Indurain

by Alasdair Fotheringham

  Furthermore, when Indurain had said that spring that he had been training harder in the mountains in anticipation of a harder Tour route, the evidence was there. A memorable victory on the Mount Arrate, the most emblematic of all Basque summit finishes, albeit not a hard one, had enabled him to fend off Zülle and ONCE team-mate Marcelino García in the Bizicleta Vasca. But what had really counted was Indurain’s blistering performance in the Dauphiné Libére, first across the Izoard and into Briançon. As Indurain pedalled towards victory on the Col de la Bastille he reportedly patted Tony Rominger – a fine second – on the shoulder and said, ‘Not a bad day for us oldies, eh?’

  A month later, though, whilst Rominger had gone from strength to strength, the quest for the explanation as to why Indurain was suffering his first major collapse in the Tour continued. It was possible that he could have simply had a so-called ‘bad day’ – when the athlete’s body, despite being in top condition, shuts down of its own volition and refuses to let itself be submitted to yet another session of overexertion that taking part in a stage race demands. There was also Riis’ theory that he had tried to put Indurain ‘into the red’ for more than fifty minutes on the climb, because at any ascent lasting over forty minutes, Riis believed, Indurain would start to crack.

  But a bad day would only have explained a short-term loss of power, followed by a bounce back, which would have been rare, particularly for Indurain, but not exceptional. On the next day’s time trial, where Indurain lost 61 seconds and finished fifth behind Evgeni Berzin and then again when he lost a further 28 seconds to Bjarne Riis, the new race leader on the following stage to Sestriere, it became clear that this loss of power was not a one-day anomaly. Whilst not out of the frame completely, Indurain’s four-and-a-half-minute deficit on Riis, and sitting in eighth place overall as the race left the Alps, meant the overwhelming favourite was in serious difficulties.

  As to why this had happened, the unusually atrocious weather in the Tour’s first week, with rainstorms, cold and even the cancellation of part of one Alpine stage because of blizzards ‘didn’t help’, Unzué recalls. ‘The cold wasn’t exactly his weak point, it was more that he handled hot weather better than others.’ Manu Arrieta says, ‘I remember it rained so much that week, every day, he said to me, “Pff, this is going to be something we end up paying for.’’ He would get colds easily and he did suffer from allergies. That was a weakness of his.’

  The weather and Indurain’s concern, expressed to Arrieta, could have been a warning sign, but that hardly explains that he would crack so dramatically. ‘We had no idea that this was going to happen,’ Unzué insists. As a case in point, Unzué says, ‘I remember there had been a bad rainstorm the day before Les Arcs, on the stage to Aix-Les-Bains and the temperature dropped fast, but he got through the stage OK. He didn’t have a fever, he wasn’t sick and in fact on the next day, he was feeling so good he told his team-mates to toughen up the pace on the stage.’ Fourteen riders had abandoned during the previous stage and there were three non-starters the following day, but Indurain, as Unzué says, got through. Furthermore, at Les Arcs, after the week of rain and cold lasted into the first three quarters of the stage, the sun finally came out.

  What happened, Unzué says, was, ‘Miguel miscalculated his strength, he felt empty, he hadn’t eaten enough and he reached the top absolutely exhausted. Right the way from the bottom of the climb he told the team to go for it and then suddenly – boom! It was a clear sign that he was going well and then ran out of petrol, over-estimated his own strength.’ After requesting a bidon on the stage – and getting fined and a time penalty for receiving one from a rival team director, Emanuele Bombini of Gewiss – Banesto team staff recollect Indurain devouring bars of chocolate and biscuits afterwards. ‘It was the beginning of his end, the unravelling of his career, it all crumbled for him quite quickly after that,’ observes Boardman. ‘A monumental day.’

  The chinks in Indurain’s seemingly impenetrable armour were beginning to yawn open. ‘Sestriere was very difficult, he suffered in the last kilometre,’ continues Unzué. Speaking about mountain stages in general, he adds, ‘You can’t forget that he was ten or twelve kilos heavier than the rest and in stages with 4,000 metres of climbing then he was bound to pay a heavier price. That is why we had to be so cautious, and only use whatever energy there was in the tank. We had to play along the line of his limits, but there were no power meters back then to help you control your strength. When you don’t have that kind of equipment, it’s harder to see.’

  Yet for such miscalculations to be made, Indurain had to be more confident of his possibilities than was realistic – and if so, that was a rare error. Nothing in the previous week’s racing suggested that he was aware of any changes. His prologue performance had been slightly off par, finishing eighth. But in terms of time loss – twelve seconds to Alex Zülle – it hardly set the alarm bells ringing. On the next flat stage, theoretically one where the top favourites would hardly be prominent, Indurain had led the bunch under the last kilometre after it split apart in the final quarter of an hour of racing. Part of the reason for that would have been to avoid crashes but it was also a sign of his strength.

  Jacinto Vidarte, the MARCA correspondent on the Dauphiné Libéré, believes Indurain’s form was on the wane after he fought so hard to take the lead there. ‘He lost time on the Ventoux stage but then buried himself on the Izoard and into Briançon and I think he paid a price for that later.’ Could Indurain’s late season finish in 1995 have had a knock-on effect? Again, it seems unlikely. ‘He was in the best condition he’d ever been in, he killed them all in the Dauphiné and then in the rest of the Tour the weather got worse and worse, rain and cold from day one. But there wasn’t really an explanation, he just wasn’t going as well,’ says Pruden Indurain, who was part of the Tour team that year. Indurain continued to be his usual phlegmatic self, Pruden says, saying to the team, ‘I’m fine, no pasa nada.’ Unlike Unzué, Pruden says, ‘We certainly didn’t think it was the start of a decline. There was never a specific moment when he cracked.’ Twenty years on, he remains equally nonplussed. As did his brother after the stage: Indurain himself was baffled by what he later called ‘loss of form so great that I was beaten by rivals I had the better of in the Dauphiné in June. Nothing out of the ordinary happened for me to lose that form, although I suffered more to get good form before.’

  The most straightforward explanation could be the most logical; Unzué argues that Indurain was at 32 simply reaching a point where he was no longer as strong as he used to be: ‘This is why I think Indurain, after the 1995 Tour, is conscious of “something” … the weather didn’t help, but he was definitely not at his best.’ Indurain certainly, even before the 1995 Tour, seemed increasingly aware that there would be a point where he could not go on. ‘I’m close to my limit now,’ he said in an interview in 1995. ‘I’ve been five years at the top and you start to notice the kilometres and the time you’ve been there … It’s not so hard if you have one good year and then disappear. It’s this constant pressure which is more difficult. If I’ve got the form there’s no problem, but I don’t know how long I’ll last.’ Yet he remained defiant, saying, ‘I may have to accept I can only win smaller races later in my life, but not yet.’

  Fast forward twelve months and in a pre-Tour interview for Cycle Sport, even the headline ‘Adiós Miguelón’ [Goodbye Big Mig] seemed to suggest the end of the road was that much closer. ‘It’s a question which is on my mind. I’m starting to feel saturated,’ he warned. But there was still the same insistence on the priority the Tour would take for him, too. As he put it, ‘right now, I would sign an agreement to win the Tour and spend the rest of the season coming second.’ However, on leaving the Alps, the chances of Indurain doing so were at their lowest in six years.

  Riis refused to rule Indurain out, saying, ‘this guy was at four minutes, but he’s won five Tours. You never cut him off.’ Riis’ nerves were understandable: he had never won a Grand Tou
r, and although in the lead on leaving the Alps, it was not clear he would be in yellow in Paris. There was also a brief attempt by Indurain to try and regain control of the race on the hilly second week stage to Superbesse by putting Banesto on the front on the final climb. This did no damage to Riis’ position, but some other favourites lost time.

  The knock-out punch came on Hautacam in the Pyrenees, the same climb where Indurain had effectively won the Tour in 1994. A lone attack by Riis, revving his motor three times with brief accelerations then blasting away from the other favourites in gears more commonly seen on flat stages – and this after he had ridden down the length of the leaders’ group and back up to the front to assess each rider as he passed – proved to be the attack that was to win the Dane the Tour. For Indurain, it may well have made him think, however briefly, that he never would again. ‘I wanted them to explode [crack], tease them first, and when I left them behind, they really exploded,’ Riis said.

  ‘Hautacam was where we all really got surprised. OK, so the opposition could take time on the shorter climbs. But we’d never seen Miguel crack as badly as he did on Hautacam. Psychologically it must have been very humiliating,’ Olano argues. According to El País, after losing two and a half minutes to Riis, at the finish Indurain clambered into the back of the windowless team van that Banesto used to transport the riders in finishes the team bus couldn’t reach, and told the first of his team-mates to arrive after him, José Luis Arrieta, that ‘if we went home now, then the end result [of the Tour] would be the same.’

  However, a final mammoth Pyrenean stage across the French frontier to Pamplona, designed by the Tour organisers as a homage to Indurain, awaited the next day. Indurain, knowing tens of thousands of Navarran fans and his family too, would be waiting, was aware that under the circumstances quitting was not an option. Instead, as Olano recounts, on a stage with five major Pyrenean climbs then 100 kilometres of constantly undulating roads to Pamplona, it was he and Rominger who went from being in a position to win to sporting self-destruction. Indurain, under the circumstances, was simply another victim of collateral damage in a battle that was no longer his own.

  Still second overall, albeit at nearly three minutes, before the stage, Olano recounts that the racing that day was so tumultuous ‘that even the stones on the roadsides got up and went on the attack. It was all because of orders from [Mapei owner Giorgio] Squinzi, who told me and Rominger we actually had to try to drop the field. He rang up Juan Fernández [Mapei director] on the car-phone and for the first and only time I’ve ever seen him do that, Juan put his foot down and told me and Tony directly that Mapei were going to go for it and then we had to attack. Squinzi said that second and third overall weren’t good enough: me and Tony had to go for the win. We tried to say that we’d be better off waiting for the final time trial to do that, but that didn’t matter.’

  Acting on Fernández’s orders, ‘[Mapei team-mates] Fede Echave, Arsenio [González] and [Jon] Unzaga actually came back and apologised to me and Tony for driving so hard at the front of the bunch. They began to kick hard on the Marie-Blanque [third climb of the day of five] to try and split the field apart even before it got really steep. And less than three kilometres up the climb, me and Tony had both been dropped.’ With them, too, went Indurain.

  ‘My team-mates had blown the race apart. And the riders who were ahead – Escartín, Virenque, Dufaux, and Riis, they were nearly all out-and-out climbers. So we were driving behind, Gines, Rominger, me and Miguel to try and catch up again. And after the Larrau [fifth and final climb] where things came back together briefly, we still had the break at barely half a minute. But then when we got to the roads towards Pamplona it was a very different story. The break went off and we were losing more and more ground behind.’

  ‘The race broke apart and Miguel couldn’t do anything,’ Banesto rider José Luis Arrieta told Spanish magazine Ciclismo a Fondo, ‘but we’d brought the break back by the foot of the Larrau. I asked Miguel if he wanted our team to collaborate with the rest, and he answered “What point is there in that? They’re the ones that have accelerated away and dropped us before.” And at that point they dropped us again.’

  ‘We went up the Larrau and I remember it seemed like every cycling fan in Navarre was on the roadside, urging us on. Chiappucci was even further back and caught us at the summit. He started yelling ¡Venga! ¡Vamos! but I told him to calm down, there was still 100 kilometres to go, on roads with climbs which weren’t marked in the route book but which you had to ride up, no matter what.’

  Finally, after riding for another two long hours across roads he would have known like the back of his hand from training, Indurain and Olano sped through his village of Villava, eight minutes behind the leading group. He smiled and raised one hand in greeting to his family as he sped past. But this was no triumphal return home. After five years of conquests abroad, Indurain was forced to endure his greatest ever defeat on his own doorstep, on the roads he knew the best in the world, on the day that was supposed to be a celebration of his career. For the greatest Tour rider ever, this was the cruellest kind of reality check.

  Even his rivals tried to give Indurain the recognition he so richly deserved in the Tour. Early on the stage, Riis, now far more confident of victory than he had been in the Alps, said he had tried to get Indurain to attack so that he could have the honour of winning on home soil. ‘I stayed with him until the front group were over a minute ahead, and then I had to go,’ Riis recalled later, although he then tried to soften the blow by insisting Indurain go up on the podium in Pamplona alongside him. But although Indurain agreed, and stood on the Tour podium for one last time as Riis raised his arm, it was a bleak kind of homage. As Unzué puts it, ‘It was almost a funeral.’

  Yet there was dignity in Indurain’s defeat, too. ‘If there was one day when Miguel was going to feel really upset, then that was in Pamplona. But he wasn’t, not at all. And that to me forms part of his greatness, how he reacted and treated it as something normal. For me, it was another lesson in how to handle your rivals’ superiority and probably, too, the confirmation of his own decline.’ Other top riders suffering such tremendous defeats would, perhaps, have opted to go on a death-or-glory breakaway. But as Unzué says, ‘there was never a question of vendetta, of turning things around like that, going out in a blaze of glory. That just isn’t Miguel’s style.’

  In the public’s eyes, Indurain’s way of overcoming the destruction of his Tour de France dreams of a sixth victory – after he finally finished the 1996 race in eleventh place overall – was a return to a key part of his sporting roots: time trialling. In the 1996 Olympic Games, for the first time ever, professional cyclists were permitted to take part. For Indurain, more than sporting revenge for the Tour’s defeat, the Atlanta Games represented a new challenge in itself, and an opportunity, too, to set the record straight after his disappointment at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.

  Yet following the Tour debacle, even as defending World Time Trial Champion, Indurain’s selection for the time trial for Spain was no longer a mere formality. It was only following a bizarrely long meeting with the Banesto management after the last time trial, where Indurain placed second behind Ullrich, that it was confirmed he would ride.

  The Atlanta course, as Boardman – who took the bronze – recollects, was not difficult in terms of terrain, although it was technical. Nor was it excessively long at 52 kilometres. The challenges were more weather-related than anything else. ‘I had the form of my life which came out a couple of weeks later, but it was hot and very humid. It had poured down before the time trial and there was nearly 50 per cent humidity. I even threw my helmet away halfway through. I was up [and provisional best] on the first lap, up on the second lap’ – even overtaking Bjarne Riis in the process – ‘just then got whacked. On the last lap, I was on the edge of passing out.’

  Indurain, on the other hand, was in his element. ‘He works on solar energy,’ José Miguel Echavarri once observed and althou
gh marginally slower than Boardman and Olano in the first third of the course, by the mid-way point, Indurain had overhauled his compatriot and closed the gap on the Briton to three seconds. By the finish, as Boardman suffered badly, Indurain forged on steadily to what turned out to be his last great triumph, and one that answered, for the moment, any questions about his motivation after the events of July. In Atlanta Indurain insisted in any case that ‘this victory and not winning the Tour have nothing to do with one another … I don’t have to prove anything to anybody.’ Rather than a debt to his public, he felt Atlanta resolved a debt to himself. ‘It was the medal that was missing in my collection. I’ve won a lot of time trials and this confirms what I managed to achieve in Colombia last year.’

  Indurain would later reveal he believed the Olympic Games victory would have represented the blaze of glory with which to sign off his career. Five days after his return from Atlanta when he was asked by Echavarri and Unzué at the Clásica San Sebastián about renewing for 1997, Indurain’s answer was clear: ‘I’m stopping.’ Unzué says, ‘After the Tour, we asked him to go on for another year and that’s when he says no, I’m not going to do it. That’s where he almost takes the decision not to race any more.’

  The key word here in Unzué’s recollections is ‘almost’. The very success that had clarified the idea in Indurain’s mind that it was the right time to pull down the curtain on his career intensified the speculation that he might continue. ‘Atlanta showed us that Indurain was still alive and that he wasn’t finished by any degree,’ comments Jacinto Vidarte, at the time a cycling journalist with MARCA and the only reporter to be present at all the principal episodes of Indurain’s final season. ‘By that point, it was pretty clear that the relationship between Miguel and José Miguel and Eusebio had gone sour. There was the business with Sabino Padilla having to use his own car and sort himself out for the Tour.’ There were later, unconfirmed accusations from Echavarri in El País that Padilla had become excessively influential over Indurain, saying, ‘He took over Miguel during the Colorado training camp. He kidnapped him.’