. And there can be no mistaking the way Indurain’s arm is raised in triumph as he crossed the line in Duitama for a silver medal, just as it had been four years before at Val Louron when he finished behind Chiappucci en route to the Tour, but this time with a huge difference in the overall outcome.
‘Making that gesture of joy in Colombia that day when he came second was more than for him, it was for a team-mate, for a teammate’s victory,’ Delgado says. ‘At Val Louron, when he punches the air after finishing second behind Chiappucci, there was a reward for him, there was a yellow jersey. But in Colombia there was nothing. His joy, his satisfaction, was not for himself.’
‘The leader was Miguel, everything about that Worlds made it Indurain’s Worlds,’ Olano says. ‘He had prepared for it at altitude, and we were racing for him. But in races you have to be calculating. Better that a team-mate win, than a rival wins because of a mistake you have made. Just look at what happened with [Alejandro] Valverde and [Joaquim] Rodríguez’ – in the 2013 Worlds, a lack of co-ordination between the two Spaniards saw Rodríguez lose the Championships to Portugal’s Rui Costa. ‘That could have happened to us, because the situation was very similar.’
Echoing Unzué’s words, Olano says, ‘The Banesto fans and Indurain fans criticised me, and all I can say to those people who – still – continue to hammer on about it, is to tell them to look at the Worlds video and the look of satisfaction on Indurain’s face. It’s not there because somebody’s treated him badly, it’s there because we won the Worlds.’
From a Spanish point of view, taking the first ever World Championships with Olano acted as a breakthrough. After 1995, Spain took the professional rainbow jersey of World Road Champion on no fewer than five occasions in less than a decade: once in the Time Trial and four times on the road race. ‘1995 was the first Worlds we went to with the objective of winning, it marked a new chapter,’
Olano says.
But for Indurain? The final chapter of his ‘American adventure’, as the press nicknamed his six-week stint on the far side of the Atlantic in Colorado and Colombia, consisted of his second bid on the Hour Record in the velodrome in Bogotá, exactly one week after the World Championships. Given the extremely limited preparation time this gave him to adapt from the road to the track, even less than in 1994, it was an unusually ambitious target for the Spaniard. But Banesto presumably gambled on Indurain having strong enough form from the Worlds to bludgeon his way through any problems he might have. Like at Bordeaux, this was going to be more about power than aerodynamics.
The initial times, as Indurain pounded round the openair Bogotá velodrome at the ungodly hour of 6 a.m. – to avoid possible strong winds – looked promising. After four kilometres, he was almost two seconds ahead of Rominger’s record. But from that point on, he slumped further and further behind. After twenty kilometres, Indurain was over thirty seconds slower, and by the twenty-eight-kilometre mark, the distance had stretched to nearly a minute. Although Indurain was losing ground less quickly by this point, he was rapidly running out of energy and had no time left, even if he had managed to reverse his losses. Shortly before reaching thirty kilometres, not even the cheers of the 5,000-strong crowd who had braved the early hours and chilly night air to urge him on could keep him from pulling over and ending his effort.
The causes of such an unexpected defeat were multiple. There were those quick to point to an almost ridiculously low preparation and adaptation time of just four days, compared to the three weeks that Rominger had taken back in 1994. Nor was Indurain’s build-up for a road event ideal. Weight-wise he was at the top of his game for the road but to get an idea of how inappropriate being so light for the track was, it’s worth remembering that Bradley Wiggins put on ten kilos in weight between winning the Tour and focussing on racing in the velodrome. Rominger, Colombian newspaper El Tiempo reported, was three kilos ‘overweight’ when he beat the Hour Record in November 1994.
Another possible error made by Indurain and his entourage included riding in cold temperatures, when the air pressure is much higher and air resistance consequently denser. When Wiggins beat the Hour Record in London in 2015, the temperatures in the indoor velodrome in Stratford were set at 28 degrees, warm enough to give a performance advantage, given that every increase in temperature of three degrees results in a one per cent increase in speed.
The cold also, possibly, affects a rider’s anaerobic threshold. By avoiding the wind ‘issue’, therefore, Banesto risked aggravating others. ‘He did not get defeated when he was at his “real” level,’ argued El Tiempo, ‘but at this level of performance, you pay for any error.’ Indurain himself blamed a mixture of starting too fast, gusts of wind and insufficient time – just twenty-four hours – between the ‘dress rehearsal’ and trying for the Record in earnest, given that both involved getting up in the middle of the night for a 4 a.m. breakfast. On top of that, after a strong start, he began losing his cadence, ‘which led to me losing my ideal posture, which led to me moving around to try to get it back. But it’s not the end of the world, sometimes you lose in races. I may try it again.’
Another Hour Record bid was quickly ruled out after a four-hour crisis meeting was held between Echavarri, Unzué and Padilla to decide whether he could repeat the Hour Record a week later in another Colombian velodrome, in Cali at sea level. That proposal collapsed when Indurain himself put his foot down and insisted that it was time for him to return home.
What should have been a hugely triumphant end to the season that saw Indurain enter the history books as the Tour’s most successful racer, therefore ended, rather unexpectedly, on a duff note, with an abandon in the Hour Record and what was – to the broader public, if not to Indurain – the second duff note of a silver medal at the Worlds Road Race. Part of the problem was, as both Boardman and Unzué have observed, that anything less than total success was no longer judged as a triumph for Indurain. Nor can he have been unaware of speculation in the press that Banesto were displeased at his result, if not his racing approach in the Worlds.
None of this was a major setback, given that Indurain had a fifth Tour in the bag and was the dominating force in cycling by a long way. But at the same time after such a lengthy, harmonious relationship between Indurain and his team, even the rumour of an argument or a disagreement over objectives was far more noticeable. On top of that, he had finished the season much later than usual – this was the first Worlds to be held in October rather than August and Indurain’s last race tended to be the Volta in the second week of September – and with a full month’s less rest. ‘That Hour Record was the first time,’ Olano says, ‘that I began to get the feeling that Indurain could be getting burned out.’
‘Miguel wanted to go home and they said he had to stay on to do the Hour Record,’ claims Delgado. ‘But the Hour Record, mentally, is a brutal exercise. Physically, it’s an hour of going round and round and your head’s saying “What am I doing here?”’ It was a question, it seems, that was already in Indurain’s head both inside the velodrome and outside it. Delgado agrees that Indurain was exhausted, mentally if not physically, and concludes, ‘I never understood that final assault on the Hour Record.’
‘It wasn’t a question of us wanting him to do the Hour Record, it was a question of proposing it,’ argues Unzué. ‘It was about making the most of the work we’d done in Colombia, being at altitude, and seeing how he’d raced seven days before, he clearly wasn’t going badly.’ However, ‘There was a series of circumstances, and he was getting exhausted. He’d come from a training camp, gone onto the Worlds, gone on to the Hour Record, it was logical he was close to KO by then, but it’d all been set up. It was at a point where you couldn’t stop everything. We knew how hard it would be, but we tried.’
‘There was a discussion about trying it in Cali, at sea level. That was when Miguel said, “I’m fed up, I’m tired,” and nothing more was possible.’ There were some further, semi-secret tests in Bordeaux after his return to Europe, but it was more a symbolic effort than a real attempt to start up the process again.
Even if the rumours of Indurain slamming the door of his hotel room in Colombia when it was proposed he repeat his Hour Record bid in Cali, or – as Olano claims – of Padilla walking out of the Bogotá Hour Record velodrome before Indurain had quit, were never proved to be true, that such rumours existed did not augur well. A more tangible split between team and rider occurred with the definitive exit of Sabino Padilla, the team doctor and one of Indurain’s greatest confidants in Banesto. Padilla’s departure, to work with Basque football team Athletic Bilbao, did not stop him from working with Indurain in the future. However he only did so in a private capacity, with Indurain paying the doctor out of his own pocket, and Padilla using his private car to accompany Indurain on the Tour in 1996. Once again, this was hardly a major parting of the ways, but it was a parting of the ways, nonetheless – and that, in the history of Indurain and Banesto, was both unprecedented and unsettling.
None of the rumours of turbulence between Indurain and his team would have been remotely significant, of course, had it not been for the events of Saturday 6 July, 1996. After five years of domination in the Tour de France, three and a half kilometres from the summit of Les Arcs in the Alps, Indurain’s era suddenly appeared to be in serious danger of crumbling away completely. As I wrote in Britain’s Cycling Weekly in their report on the stage, and I was only half-joking, some day a monument should be erected at the exact point on the side of the road where Indurain finally did what had, for five years in the Tour, seemed inconceivable. He cracked.
The Mende stage in 1995 had been a defeat for Banesto as a team. This time it was Indurain himself who fell apart, weaving across the road, emphatically waving his hand in a typical rider’s gesture to indicate he wanted something to drink. At the foot of Les Arcs, he later said, he had been thinking of attacking. But by a little over two thirds
of the way up, Indurain found himself drained of energy, shoulders slumping as he grimly ploughed up the climb and at a point where he ‘could barely think about finishing the stage.’ Such a radical change in the most consistent Tour winner the race had ever known, a rider who, as Olano puts it, had such an effortless style he did not seem to be pedalling, bordered on the unreal.
At the end of the stage, a waterlogged slog through the Alps where the defending yellow jersey Stephane Heulot abandoned with tendinitis and several top riders crashed, Indurain had lost more than four minutes on winner Luc Leblanc and over three and a half minutes on Tony Rominger. Rominger was the rider who had said after Indurain’s final stage victory the previous July that he ‘knew he would never win the Tour.’ But Rominger’s excellent second place, despite crashing twice on the stage – ‘he’d changed his brake levers so they would be turned upwards, like the brakes on a new scooter he’d bought and he couldn’t control the bike properly,’ his team-mate Olano reported – was totally eclipsed by Indurain’s dramatic difficulties and attempts to find out what had caused them.
‘I was shocked, surprised that he was not there any more,’ Riis, finally the overall winner of the 1996 Tour, commented to Cyclingnews’ Daniel Benson. ‘I was like, “Wow, what now?” I actually think I lost a lot of focus on the climb, I would have been strong enough to follow Leblanc, but I think I was just a little shocked. My hero, the one I want to beat, he’s getting dropped …’
No single explanation at the time managed to provide a full picture of why it had happened. Indurain might have turned thirty-two, and was therefore approaching a point when he was bound to give way to a younger generation, but there had been no real signs it was going to happen that July. Quite apart from his track record in the Tour, Indurain had repeated 1995’s approach path to the Tour and it had proved equally successful. A maiden victory in the low-key Tour of the Alentejo in Portugal in early May ahead of his brother Prudencio was a more unexpected footnote to his palmares. But from that point onwards, wins in the rugged Vuelta a Asturias against a solid line-up of Spanish contenders and for a second year running in the Dauphiné Libéré hardly indicated that his build-up had been anything but business as usual.
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